The Southpaw (23 page)

That was the first night me and Coker and Canada and Perry was able to get together on the quartet. We had not sung in a bunch since Q. C. the summer before. If we was rusty it never showed. We was all sticky and tired when we got back from Tampa, and it was late, and some of the boys took another shower, and the 4 of us sat on Perry’s bed all wrapped in a towel, waiting for the others to clear out of the shower.

We always give the older fellows first crack. We got in tune, sitting there on the bed and humming “I Love You As I Never Loved Before” real low, and going over the words, and “Carry Me Back To Old Virginny,” and the 1 about the nice girl, the proper girl, where her hair hung down in ringulets. Bing Crosby done it on a record. Then we went in the shower, and we showered, and then we begun to sing. I guess we sung for 30 minutes, and when we was halfway through we could feel how quiet it was out in the main room of the barrackses. I took a peek out once, wondering why, and I seen where most of the boys was just laying on their bed, some of them all naked, some of them fanning theirselves, some of them just sitting wet and letting the breeze come through the window and dry them off, yet all of them looking kind of peaceful, like they was enjoying the music. Gil Willowbrook and Herb Macy was playing double solitaire on an empty bed, and Herb looked up, and he said, “Go on and sing some more.”

So I went back in and we sung some more. Later, when we got to New York, we went up in the Brill Building on Broadway at 49th where all the music people hang, and we went in 1 office and out the other, telling them who we was, and they give us free copies of all the best new songs, stamped all over “Complimentary.” The night before the opener we was on a TV show, and we sang, and after that these music people called up regular at least every other day, just about down on their knees and pleading with us for God sake sing their song on the air.

I really loved singing in them clubhouse showers. The walls vibrated, and I think it would put everybody in a good frame of mind. If we lost a ball game we might not sing at first. Then someone would say, “Why not sing?” and we would sing 1 that was slow and sad, like “My Old Kentucky Home,” and then we would pick it up and sing faster, maybe “The Camptown Racers” or “Old Susanna,” and after a time we forgot that the game was lost, and we was thinking ahead to tomorrow, and I think that when you add up all the things that made the club what it was you have got to take the singing into consideration, for it done something, just like Dutch’s lectures done something, just like the hard work down in the south done something to make us what we was.

We split 2 with Cincinnati. Dutch had the pitching rotated pretty good.

The fellows that was in the best shape was going 5 innings at a clip by now with Dutch every so often splitting up a game amongst the relief.

Bub Castetter started the second game against Cincy and set them down fine for 1 inning. But he got in a pack of trouble in the second, though he give up only 1 run. He was sweating like a hot-dog stand when he come to the bench, and breathing harder then he should of been. I felt sorry for him.

And then I got to thinking. Supposing he snapped back. Supposing he went along like his old self all spring or maybe clear to the Fourth of July. Then what? It was only a matter of time until he would be sent down again, like the year before. It seemed to me the best thing Bub could do was quit while still on his feet.

In the third somebody drilled 1 back through the box into center. I watched Bub. I seen him give ever so slight a look down at Dutch on the bench. Ugly took the throw in from Lucky, and Ugly and Gene both shifted over towards second, hoping to plug the gap. But you cannot cover up for another. The game has got to be played 1 certain way, and old friendship cannot matter, even though you might of once roomed with a man and drunk his beer and dealt 10,000 hands of poker, and he told you his troubles and you told him yours. You might of wrote him a letter over the winter.

But none of it matters. Only the game matters, and that is why I felt sorry for Bub, and sad, and wished him well, and yet, at the same time, I seen him falter and fail and knowed in my heart it might as well be sooner for his own sake and the sake of the club.

He never got a man out in the third, and Dutch lifted him, and we lost because we could not make back what Bub give away. That was only the second spring game we dropped. 

Chapter 21

That night we broke camp for good and headed up by bus for Jacksonville.

The boys bitched about riding the bus. Red said every year they rode the bus all night from Aqua Clara to Jacksonville, and every year they bitched, and never a 1 of them thought to fuss about it at contract time.

“But we have got to get these games in,” said Red, “for it is a couple mighty good nights for Old Man Moors,” meaning that since we played Queen City there, and then the Jacksonville club, and the whole works including the park owned by the Mammoths every dime got kept in the family except the electric bill, these being the first night games.

