by Dan Barry
But what about the International League’s complementary document, its constitution, a collection of bylaws and rules, which clearly states that on a routine night like this, with no scheduling pressures for travel or playoffs, a curfew must be imposed at 12:50 in the morning? Flabbergasted by the decision to keep playing, Mike Tamburro disappears into the McCoy sanctum, returns with a copy of the constitution, and ceremoniously points out the wording that says, in effect, let’s all go home. But even if Tamburro had received these league commandments from Moses himself, beside a burning bush—or a burning barrel—they still would have had no bearing on Lietz, who is guided solely by the aforementioned 1981 “International League Instructions for Umpires, Managers and Players.” And Lietz says as much, in words that will stay with Tamburro for decades after:
Those bylaws don’t mean shit to me.
With that, another half inning begins, as managers and front-office executives curse and mutter in frustration. “No one was happy, I know that,” Denny Cregg, the home plate umpire, will recall. Mike Tamburro is so unhappy that he places a long-distance and late-late-night telephone call to Grove City, Ohio—to the home of one Harold Cooper, the president of the International League. The Harold Cooper, whose name is inscribed on every baseball used in the league; who single-handedly saved minor-league baseball in Columbus, Ohio; hard-drinking, forward-thinking, profanity-spewing, irritating, intimidating, and often endearing Harold Cooper, who at fifty-eight has forgotten more about the business of baseball than you’ll ever know. He was raised by baseball, all but born in a bat bag and weaned on tobacco spit and spilled beer. Harold was eight years old when his father was murdered, the body found sprawled on a couch in an abandoned house. Then his mother split for New Orleans. Then his grandmother, who was helping to care for him, got sick and died. Soon young Harold was running wild on a rough side of Depression-racked Columbus, taunting cops and sneaking into the brand-new Red Bird Stadium, where he found succor. Before long the urchin had ingratiated himself with the president of the Columbus Red Birds, who gave him various odd jobs to do, among them: wiping down the moldy hot dogs with a vinegar rag. Soon he was polishing cleats, working as the clubhouse manager, growing so close to the ballplayers that many of them attended his high school graduation. After that, apart from time in the military, college, and a few unrelated jobs, he has spent his life in minor-league baseball—especially in Columbus. In the mid-1950s, he put together a syndicate of investors to save the Columbus Jets. Then, in the mid-1970s, as a Franklin County commissioner, he led the charge to refurbish the stadium and attract a Triple-A franchise, the Columbus Clippers. Maybe you don’t like Harold Cooper. Maybe he’s bitten your head off one too many times, or drunk you under the table during baseball’s winter convention, or told you too often about cleaning the mold off hot dogs, or shown too much favoritism to his home team, the Clippers. But you respect Harold Cooper. You respect him enough to fear what he might say to someone calling him at home at one o’clock on Easter Sunday morning.
No answer. Somewhere in the bowels of an old and nearly empty stadium, Tamburro hangs up the telephone, wondering all the while: It’s after midnight on Easter Sunday. How can you not be home?
So it continues, deeper and deeper into a holy Sunday, a baseball game wanting to end but unable to find the way. The players and the managers and the coaches and the journalists and the batboys and so many others cannot leave. They are rooted by the gravitational pull of duty, a magnetizing force too powerful to overcome. They cannot leave.
Single, foul out, strikeout, fly out.
Groundout, strikeout, single, fly out.
Groundout, pop out, pop out.
The game surrenders to the rhythms of the pitchers, empowered by the wind at their backs.
Strikeout, strikeout, error, single, walk, and Pawtucket mounts an anemic, bases-loaded attempt to end the game in the 17th inning, only to have Chico Walker ground out to second.
Groundout, walk, strikeout, walk, walk, and Rochester outdoes Pawtucket by posing a bases-loaded threat in the top of the 18th without so much as hitting the ball. But Bobby Bonner slaps a ground ball to Boggs, who punctures Rochester’s hopes with a toe tap on third.
In the bottom of the 18th, Dave Koza approaches the plate for the eighth time in this game. He has 3 hits in 7 at bats so far, and do you know who knows this minor but encouraging statistic better than the official scorer, up there in the drafty press box? Do you know who knows this better than Koza himself? A young woman sitting and faintly shivering in the lonely stands on the third-base side, despite the blanket in her lap, her long blond hair parted in the middle, her large eyes conveying not so much a naïve wonder as an openness to what comes next: his new wife, Ann Koza. And do you know what she is thinking? Of course you do.
