by Dan Barry
Remmerswaal.
Schwechheimer started shouting that he had been knocking on the door for several hours. Don’t you understand? You’re getting called up! Boston wants you right away! Boston! The big leagues!
With an air of serenity, Remmerswaal said: They can wait.
The next year, 1980, Remmerswaal was again called up by Boston, as was the left-handed pitcher Bruce Hurst. During a game in Cleveland, Remmerswaal somehow arranged for a food delivery to the bullpen. As Hurst will remember it, the bullpen pitchers devoured pizza and ice cream, oblivious to the television camera recording their late-game feast. Boston management was not amused.
In the top of the 20th inning, Remmerswaal gets Cal Ripken Jr. to swing at the first pitch. A fly out to right field.
The thing about Remmerswaal: He is smart, almost too smart. “He could talk academically about the physics of an airplane in flight, or why a curveball works the way it does,” Hurst would later say. “But if you told him the bus left at eight o’clock, that confused him.”
Remmerswaal loves to argue. Not necessarily because he believes passionately in what he is arguing about, but because argument passes the time, stimulates the brain, can be a sport all its own. One time, Ben Mondor was summoned in the middle of a game to address a clubhouse emergency. He hustled into the room to find Win Remmerswaal and another ballplayer about to come to blows. Over what? An intellectual argument about the properties of electricity. Jeee-sus Christ.
Remmerswaal persuades the second batter, Floyd Rayford, to swing at the first pitch as well. A fly out to left field.
What will become of Win Remmerswaal, funny, unpredictable Win Remmerswaal, now peering down from the mound at Rochester’s next batter, the impossibly tall first baseman Dan Logan? For one thing, his major-league career, a study in blown opportunity and wasted talent, is behind him: twenty-two games, three wins, one loss, and a reputation for not taking baseball seriously. For another, his life will never be as happy or as carefree as it is here in Pawtucket, where an intern might pitch apples to him for batting practice in the clubhouse; where Hood makes sure there’s plenty of beer available after the last inning; where life is a game, and the game is life. After this season, his professional baseball career in the United States will end. He will play in Italy, marry, divorce, and return to the Netherlands, where his superb pitching for the national team once made him a Dutch hero and attracted the notice of American scouts. He will slip into alcoholism, live rough, and become so sick with double pneumonia and pleurisy that he will lapse into a coma, only to awaken a few weeks later with brain damage. By the age of forty-two, he will be housed in an assisted-living facility, bound to a wheelchair, clear-headed one moment, talking about traveling by space shuttle the next.
Mondor will always consider Remmerswaal to be his favorite ballplayer. There was something about the pitcher’s resistance to structure that appealed to his own rigid sense of order. He will never forget to send the Dutchman little reminders that he remains a member of the Pawtucket Red Sox family: yearbooks and media guides and Christmas cards. And every now and then, Mondor will receive an update from the Netherlands. How a pitcher who once threw fastballs into the nineties sits in a wheelchair, in a nursing home, in a country whose national pastime is not baseball, and says to no one in particular: I pitched in front of millions.
In 2008, Bruce Hurst will visit Remmerswaal at his nursing home in The Hague, where the wall behind his hospital bed is adorned with Win Remmerswaal baseball cards and a Pawtucket Red Sox team photograph. Hurst, one of the straightest, most earnest men ever to play baseball, strong and strapping in white shorts and a red-and-blue polo shirt, will sit beside Remmerswaal, one of the oddest, most colorful men ever to play baseball, bent in his wheelchair, his tan-and-white polo shirt stained by a coffee spill. Although they will manage to communicate, haltingly, for a few minutes, Hurst will leave with the sad sense that his old teammate “had a thousand things he wanted to say.”
Tonight, though, Remmerswaal feels invincible. He strikes out Logan on three pitches. He is living inning to inning, and here comes the 21st.
