The Southpaw (38 page)

Every man to his own system. I see by the chart that with men on base your tendancy is to get behind your batter. That was always your tendancy & I did not need a chart to see it. When you are in hot water you are wild. You should not feel that simply because a man gets on base you are in hot water. You must forget the runner & pitch the batter. I have told you this many times.

Dutch had the faith to pitch you Stdy. Just between us you are the best righthander on the club if you only knew it, & I am fully aware of Johnson. But you must not let rough water upset your control over yourself. You boys are going down the stretch now, & the responsibilities will be great. Here is where the weak go down & the strong win out. I believe, & have always believed, that the winning club is not always the best on paper but it is the club that refuses to go all to pieces in the crisis. Things will get worse before they get better. The heat is on, Boston is crowding, 3 games behind as of last night. You boys are the best on paper if only you are the best in your heart.

Lindon, that is all that I can tell you. Everybody in QC watches their ex-boys with intrst. We are running a good second to Slt Lk & I believe we might yet beat them in the stretch. There is nobody here ready to go up, & that ought to ease your minds. The nwsppr said Dutch was about to send for Dolly Peterson. This is false. I have had word from Roguski & Smith, nothing from Wiggen or Simpson or you or Pearson or any of my other ex-boys that I remember with fondness always.

Yrs,

MIKE

Following is a letter from Holly, date of July 31, typewrote on plain white paper. It says:

Dear Henry the Navigator,

I sit for my twice-weekly letter to my favorite baseball player, he who never replies to my letters and who, were it not for the wonders of newspaper, radio and television, would be lost to my sight, at least for the summer. The thermometer hit 95 today. I melt.

I saw you on television this afternoon at Black’s in Perkinsville, against Pittsburgh. I saw Perry Simpson score the run that won, and I was informed by a gentleman who stood at my shoulder and who seemed to know whereof he spoke that “that boy don’t run, he just flies close to the ground.” At times, particularly after completing an inning, you seem to look up into the television camera—a more or less unconscious gesture, as if you were surveying the grandstand prior to returning to the dugout—and you seem to be looking directly at me. But you do not see me: I am not televised. Only the great are televised.

This letter will be short, for the heat is terrible and I should like to visit outside and breathe the night air and swat mosquitoes. Swat. Was it Babe Ruth who was called the Sultan of Swat?

Your father says that you are diligent, that today’s triumph was your eighteenth, and that you are certain to win more than twenty—twenty being the number which the newspapers and the books on baseball describe as magic. A pitcher who performs this magic feat becomes a member of “the charmed circle of twenty-game winners.” I promise you that I will be charmed as well.

Take care of your back. The announcer said this afternoon that you have been spending some time in a whirlpool bath—what’s that?—and that you say your back is better. You pitched as if it were, too.

And you had only a very little rest, having pitched Sunday and in relief Tuesday. Your father pitched several innings Sunday against the Columbus Clowns. He fared ill.

Well, enough. Please know that you are in our minds constantly, and in mine in particular, such as it is.

Love,

HOLLY

Following is a letter from Pop, date of August 10, wrote on this very same sort of paper that I am using. It is in pencil by hand, and the words have the same slope as mine, the old lefthand tilt. Give it a quick look and you would think it is my writing. It says: 

Dear Hank,

How’s the flipper?

Son you have racked up number twenty, there is no need me telling you what I think about that or the way you been working all along, I bust my buttons with pride every time I go anywheres, though to tell you the truth my heart was in my mouth yesterday afternoon. But you pulled out fine, and between yesterday and today I am confident New York has busted the back of Boston, the boys in Borelli’s back me up in this, I seen yesterday’s on the television down in Perkinsville and watched for signs of the backache, I believe you have got that whipped as well as Boston, for you were a picture of beauty out there, Sam turned in a crackerjack job today, so you will polish up in the east OK and start west with four games as a cushion, yesterday and today busting the back of Boston I am sure.