Come on, Dave. End this.
Strange how we wind up where we do. All it takes sometimes is a chance encounter, something seen in a pair of eyes, an openness to change. Two years ago, Ann was dating a nice guy in her isolated hometown in northeastern Pennsylvania. And now here she is, at twenty-three, married to the strapping first baseman for the Pawtucket Red Sox, imagining a major-league life, experiencing every game with him, every pitch, celebrating when he celebrates but not despairing when he despairs; she does that alone. And tonight, she freezes as he freezes.
Come on, Dave.
Ann grew up in Tunkhannock, a small working-class town about thirty miles northwest of Wilkes-Barre. Her mother worked as a nurse at a state mental hospital, her father—well, her father worked when he worked, giving piano lessons, doing odd jobs, often on the barter system. They raised Ann to be independent and tough. A good swimmer in high school, she was also a gifted baseball player with no interest in girls’ softball. She tried out for the boys’ varsity team and was taken seriously by the coach, who told her that she was good enough to make the team, but there were rules against girls playing on a boys’ team. She became the manager instead.
After high school, during a spring vacation in 1979, she and her boyfriend stopped in Winter Haven to visit a friend of his, Burke Suter, a pitcher in the Red Sox organization. He introduced them to his handsome roommate, Dave Koza, and that was that. When Ann returned to Pennsylvania, she conducted some International League research, saw that Pawtucket would soon be playing in Syracuse—just 130 miles from Tunkhannock!—and called up Suter to ask for tickets. Koza answered the telephone.
Ann got a speeding ticket on her rush to Syracuse.
Around a minor-league team’s schedule, a long-distance romance developed. Ann would drive to Dave’s games in Rochester and Syracuse, and, occasionally, all the way to Pawtucket, staying with Dave and his PawSox roommates in the double-wide they rented in a trailer park, beside the old Narragansett Park racetrack, that was owned by an old mob associate (Welcome to Rhode Island!). When the season ended, and the Boston Red Sox had again not included Dave in their September call-ups, Dave asked Ann whether she would join him on his trip back to Torrington, Wyoming.
Yes.
Dave and Ann loaded up his black Chevy Blazer and took the first of their many cross-country rides together, shedding the cheek-by-jowl crowdedness of gritty Pawtucket and the confining hills of Tunkhannock for a flat terrain on the other side of the country, where Dave Koza walked about like a shy giant (Oh, Dave’s back! Dave’s back in town!). They moved in with Dave’s friend Cactus, who was now working at his family’s car dealership and living in a house in a desirable part of town “up on the hill.” Dave always brought back a huge bag of Red Man chewing tobacco for his buddies, courtesy of the Pawtucket Red Sox clubhouse. A Torrington celebrity, he rarely had to pay for a beer.
Dave got a job working construction with friends, who teased him about his fear of scaffolding, while Ann worked at the Holly Sugar Factory when she wasn’t on call as a respiratory therapist at Community Hospital. Cactus gave Dave a good deal on a silver Oldsmobile Toronado, a two-door coupe that looked especially fine with Ann riding shotgun.
They all went hunting for pheasant and then for elk, camping out in snow-packed mountains, far from Pawtucket, where the very idea of elk was so foreign that Joe Morgan’s nickname for Dave was “Elkman.”
Then, right after Christmas, Dave got back into baseball shape. Not that he was ever out of it; he kept fit. But come the New Year, he’d get the itch, and want to start throwing to someone. So he’d pack up his glove, his bat, and a few baseballs, and drive across a piece of the Torrington tundra to the old Willi gymnasium, where, on so many boyhood nights, he led his high school basketball team to victory. Now, alone, with no cheering crowds, he’d run up and down the stairs a few times, swing his bat at a series of phantom pitches, then induce Ann to throw him ground balls and line drives and pop flies. If Ann wasn’t around, he’d get Cactus to do it. And if Cactus wasn’t around, Dave would throw a ball against the wall, whop, whop, whop, again and again, like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, imagining himself someplace else.
