Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  Do you know how you can always tell an outsider to this city? Sure you do: the way he pronounces its name.

  Don’t listen to his claim that he’s familiar with the area or has heard of the community’s concerns. When that guy says PAW-tucket, watch out….

  You don’t live in PAW-tucket. You live in P’-TUCK-it. (If you say it right, it sounds like you’re spitting.) And anyone who says it differently, grammarian or Washington, D.C., bureaucrat, just doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

  So here it is, P’-TUCK-it, at rest.

  Main Street, nearly as still in the day as it is now at night, has recently been converted into a pedestrian mall as part of yet another “revitalization” effort, with canopies of clear plastic installed to shield pedestrians from the elements. These hideous, translucent coverings will only bake the sidewalks come summer—but they’re worth a try. Nearby looms the grand Leroy Theater, once home to the largest Wurlitzer organ in New England; closed and quiet for a couple of years now, it is beginning its fitful surrender to making way for a Walgreens—but people are vowing to restore the place. True, the Ten Mile River is so polluted that residents along its shores can barely abide the stench—but there is talk of remediation. True, the population has dropped by more than 10 percent since 1950, to about seventy-one thousand people—but the city has felt overcrowded anyway.

  True, the tireless entrepreneur believed to own more property than any other city taxpayer is a mob associate named Albo Vitali. He owns a trailer park near Narragansett Park where Dave Koza and other Pawtucket players have lived over the years, and he is vowing at the moment to restore the beloved Leroy. He has also been identified by the state police as an accomplished bookmaker, gifted mover of stolen goods, and convicted felon. So close is he to Raymond L. S. Patriarca, New England’s steel-eyed, liver-lipped crime boss, that he once posted Patriarca’s considerable bail. A couple of years ago, this prominent Pawtucket landowner and businessman pleaded guilty to selling quarter-shaped counterfeit coins that might, say, trick a vending machine into coughing up some candy Chuckles. True, true; all true. But don’t you admire the hope in Vitali’s felonious alchemy? The hope of transforming slugs into money?

  Hope, after all, is the motto of Rhode Island. Hope has a seat on the public buses, those thirty-five-foot green whales, their insides musty with urine at certain hours of the day, sighing through their blowholes as they stop and start past machine shops and old mills. One of the drivers, Scott Molloy, who will soon embark upon a long career in academia, is occasionally assigned the Pawtucket route. And for all the urban despair he sees, especially late at night, when that despair assumes the drape of gloom, he is struck by a small group of ragtag Pawtucket regulars, a couple of white guys, a black guy, and a woman, who routinely make the transfer to the dog track in Lincoln. Broken people, really, but made whole somehow by one another, and by the shared hope of a winning day at the track—of returning home on a RIPTA bus with a hundred-dollar score on a two-dollar bet. Never happens. Maybe tomorrow.

  At this hour, these small-time bettors must be asleep, dreaming of greyhounds. At this hour, in the declining Slater Park Zoo, poor Fanny the Elephant, chained for the last two decades to concrete covered in hay, enjoys brief, somnolent respite from her captors; someday she will be rescued and taken to a Texas ranch to live among other pachyderms, but for now, whatever visions of liberation Fanny might harbor go undisturbed. At this hour, the socializing in social clubs has ceased: in the Lily, beside McCoy Stadium, for instance, where a door-banging raid by the cops will someday curtail its central business of bookmaking; in the Dante Alighieri, on Hurley Avenue, where Albo Vitali dreams of turning lead into silver; in the Irish, on Pawtucket Avenue, where white-haired Pat McCabe, the County Armagh sprite of a barman, truly understands the propriety of the last call, it’s time, it’s time.

  It’s nearly Easter dawn, he might say. Sleep, why don’t you?

  Most of Pawtucket heeds this sensible advice, including some of the few still remaining at McCoy. In the Rochester clubhouse, a couple of ballplayers, long since removed from the game, have given in to the tranquilizing effects of many cans of beer. In the parking lot, Kenny Laflamme is in deep slumber in his stepfather’s Ford Pinto, unaware that he has accidentally activated the car’s headlights, which are slowly draining the battery. And in the owner’s office, under a secondhand desk, a child sleeps: a brown-haired girl of two, a spray of freckles upon her cheeks, worn out from drawing in her coloring book and nestled in a bed of blankets and coats. Her name is Meagann Boggs. Dad is at work, playing third base for the Pawtucket team, and Mom is close by, sitting with Ben Mondor in the modest partition so grandly called the owner’s box.

  So a child sleeps, and intoxicated ballplayers sleep, and the book-makers and proprietors and residents of Pawtucket sleep, and a shackled elephant sleeps, and, four hundred miles away, the New York city of Rochester sleeps, though some are half dozing to the Rochester- Pawtucket lullaby flowing through their radios from the creaky press box of McCoy. Two Red Wings employees, Bob Drew and Pete Torrez, each of them out of place in his own way, broadcast the game as if offering a late-night glass of warm milk.

  “We’re going into inning number twenty-two right now,” says Drew, his voice as soothing as a bedtime storyteller’s. “Williams steps in there, still looking for his first hit of the night, or the day, or whatever you call it. There’s an attempted bunt, foul at the plate….”

  Wait!

  What’s that sound? That song! A lilting, Irish-tenor song of ire, echoing now through the radios of Rochester! It is Joe Morgan, the manager of the Pawtucket Red Sox, screaming at the home plate umpire. And because the stadium is nearly deserted, his angry ditty rises up from home plate to the press box, where it is being captured clearly by two small microphones, transmitted through the black-box mixer attached to a phone jack, and sent by phone line back to a small radio station in Rochester, where the only on-duty employee, a man named Howie, ensures its broadcast to the city of the Kodak Tower and the George Eastman House, to the many neighborhoods and suburbs, the Nineteenth Ward and Irondequoit, Upper Monroe and Penfield. It is a place where baseball matters: where the home team, formerly known as the Bronchos and Hustlers, among other names, and now called the Red Wings, has mattered since the nineteenth century. People in Rochester care about their Red Wings, and to those faithful still listening in, Joe Morgan sings an Easter Sunday hymn for which the refrain appears to be:

  “I don’t give a shit!”

  Here is what has brought Morgan to the point of speaking in tongues. Rochester’s speedy leadoff hitter, Dallas Williams, the twenty-three-year-old center fielder, is having a miserable night at the plate. He is 0 for 8 so far, and he has tried to drag-bunt his way onto first base and out of the hitless ignominy that awaits him. But the batted ball appears to have jumped up and hit him in fair territory as he ran from the batter’s box. The umpire, Denny Cregg, has called it a foul ball, but Morgan is colorfully asserting that the umpire is incorrect. Williams, he is shouting, should be out.

  Through the oval opening of his hooded sweatshirt a few feet from the commotion, ten-year-old David Cregg sees his uncle walking away, trying to avoid confrontation with the animated, persistent Morgan. In the off-season, Denny Cregg, thirty-two, works construction, roofing, anything that will sustain him until baseball season, when his compensation is $1,000 a month, plus expenses and the priceless feeling he gets by stepping onto a baseball field—“It’s like a drug,” he will say, decades later. His hope is that someday a roving supervisor named Barney Deary, Major League Baseball’s one-man Umpire Development Program, will see him in action and say: Next year, you’re calling balls and strikes in the big leagues. It will never happen. Cregg will give up his dream five years from now. But he will remain in baseball as a supervisor for the Professional Baseball Umpire Corporation, evaluating other aspiring umpires on how they handle myriad situations, such as this one, in which an argumentative manager re
fuses to leave the field.

  “Okay, Joe Morgan has just been thrown out of the ball game,” Drew tells his listeners, chuckling. “And I think it’s because he said, ‘I don’t give a darn,’ or something like that. Yeah—that Joe Morgan has been tossed here in the twenty-second inning.”

  That Joe Morgan. He’s not going anywhere. Not yet.