I have not worked since the Sunday before last three innings against Bobo Taylor and his crowd, same old bunch with a new face here and there, me pitching the last three when Jimmy Dubrow petered out, I was sorry for that for I praised Jimmy high to Bobo and told him to get somebody from the Mammoths out here to see that kid work, as well as another kid that you never met, Ernie Hoyt, a boy that hits them a mile and roams the outfield like Judkins. Sorry about Judkins being laid up. Hoyt looks a lot like Lucky in all ways, even down to hitting the slightest bit with his foot in the bucket. I think this will be the last season for me with the Scarlets, I will hang up the glove and call it quits, youngsters coming in and teeing off on my stuff that a few years back they never could touch, but the club keeping me on I know because I am a sort of an attraction, being your old man and all or they would have let me go by now. Bobo said he seen you in Cleveland and never seen two such look-alikes, right down to toeing off the first base side of the rubber, and I said that was to be expected since who in the hell learned you from the very first, he said you and him and some of the others had dinner. I want you should always be nice to Bobo, it was him that first put Jocko Conrad wise to you, the rest is history.

I am sure pleased about number twenty and can’t get over it yet and probably will not actually believe it for a day or two, Fish kept the Mammoth score coming in over the loudspeaker this afternoon, the crowd payed more attention to that than to the ball game going on in front of their eyes, I felt good for Sam in particular, that was a nice job and no mistake, also Jones walloping the ball like he done, maybe he does not need a jaw operation after all.

If I was Dutch I would leave things go a week or more and not be switching things around so dam much, give a guy a chance to work out in a new spot, I can’t see playing Smith in the outfield, that kid the best natural infielder I ever seen from all reports, why not leave Wilks play more, an old veteran like him just the kind of steadiness you need at a time like now, and use Burke and Carroll more and give you more of a rest between starts, no wonder you have got the backache, well, Dutch knows best. Aaron says it is probably your nerves, I said hell, Hank has got nerves of steel, Aaron says steel busts and bends like nobody’s business under pressure.

Son, Holly is worried about that boy getting beaned in Detroit, still in a coma according to the radio. She is afraid you might get a dose of the same, I said hell, nobody pitches hard to Hank, they just throw to him easy, he never hits. I said look at the paper, she follows the sports like a hound, he is hitting .109 on the year and nobody throws hard to a hitter that connects only one time in ten, this all got me to thinking you could help your own cause a bit with a hit now and then, yesterday if you would have connected in the eighth the suspense would have been over with right then.

Holly and I sends her love and wish you could be here, but business before pleasure, I am at the bottom of this page and must give Aaron a hand, I will close.

POP

Following is a letter from Aaron Webster that come pasted in an envelope on the outside of a package. It is typewrote on the back of the pages, the front all scratched out, date of August 15. It come just before we took off for the west. It says: 

Dear Henry,

The accompanying package contains a book which belongs to Red Traphagen. I return it through you. Thus we make the play, Webster to Wiggen to Traphagen, three noble athletes, two of them big-leaguers, the third still in the bushes but showing promise. I shall be eighty years old in a few weeks, however, and I suspect that my age will count against me. I am not so spry as once I was, and it may be that on hot afternoons in St. Louis I shall be forced to request that my duties be assigned to others.

As I write this letter I look from my window into the yard behind your house where, not so long ago, you were busily engaged on many an afternoon in throwing a rubber ball against the wall. You may recall that on numerous occasions the ball responded in an eccentric way and bounced into my flower bed. You bounced after it, much to my horror. The larger you grew the more you endangered my shrubbery.

Nevertheless I was, at one time, your cheering crowd, your New York and your Boston, your Cleveland and your Pittsburgh, and I cheer for you yet in my silent way. I pay no Federal Tax for the privilege. I paid it reluctantly when we went to New York in April. I shall not pay it again, and therefore I shall not see you play again in the uniform of the Mammoths.

I have been constantly concerned over this continuing pain in your back. I hesitate to diagnose your ailment at this distance, though I am perfectly sure that I know both its causes and its cure. Perhaps we will have a chance to talk of this over the winter. Meanwhile I leave you and your back to the mercies of professional physicians, specialists, trainers and others of that array of medicine men employed by the Moors “empire.” (Even though, as I say, it is I, not they, who know your trouble.)

I follow you with fascination: a whole new field of endeavor has come into my view. Win, lose or draw (is draw possible in baseball? I think not) you are already a monumental success. Whether you participate in the World Series in October is (to me) a matter of indifference. You would have been a sufficient success had you returned home from Aqua Clara in March—or had you never left in February. Only sorely troubled human beings need success in the accepted sense; the wise are content to turn their backs upon it and to own, if not the Moors“empire,” the love and respect of a few neighbors of moderate means, little “success” and no visible ambition.

Please remember to thank Traphagen for the book. I have not read it as carefully as I had hoped to: concentration is difficult. Despite daily resolutions to the contrary I am glued to my radio afternoons and evenings; today, for example, I must follow Mammoths vs.

Washington this afternoon and Boston vs. Brooklyn tonight.

I know the announcers well by now. I am intimately acquainted with the speech mannerisms and favorite phrases of every baseball broad-caster. Their occupational slang is no longer a mystery to me (thanks to your father), and I am quite certain that I could conduct a sports column for the Perkinsville
Clarion
without arousing the least suspicion among my readers that I am seventy-nine years old and that a very few years ago I thought a dugout was a small boat which American Indians fashioned by hollowing a log.

I remain, now and forever,

Your neighbor,

AARON 

Chapter 31

I was in the lobby in Pittsburgh when the news come concerning Dutch. I begun to ride the lobbies an awful lot by now. No more hanging with the boys for me, snapping like they was, 1 against the other, all kinds of little squabbles springing up over nothing a-tall.

I was in the middle of these arguments twice, and twice was enough for me. 1 time it concerned Cuba, of all places. George told Red to tell me I should come to Cuba in the winter and pick up some excellent money in the winter leagues down there, and Goose heard that and said, “Keep your mind upon the summer leagues and leave the winter take care of its f—ing self,” and then he turned on George and told him the same, and the 2 of them stood chin to chin in the shower arguing with each other, both in different languages. Any other time it would of been funny.

Scarcely 2 days later Krazy Kress come around and spoke to me further concerning Korea and Japan. Well, mention Korea and Red hits the roof, and mention the winter and Goose hits it, and between the 2

of them and Krazy there was a 3-way spat. In fact, mention anything a-tall and somebody had a strong opinion on the subject in those days, and every time there was an argument I got weak all over in the middle of my stomach. So it was really the safest thing for me to start riding the lobbies, and ride them hard, and be out of the way of the fireworks.

I would find a soft chair in a far corner, and I would buy a murder or 2, them quarter books with the girls on front and their breast all practically bare and the murder generally in the first chapter and the chap that done it revealed at the end, although I pretty soon learned to spot him early, and I spent days and sometimes nights like that because it seemed safer.

It was a Tuesday. The train was late to Pittsburgh, and we missed lunch and grabbed red-hots outside the park and dressed like 60 and drilled without the red-hots digesting, and we no sooner finished the drill then the rain come down in buckets, and the game was called. We went back in the clubhouse, and the rain was beating against the windows something fierce, and Dutch bellowed over the noise of the rain, “The day ain’t over yet, so nobody get dressed.” We waited, and when it let up a little Dutch led us back out and we drilled an hour. That was the first of the extra drills, and the boys bitched, not only about drilling in the rain but about drilling a-tall, for we still had the 4-game cushion when we left the east and it seemed like the slump had run itself out. Yet we drilled, the bats and the balls so slippery your life was in danger, and nobody could scarcely run 50 feet but he skidded and went down in the mud, and the boys went about saying all sorts of murderous things against Dutch (always when Dutch was 300 feet away at least) until finally he called the halt and we went back in all covered with mud to where you couldn’t see the number on a fellow’s back, and afterwards we went back to the hotel, and I ate my dinner and bought a murder and took up my post in the lobby, and that was when I first heard the news on Dutch.