Every once in a while, Dave, Ann, Cactus, and a couple of others would head down Main Street to drink beer and shoot pool at the Broncho Bar, beneath the indifferent gaze of the mounted elk, whose glassy eyes had watched Cactus and Dave come through the door so many times over the years. Cactus never forgot the night that some knucklehead started giving Dave a hard time, riding him, looking to settle some perceived slight. The two men squared off beside the pool table, the aggressor made his first move, and—bam—Dave laid him out with a cat-quick left to the jaw. Then, typical Dave: He went to follow up, but saw the man was out cold, and left it at that. No second punch; no blood thirst.
Cactus knew better than to ask Dave how it was going, “it” being the man’s major-league struggle, and Ann knew all there was to know, except the answer to why. But neither of them could protect Dave from the hounding inquiries of good friends and passing acquaintances. To his credit, Dave never got angry, no matter how many times he heard how he’d be the first person from Wyoming to play in the major leagues (not true, actually, but he would have been among the very, very few). He’d gently explain how hard it is to reach the big leagues, how he still has hopes of making it, and yes, yes, he’s met Carl Yastrzemski—and even Ted Williams. Many years later, Cactus will look back on those nights at the Broncho and realize that, for Dave, Torrington was not always the land of escape that it seemed to be. Ignorance about the business of baseball was greater, expectations higher, Cactus will say. “The pressure must have been phenomenal.”
A few months ago, Dave and Ann took a short road trip, driving his hot Toronado across the state of Wyoming, 460 miles, through Wheatland, and Douglas, and Cody, all because he said that she simply had to see Yellowstone National Park. Once there, Dave pulled up to a scenic overlook called Inspiration Point, with its breathtaking view of the canyon and the rushing Yellowstone River below. He walked Ann to a suitably romantic spot, reached for the ring he had in his pocket, the one he had bought from Cactus’s uncle, a jeweler, and—a station wagon pulled up and disgorged a bunch of mood-ruining kids. Dave and Ann got back in the car and drove around until he found another spot, cleared his throat, and—a troop of Girl Scouts marched into view. Finally, he took Ann to Old Faithful, determined to present the ring to her when the geyser erupted. He waited, and he waited—it was getting a little awkward—and then…
Yes.
On February 5, 1981, Ann Creeden, of Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, and David Koza, of Torrington, Wyoming, were married in the chapel at St. Joseph’s Children’s Home, a former orphanage in Torrington now used as a facility to help poor and emotionally damaged children. The Koza family held a reception at the golf course and country club. Then the newlyweds aimed the Toronado east and drove the 1,650 miles to Tunkhannock, where the Creeden family held another wedding reception at a little bar called the Inn Between. After that, it was 1,150 miles south, to Winter Haven. Not because that is where Dave and Ann first met, but because it was spring training, and time to try again.
And here Dave is now, at the plate, trying again. And here is his new wife, Ann, wrapped in a blanket in the stands but very much beside him in the batter’s box. She doesn’t just want him to end the game. She wants him to be the one everyone talks about the next day. The One.
Come on, Dave. End it.
Koza hits a ground ball that the second baseman, Tom Eaton, boots for an error. Then Wade Boggs slaps another grounder back to the pitcher for a quick double play. And what all this amounts to, all the practice and the heartache and the touching aspirations of two newlyweds, is just the 19th inning.
The moon is nearly full. Make of this what you will.
In the Rochester dugout, the pitcher Jim Umbarger sits wrapped in a winter jacket, thick ski gloves and a red ski hat, an outfit so inappropriate that another Rochester pitcher slouched on the bench, Mike Boddicker, calls him the Cat in the Hat, which prompts another pitcher, Don Welchel, to ask whether Umbarger is going to treat everyone to green eggs and ham after the game. Clearly, a Seussian air of giddiness now commingles with the raw cold. Rochester’s young catcher, Dave Huppert, notices that some of the ballplayers are so tired and uncomfortable that they are losing what he will call “their mental look.”