We sung for about 100 miles, me and Coker and Canada and Perry. It was the kind of a night you could sing your best, all clear, and the moon was big and she rode along beside, first in 1 window and then in the next, then disappearing over the top of the bus and coming down the other side, and now and again we would stop and pile out for a hamburg in some little town where they was all asleep except the people that run the diner and a few truck drivers and maybe a cop or 2  and a few old men. They would all be stunned to see us. We give out autographs, and 1 old boy in 1 of these towns grabbed a hold of my arm and he said, “Which is Sad Sam Yale?” and “Which is Ugly Jones?” and “Which is Swanee Wilks?” and “Which is Gene Park?” and there was 1 old colored man in 1 place come up and said he wished he could get the autograph of Lazybones Leo Newton, and the boys all laughed, for Lazybones was 10 years dead. Finally Red said,

“Say there Lazybones Leo Dutch Newton, come over here and give this fellow your autograph,” and Dutch caught on quick and come over and give out the autograph, forging it, and a dollar besides.

When we got back on the bus Dutch told us some stories of Lazybones, for they played together many a year on the old Mammoths, when they was called the Manhattans. Dutch said Lazybones could sleep 16 hours at a stretch. Yet give him a bat in his hand and he was not sleepy, not by a long shot, as the records prove.

Well, you have probably read a good deal about Lazybones without me telling you anything you don’t know. There is as many stories about Lazybones as about John McGraw or Ty Cobb or Shoeless Joe Jackson or Babe Ruth or Walter Johnson. I wish I could tell them like Dutch told them, sitting up there in the front of the bus with his feet stretched out on a suitcase, staring ahead at the road and thinking old memories and telling old stories. I moved up front. I took down a suitcase from the rack and stood it on end and sat in the isle, and I listened to them stories for 75 miles or better. They would just about make you weak from laughter. Or they could make you cry. If you ever heard Dutch tell about the death of Babe Ruth it would make you cry. I don’t care who you are.

Mostly he told funny stories. I seen the driver, and I seen that he would smile. We would pass under a light in a half-assed sleepy town, or a car from the other direction would shine in his face, and he would be smiling. I guess for a bus driver it was a pretty big night. It was quiet, and I remember. Dutch talked soft, and we rode and rode and I never felt so peaceful and happy in all my life, listening there to the soft voices in the dark of the night. Then I heard a voice from the back. It was Swanee. “Dutch,” he said,

“suppose you was to do it all over again? Would you be a ballplayer all over again?”

Dutch thought awhile. “By God I would,” he said.

“Not me,” said Sad Sam.

“Bullshit,” said Dutch. “What else would you be?”

“Bullshit is right,” said Red. “There ain’t a man on this bus that could eat like he eats in any other line of work. Leave us not kid ourselves. It is a stupid f—ing way of making a living but it is better than eating somebody’s crap in a mine or a mill or a farm or an office. It is the gold we are after.”

“This is all getting too deep for me,” said Dutch. “Boys, let us have some music.”

“Smith and Simpson is asleep,” I said.

“You and Roguski sing,” said Dutch.

“We cannot sing except all together,” said I.

“That will sure play hell when it comes time to come down on the limit,” said Sam, pretending like he was talking to Dutch and I was not there. “Of course you might string up a radio between New York and Queen City. Then the 3 can sing at 1 end and Wiggen at the other.”

Then Red said loud, like he was talking to Dutch and
Sam
was not there, “I was just telling George that if Sam Yale has not got some youngster on the club to razz and rag he considers the season a bust.”

“I do not mind,” said I.

“Boys,” said Dutch, “why must we snipe at 1 another at a time like this? I certainly do hope in my heart that there will be no politics on the club this summer. Sometimes I think every ballplayer ought to be struck dumb at birth and kept like that until he has bowed out for good.

If I had my way it would be done, for I sometimes think I would rather manage a squad of goddam gymnasium teachers. Talk talk talk.

Politics, politics.”

We got to Jacksonville early in the morning and slept all day in some damn hotel that did not have no air condition. It was so hot I could barely sleep. Perry slept with some friends and said they had a cool place.