The existential questions that might arise from the twinning of a never-ending baseball game with the resurrection of the Lord are not posed. No one is asking, in the argot befitting the setting: What in the name of Christ are we doing here? Instead, those on the field, in the dugout, and scattered throughout the stands accept this night for what it is, and in small ways are taking care of one another. The public-address announcer has spread the word that hot chocolate and coffee are available for free at the only concession stand still open. The batboy, Billy Broadbent, has trotted out to the plate with three Snickers bars for the umpires. The home plate umpire bequeaths his candy bar to his first-base colleague, whose hands are frozen because 6 innings ago he bequeathed his gloves to his third-base colleague. In this way they complete a Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance act of umpire charity.
Of course, not everyone embraces the wonder of the hour. Lee Graham, the sweet and easygoing center fielder for Pawtucket, runs up to Lou Schwechheimer and demands, through trembling lips, that he end this thing. Schwechheimer smiles at the very idea that he, a twenty-three-year-old kid from the front office, could halt a Triple-A baseball game. But Graham, a child of Florida now chilled to his essence by the outfield wind blowing through him, is not joking. With eyes locked on Schwechheimer, Graham says it again, almost as a threat: End this thing!
There is also the eternally dyspeptic Angelo Cataldi, the Providence Journal sportswriter who would prefer to undergo anesthesia-free root canal than to be here at McCoy. The night, the game—the whole place!—is absurd. Whenever he goes to the men’s room to relieve himself, for example, what does he see but that stupid mural of a bunch of McCoy inhabitants staring at him—including Angelo Cataldi! “I could literally take a leak while looking at myself,” Cataldi will say years later. “There was something really off-putting about relieving yourself while looking into your own eyes.”
But these acts of hope and kindness and frustration, these thoroughly human moments so touching and true to our condition, seem only to amuse the night. In a mischievous mood, the night decides to have some fun, and begins to play with McCoy the way a black cat might with a white ball of yarn.
Win Remmerswaal, so loose-limbed and free, begins the 21st inning by striking out the first Rochester batter. The second batter, Mike Hart, whose five-game major-league career has already ended at one major-league hit, singles now to left field. Then Bobby Bonner, the shortstop, hits a grounder to third; he is thrown out at first, but Hart advances to second. With two out, Rochester’s catcher, Dave Huppert, stands at the plate, ready, nervous, fresh to the Triple-A, and eager to get his first hit in this young season.
Huppert, twenty-four and built for endurance, is more skilled behind the plate than at it. He already senses that he is being “groomed for an emergency,” as he will later say, in case the starting Baltimore catcher, Rick Dempsey, gets injured. He has dedicated himself since high school in Southern California to a singular pursuit: squatting down and catching a ball and standing up and throwing a ball and squatting and standing, squatting, standing, all so that one day he can squat and stand for a major-league baseball team. This is what he has done for six hours straight tonight, two ball games plus, squatting, catching, standing, throwing, squatting, catching, standing, throwing, trudging to the dugout and back onto the field in clattering catcher’s equipment, the shin guards, the chest protector, the mask, all of which have to come off whenever he has to bat—eight times already tonight, with four strikeouts—and then be put back on so that he can squat, catch, stand, and throw.
Huppert’s manager, Doc Edwards, has not forgotten that the kid has already caught 20 innings. Edwards was a catcher himself, remember, so he knows how taxing even a 9-inning game can be. He also must have noticed that his managerial counterpart, Joe Morgan, took out his starting catcher, Rich Gedman, hours ago; Roger LaFrancois has been catching f
or Pawtucket for more than 10 innings now. So Edwards keeps asking Huppert whether he’s tired and in need of a break. But will the exhausted and hungry Huppert ever acknowledge to his manager that yeah, he’s kind of beat, and wouldn’t mind coming out of the game?
Never.