  Nearly thirty years later, on another inclement spring day in New England, Joe Morgan will nestle into a comfortable chair in his living room in Walpole, Massachusetts, his hometown. His feet will be shod in blue slippers, each one crowned with a red capital B—for Boston Red Sox. His wife, Dottie, will busy herself in the kitchen. On a wall there will hang a sign that reads: “A baseball fan lives here…with the woman he never struck out with.” It will be a nice scene, a tranquil scene, until Morgan recalls that distant play.

  “He ran toward first and the ball jumped up and hit him in the foot!” the white-haired man, nearly eighty, will say. And the 22nd inning of this long-ago ball game in Pawtucket will unfold again in his living room.

  “He’s out!”

  Joe Morgan’s baseball passion never cools. The son of immigrants from County Clare, he starred in baseball and hockey at Boston College, where he learned how to apply a Jesuitical rigor to the rules and nuances of the game, and continued his studies during summers by playing for the Hopedale mill town team in the Blackstone Valley League for $30 a week. He’d spend the day working—in a mill one year, at an inn two other years—then play baseball at night against mill workers, college students, and crusty baseball professionals, including a few former major-league pitchers who knew how to snap off a 12-to-6 curve (“I found out how good I wasn’t in a hurry,” he will say). Once he earned his bachelor’s degree in American history and government, he set it aside to embark upon a long career as an itinerant baseball man, his every port of call remaining so vivid in his mind that he will summon them in a laconic Yankee recitation, like a salty Robert Frost asked once again to deliver “The Road Not Taken.”

  “Well, the first team I played for was the Hartford Chiefs in the Eastern League. Next year I was at Evansville, Indiana, in the Three- I League. Following two years I was in the U.S. Army as a ground pounder.”

  Ground pounder?

  “A guy that’s in the army is a ground pounder just by walking around.”

  Where was he? Oh, yes. The Hartford Chiefs, in 1952. The Evansville Braves. Then down to the Jacksonville Braves in the Sally League. The Atlanta Crackers in the Southern League. The Wichita Braves in the American Association. The Louisville Colonels. The Charleston Marlins. Back to the Atlanta Crackers, now in the International League, for a couple of years. Then back to Jacksonville, but this time for a team called the Suns. Then, at the age of thirty-five, down to the Raleigh Pirates, in the Carolina League, in 1966. Sprinkled among those thirteen years in the baseball wilderness were bits of four seasons in the major leagues, with the Milwaukee Braves, the Kansas City Athletics, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Cleveland Indians, and the St. Louis Cardinals. He was more than a cup-of-coffee guy, but not much more: two cups and maybe a doughnut, to go with a .193 batting average and an ever-expanding repository of baseball knowledge and lore.

  He will describe the heat-baked infield at the ballpark in Keokuk, Iowa, as the worst he ever played on; explain why Jimmie Foxx was the best all-around ballplayer in history; remember the name of a long-forgotten minor-league pitcher, Al Meau, who hit a ball through a tire hung in right field in Bluefield, West Virginia, winning enough money to pay his rent for the 1947 season; vividly describe a strange dinner that he and Dot shared with Ted Williams and his girlfriend; and discuss, with professorial authority, the many ballpark stunts he witnessed over the years, including this:

  Joe Engel, the gimmick-loving owner of the Chattanooga Lookouts and acknowledged “Barnum of Baseball,” would cover the infield with hundreds of dollar bills, along with a fin and a sawbuck here and there. The players from both teams would be positioned along the first-and third-base lines, while a lucky fan standing at home plate would be told that he had thirty seconds to pocket as much of the money as he could, after which the players would dive in. But it would never get to thirty seconds. Shortly into the countdown, one of the ballplayers would feign a move, tricking other ballplayers into crossing the line, and a monetary free-for-all would ensue.

  “I found out the best way to do it was to run out there and fall on the ground, and cover as many as you could, reach around the side, scoop up and then get ’em underneath you,” Morgan will recall. “I think I got seventeen bucks one time.”