Considering that I was tired I done well that night. Mike’s kids was looking better, hitting harder and connecting more often. They scored 3 off me in the third on a pop fly home run by Brooks that in any ordinary park would of went for an out. All it was was a little looping drive that never sounded nor looked like a hit a-tall. There was 2 on at the time, both of them on singles that bounced off the wall in right, the wall being located about 6 feet behind first base, or so it seemed.

Brooks went strutting around the bases like he done something unusual. Then I settled down and throwed wide to lefthanders and close to righthanders, and when I left the game after 5 innings we was ahead 7-3.

Afterwards Dutch asked me what that kid Brooks hit off me. “Hit!” said I. “He never hit nothing. His bat bumped into the ball.”

“What in hell did he hit?” said Dutch.

“Just a fast ball,” I said.

“Thank you,” said Dutch, real sarcastic.

On the train to Savannah we seen a report in the papers stating that Dutch spoke long distance with Brooklyn, trying to buy Bill Scudder for 75,000 plus Gene Park and Goose Williams. That was why Dutch played Perry at second all 4 nights in Jacksonville, for he wanted a good, long look at Perry. Red told me. I never met a man that could figure the angles like Red. Red said that Dutch believed that for every colored ballplayer on a ball club there ought to be another to room with him, and that tied in with Dutch asking me about what Brooks hit, for if he sold Goose he would of brought Brooks up. There was another report in the Savannah paper saying that Dutch was ready to close a deal with Brooklyn, giving them Goose and Sid Goldman plus cash for Bill Scudder, and this made sense when tied in with the report the day after that St. Louis was ready to swap the Mammoths Jim Klosky for Gene Park plus cash, St. Louis badly needing a second baseman and Brooklyn feeling that Goldman and Williams would plug their gaps, though of course they was far from wild to part with Scudder. That would of meant that Perry Simpson would take over for Gene Park at second for us, Klosky at first, Brooks would come up and I would of probably been sent back to Q. C. Well, we was all in a nervous frame of mind and no mistake.

I pitched like a fiend the first game against Philly in Savannah. If they ever seen what I throwed they seen it too late to hit it, or if they hit it they never got a good piece. I worked 6 innings and give up 4 hits and no runs, and Bub Castetter finished and was wobbly all the way, but we won it on home runs by Sid and Gene Park. The trading talk sloped off some. That stuff goes hot and cold, and now it was cold, at least for a time.

Dutch probably turned cool on the trades. Maybe he was beginning to feel like I felt. I felt like this was a
club
, not just a bunch of ballplayers, but a
club
. Maybe there was politics and mutterings and mumblings, but it never mattered, for when you was out there it dropped away, and if Sad Sam Yale ain’t spoke a word to Red Traphagen in years unless it be a dirty dig nonetheless you would of never knowed it watching them work together, and if George never spoke no English except his 2 favorite words it never mattered neither, for the lovely throw from third to first is something that got nothing to do with words.

I knowed that if anybody beat us they would go a long way to get it done, and when they was done they would know they been in a scrap.

We could be beat. Sure! But beat us once and we would beat you 3 times back. We won easy and we lost hard all spring.

Philly beat us 2-1 the second day in Savannah, and we beat them on the third, 5-2. Savannah is where Perry was born, and he left when he was but a tot, him and 3 sisters and his brother and their uncle in an old 24 Moors with half the windows broke and no door by the driver.

Perry says it was the coldest ride he ever took, going in the dead of winter from Savannah to Colorado. The uncle had a job in Pueblo, Colorado, and when they got there the job was took by another. Don’t things like that just make you boil? Who would of thought that someday Perry would come back to Savannah and it cost you a buck just to see him from the bleachers?

Dutch played him at second on getaway night. He beat out a bunt twice and stole 2 bases. When Perry gets on base he gets the other pitcher rattled plenty. You can’t judge Perry by averages. The way you judge him is by the number of times he gets on base, whether bunting or drawing a walk or beating out a roller that on most fellows would be an out, and you got to judge him also by the way he keeps the opposition worried. Then, too, every so often he will powder 1 plenty. As a defensive second baseman I consider him the equal of anybody in the league except Gene Park and possibly Pearce of Brooklyn, though I even doubt that Pearce can go so far to his right as Perry.