Because who knows? At some point this season, or next, one last spot may need to be filled on the major-league team’s roster. Or maybe, God forbid, Rick Dempsey gets injured, and the choice for a replacement comes down to Huppert and some other minor leaguer. Let’s say they’re both catchers, with good hands and weak bats. It’s a toss-up, the powers that be are looking for reasons to pick one over the other, and someone says, Remember when Huppert asked out of a game that time? No need for anyone to say quitter, or loser. The silence would say it for them, as the powers that be move on to the next order of business, like the mill owners of old, without giving another thought to this Huppert. To which Dave Huppert says, in his own silence, never. He has inhaled the infield dust from Buena Park, California, to Bluefield, West Virginia, and he plans on a long major-league baseball career. Ten years would be a good length of time, he figures, although he will ultimately have to settle for far less: a total of seventeen games with the Baltimore Orioles, and just one hit. But Huppert will be so proud of that one hit—a single off future Hall of Fame pitcher Phil Niekro in Yankee Stadium—that, decades later, he will refer to it in his official biography, as the manager of the Lehigh Valley IronPigs of the International League. But to get there, to Baltimore and Yankee Stadium and Helena, Montana, and Stockton, California, and Birmingham, Alabama, and every other way station leading up to the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, he must first succeed here and now, early on Easter Sunday in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Momentarily freed of his confining armor, Huppert waits.
With two outs and two strikes, he lofts a fairly routine fly ball to right center field. Now the night steps in to have its fun, intercepting the ball in its windy grasp. The more that the center fielder, Graham, runs for the ball, the more the wind blows the ball away from him. It’s as though man and ball are magnetic opposites. By the time the night blithely releases the ball, Huppert is standing on second base, the proud owner of a wind-tossed double that has driven in the go-ahead run, a run that looms like five runs at this late hour. After a groundout by Eaton, Huppert hustles back to the dugout to don his armor one more time, already imagining the happy embrace of grateful teammates in three short outs.
And the night chuckles.
Steve Luebber, the Rochester pitcher, is also anticipating the slaps on his back and the win on his record. He gets Russ Laribee to fly out to right. Now Dave Koza: a lot of power, a bit of a free swinger, not too difficult to fool. But somewhere in the stands, where maybe fifty people now sit, a young blond woman roots against Luebber, thinking, Come on, Dave.
Koza tries to muscle one out. Instead, he launches a short, skyscraping pop fly out toward right field, for what Luebber is already calculating as an easy out. The second baseman, Tom Eaton, trots toward the outfield and calls “You’ve got it” to the right fielder, Mike Hart, who replaced Drungo Hazewood days ago, it seems. But Hart calls back, “No, it’s yours!”
No, it’s the night’s. For the night has again cupped this ball, once destined for right field, and is wind-carrying it back toward the infield, creating the illusion of a midair turnaround. Tony Maners, the first-base umpire, will later remember seeing the ball “hit pretty well toward right field,” only then to notice poor Tommy Eaton, who had just run toward the outfield, running flat-out in the opposite direction. Eaton is proud of his defensive skills, and he knows this one is on him, no matter that the night has set him up as its plaything. Running, running toward the pitcher’s mound, he lunges, but the ball kicks off the heel of his glove, and the only words that he can think of, and he is not a profane man, but the only words that come to his mind are two: “Oh” and “fuck.”
A pop fly lands somewhere behind the pitcher’s mound—a few dozen feet from the plate—and Dave Koza is standing on second base with a double. Luebber and the rest of the Rochester Red Wings agree: Oh fuck.
Now Wade Boggs is doing that thing he does in the dirt before stepping into the batter’s box, that Hebrew sign for life, or luck, or whatever it is that helps him to focus, along with imagining that his batting helmet is his “thinking cap.” No one cares tonight about the many strange rituals of a slow minor-league third baseman who does not hit for power, but that will change. Years from now, the entire country will come to know him as perhaps the purest hitter of his generation. He will collect more than 3,000 hits, silence doubters of his fielding ability, and appear in two World Series. His loyal wife, Debbie, sitting and suffering now in the McCoy stands, will sit and suffer again, during an acutely embarrassing television interview with Barbara Walters in which her husband will discuss a years-long extramarital affair. He will diagnose himself as a sex addict after watching a Geraldo Rivera talk show episode on sex addiction. He will become a client and pitchman for a hair-restoration company, have cameo television appearances on both Cheers and The Simpsons, and be worshipped by a generation of college students more impressed by one unverifiable statistic—that he would drink sixty to seventy cans of Miller Lite on cross-country flights—than by any statistic related to his hitting. He will be admired and reviled, and he will never let the Red Sox front office forget how they underestimated him when he played in Pawtucket. He will often refer to himself in the third person, but to many he will simply be: Boggsy.