  After his playing career ended, Morgan continued his baseball peregrinations as a manager: Raleigh, North Carolina; York, Pennsylvania; Columbus, Ohio; Charleston, West Virginia; a year as a coach with the Pittsburgh Pirates; and then back to Charleston. Meanwhile, he and Dottie were raising a family and paying a mortgage in their native Walpole, so he took any job he could find in the off-season—so many, in fact, that he once compiled a list of them and filed it in a small wooden box, along with other idiosyncratic information: every horse to win at least fifty races; the countries that produced the most baseball players, besides the United States and Canada (“Ireland had a shitload of them in the early going”); prominent players who played just one year with the Boston Red Sox (Jack Chesbro, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, Tom Seaver…).

  “I was a substitute schoolteacher. I was a bill collector. I took the census in this town. I was an oil man. A coal man. Construction worker. I worked for Polaroid. Raytheon. American Girl Shoe. I worked for Uncle Sam for two years in the U.S. Army; can’t forget that. I went to winter ball, four years. I coached the Boston neighborhood hockey team. Oh, yeah, I worked for the post office for a couple of years.”

  In early 1974, the team in Pawtucket, just twenty-five miles south of Walpole, had an opening for a manager. Sensing another faint chance to manage in the major leagues someday, Morgan expressed his interest to the midlevel executives in the Boston organization. When nothing came of his inquiries, he boldly called Dick O’Connell, the Red Sox general manager, at home.

  O’Connell’s initial response: How the fuck did you get my telephone number?

  Morgan’s initial thought, rendered in Morgan-speak: Holy Christ, that’s negatory.

  But Morgan plowed on, saying he was the man for the job in Pawtucket. O’Connell floored him by responding: There’s a ton of people who want this job, but nobody’s asked me about it, and I’m the boss around here. You got the job!

  So began New England’s gradual embrace of its prodigal son, a baseball savant whose managerial decisions were rooted not in statistical analysis but in what he had learned from the Jesuits and those Blackstone Valley veterans, and from all that time spent in places large and small, in Milwaukee and Keokuk, playing beside the great and the forgotten, for teams called the Cardinals and the Crackers. He won over most of his players with his paternal bluntness and his ability to say I’ve been there; I’ve been cut, demoted, uncertain of my future; I’ve been in your cleats. He charmed fans with his on-field histrionics and odd linguistic style, a kind of Walpole meets Canterbury, in which his nonsensical catchall phrase, “Six, two and even,” seemed to add up somehow. And he earned the respect of umpires for his deep knowledge of the rules of baseball, although they found his goading, exhibitionistic manner less than endearing. After being ejected one time in Columbus, Morgan did not leave until a sheriff arrived to escort him from the field, after which the unamused sheriff declined his invitation to share a clubhouse beer.

  For all his antics, Morgan possessed the maturity that comes from hard-earned perspective. He understood the essential truth of baseball: that to be paid to throw and bat a ball around is a blessing. Real work came after the last game of the season, when he returned to the ranks of the stiffs, doing whatever he could to provide for his family. Soon after landing the manager’s job at the Pawtucket Red Sox, he began working the off-season with the Massachusetts Turnpik
e Authority, mowing the last of the grass, picking up garbage, plowing snow. He’d clean up around the toll plazas, and when he found an errant coin, he’d pocket it.

  Joe Morgan and Pawtucket, then, were a perfect fit: modest, time-tested, underestimated. He and the owner, Ben Mondor, understood and respected each other. After every road trip, for example, Morgan would return to McCoy to find a fifth of Chivas waiting for him, courtesy of Mondor—except for the time the team lost nine of ten on the road. Left on his desk was a miniature bottle of scotch: an airplane nip. He laughed his ass off.

  One night, Ben and Madeleine Mondor treated Joe and Dottie Morgan to dinner at the Lafayette House, an upscale colonial remnant on Route 1 in Foxboro, not far from Walpole. After a couple of drinks, Mondor got down to business, saying to Morgan: If you promise to be my manager for the rest of your baseball career, your family will never have to worry about another dime again. College. Money. You won’t have to worry.

  After a pause, Morgan gently gave his answer: I can’t, Ben.

  Why not?

  Indeed: why not? After thirty years of wandering the country in pursuit of a game, Morgan was being offered a dream of an opportunity by a multimillionaire friend whose word was gold. Stop your traveling. Stay in minor-league baseball. Commit to Pawtucket. All will be well. It sounded so inviting. Why not?