And in the Pawtucket dugout, the pitcher Luis Aponte, who left the game after the, what was it, oh, yes, the 10th inning, has received permission to go home from his manager, Joe Morgan, who figures that, hell, the forkballer might be needed in the next game, which is less than twelve hours away. So Mike Smithson, who has just been removed from the game, drives Aponte in his signing-bonus Monte Carlo a few blocks to the Pawtucket apartment that the Venezuelan—so popular he could be president!—shares with his wife, Xiomara, and two sons. Like a patient father, Smithson waits for Aponte to make it inside before pulling away. But something is wrong. Aponte is knocking and knocking, but getting no answer. Wait. Okay. He is talking to his wife. He is talking, and she is talking, but the door between them is not opening in welcome. Now there is a lot of yelling in Spanish, the rough translation of which is:
Where have you been?
At the ballpark! The game is still going on!
You lie!
A few minutes later, a dejected Aponte returns to Smithson’s car. His wife, he explains, does not believe that grown men are still playing baseball in the dark of an Easter Sunday morning. She thinks instead that he has greeted this holy day by drinking and chasing women. Aponte has nowhere else to go but back, back to McCoy Stadium, the Alcatraz of baseball, the concrete fortress from which you cannot escape.
But if this game is to reach its full-moon otherness, it requires an appearance by the Pawtucket relief pitcher Win Remmerswaal. Without Remmerswaal, you have at best a waxing gibbous moon; with him, you have lunar completeness. And here he is, standing on the mound, six feet two and weighing a measly 160 pounds, averse to warming up, yet able to throw a baseball well over 90 miles an hour. With playful blue eyes, and longish brown hair flowing from under his cap, he conveys an easy intelligence that suggests a subtle, killer mentality, as if he is not emotionally invested in the task before him; as if this is all a lark—baseball, Pawtucket, life. For Win Remmerswaal, maybe it is.
In the top of the 19th, he induces Rochester’s leadoff hitter, Dave Huppert, to pound a ground ball to second base. One out.
Remmerswaal is from the Netherlands, which may explain why baseball seems to be more of a hobby for him than a national pastime, and why he seems to abide a foreign code. For example, it made no sense to him that a promotion in the Red Sox minor-league system meant that you went from Single-A, in balmy and beautiful Winter Haven, to Triple-A, in—Pawtucket. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Remmerswaal does not seem to accept basic social customs, such as adherence to the law, or the value of currency. When he first came to Pawtucket, he spent a few hundred dollars on an old Ford that soon developed a rattle: the sound of Heineken bottles rolling on the floor whenever he came to a stop. The car’s license plate was a piece of cardboard with a fe
w meaningless numbers scribbled on it, and its glove compartment became one of many repositories for the paychecks he never seemed to cash. Even now, on road trips, Morgan tries to rouse his ballplayers from bed by telling them that if they want their meal money for the day, they have to meet him in the hotel lobby by 10:00 a.m. But the gambit never works with Remmerswaal, so Morgan just slips the money to him when he sees him, and hopes the Dutchman spends it on food.
Remmerswaal surrenders a cheap infield hit to Tom Eaton.
One time, at the end of a long road trip that included air travel, team officials realized they had lost something in transit—not a piece of luggage, but a pitcher. Remmerswaal. When he finally wandered into the clubhouse several days later, he was greeted with the expected, Where the hell have you been? He calmly explained that during a brief layover in Washington, D.C., he realized that he had never seen the nation’s capital, and might never again have the chance. He had left the airport and gone sightseeing for a few days: the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial.
Remmerswaal gets the next batter, Dallas Williams, to hit a ground ball to his shortstop, Julio Valdez, who steps on second base and throws to first for a double play that retires the side.
A couple of years ago, on a hot August morning, the front office in Boston called Pawtucket with orders to send Remmerswaal up to the parent team immediately. Lou Schwechheimer, a fresh intern and the most earnest member of the McCoy operation, was dispatched to inform Remmerswaal of the good news: He was about to become the first major league player born and raised in the Netherlands! But Schwechheimer could not find the pitcher, either at his East Providence apartment or at any of the several bars and restaurants that the pitcher was known to frequent. Hours passed. Every time Schwechheimer called McCoy to say he couldn’t find Remmerswaal, he was told, Keep looking. Finally, late that afternoon, the intern managed to get into the apartment when Remmerswaal’s roommate showed up with a key. Hustling into the bedroom, he spotted two thin, pale legs, both covered with black socks up to mid-calf, protruding from a swirl of bedsheets and laundry.