Boggsy works the count to 2 and 1, then hits a classic, classic Boggs double, opposite field, to left. Koza rounds third base and easily scores, tying the game, 2–2, in the bottom of the 21st inning, sometime after two o’clock in the morning.
Standing on second base, a triumphant Boggs looks into his team’s dugout along the third-base side, where cold, huddled men stomp their cleats on the concrete floor to regain feeling in their toes, and a fire emanates from an oil drum, and he sees—well, he’s not quite sure what he sees. Do his teammates want to hug him for tying up the game? Or do they want to slug him for tying up the game—maybe pummel him with those bad-habit-infected bats of theirs? Is this typical Boggs, coming through in the clutch with another clean hit to left? Or is this typical Boggs, putting self before team—in this case, putting self before the team’s collective need for sleep?
Sweet Billy Broadbent, the batboy, wants to yell for joy, but one quick look around the home dugout tells him to keep his happiness to himself. Many of these ballplayers just want to go home, and the last thing they need is some sixteen-year-old kid yapping about how great this is. Billy also knows that the sudden change of fortune in this protracted ball game means trouble for him at home. He knows that a half mile away—down Division Street, past the factories and freight trailers, across the railroad tracks, and up a street called Greeley—his worried mother has already stepped out of their bungalow and looked to her right, to make sure that the stadium glow still emanates from beyond the low-slung industrial horizon; that her two sons, the batboys, Billy and Kevin, are safe. But she cannot be happy. She’ll be calling any minute now, if she hasn’t already.
Sam Bowen grounds out to shortstop, which keeps Boggs in check at second base, and the catcher, Roger LaFrancois, is intentionally walked. Two out now, with tired men on first and second and in both dugouts. Julio Valdez, Pawtucket’s popular, flexible-as-Gumby shortstop, comes to the plate. He was called up to Boston briefly last year (he’s one of the chosen five who are depicted hitchhiking on Interstate 95 in the official program), and he will be called up again later this year. He will stay with Boston as a utility infielder for all of 1982, and then, in 1983, he will be arrested by the Boston police—in the dugout—on a charge of statutory rape involving a fourteen-year-old runaway. The charge will be quickly dropped for lack of evidence, but he and his .120 batting average will be sent back to the minors, never to play another game in the major leagues.
All up to Valdez now, as sp
indly thin as the bat he’s choking. A left-handed batter, he stands in wait for Luebber’s pitch, the stadium light winking off his blue helmet.
Three pitches.
Three strikes.
Third out.
The end of the 21st inning and the start of the 22nd.
The telephone in the front office rings. General Manager Mike Tamburro answers. The caller asks: They can’t still be playing, can they?
And Tamburro tells the worried mother of the batboys:
Yes, Mrs. Broadbent. Yes, they can.
INNINGS 22 TO 32
Pawtucket manager Joe Morgan, asserting once again that the umpire is incorrect.
Pawtucket Red Sox
On the other side, past the rolls of tarp and the chain-link fencing, past the billboards for tuxedo rentals and oil changes, beyond where the stadium’s vaporous glow presses against the infinite dark, Pawtucket sleeps. Its people sleep, too, though they never tire of defending their city’s hardscrabble honor, and all but dare you to disparage a place that only they have license to call the Bucket—which they rarely do. They know: the lost textile industry, the quiet downtown, the triple-decker claustrophobia that pervades certain tree-poor streets. Still. Just try to find a parking space when St. Raphael Academy and Tolman High School renew their football rivalry every Thanksgiving. Just try to refuse the prime rib special down at the Checker Club, or to resist that first bite of a Sunday doughnut from Korb’s Bakery. And if you don’t understand their deep, almost tribal allegiance to this flawed place, read the cheeky editorial in yesterday’s Pawtucket Evening Times: