by Dan Barry
Because Morgan, not yet fifty, was still, at his core, a professional baseball player, and professional baseball players are conditioned to take one step, one base, and then the next base, and the next, and not stop until they have made it home. And home means only one thing.
I can’t, Ben.
Why not?
Because someday I want to manage in the big leagues.
Deep in his comfortable chair, his box of lists by his side, Morgan will smile at the memory of his long career as the manager of the Pawtucket Red Sox: nine years, from 1974 to 1982. The good teams. The lousy teams. The bottles of Chivas. The characters. Win Remmerswaal, for example, that crazy Dutchman, imploring Morgan not to put him into a game until the 8th or 9th inning because he was still adjusting to the time zone. For a moment the man in Red Sox slippers will disappear into that distant place, where his office was a glorified closet, and the clubhouse showers scalded his skin, and the stadium was so empty and cold some nights that it felt like a morgue—and he will want to go back.
“Those were good times,” he will say.
“I don’t give a shit!”
So shouts Morgan, among other expressions of his disbelief. “How the hell can you say he was in the batter’s bawx?” He yells at the home plate umpire, turns his profane attention to the third-base umpire, then back again to the home plate umpire, rousing from fitful slumber the forty or so fans still in the cavernous ballpark, as well as who knows how many radio listeners back in Rochester. One of the umpires threatens to call the cops if he doesn’t leave the field, to which Morgan shoots back: Where the hell are you gonna get a cop at this hour?
“We’re in the twenty-second inning here at Pawtucket and Joe has to take a shower,” Drew, the Rochester broadcaster, says. “At least he’s going to be in where he’s warm, anyway—I wonder if we can get tossed out.”
Morgan finally, reluctantly, leaves, serenaded as he goes by the affirming cheers of the lonesome McCoy congregation. Some of those tethered to this game—like the broadcasters—wonder whether the crafty veteran has orchestrated his ouster to find shelter from the cold. In truth, Morgan sneaks off to a favored hiding spot behind the backstop and under section 9, a corner of the McCoy underbelly where wood is stacked and rubble thrown and equipment stored. He knows that back here, if you pull a little on the forest green plywood fastened by wire to the chain-link fence, you can create a secret portal to the grass-and-clay spectacle of a baseball game, the unnatural light streaming into the dusky shadows. You are close to the action, yet unseen by all. But you can be heard. In the past, Morgan’s mutterings of “Horseshit!” have betrayed his secret hiding place, prompting umpires to tell him to get the hell out of there. “Horseshit” might also reflect his opinion of the Boston Red Sox front office. A few years ago, he applied for the manager’s job in Boston and was all but ignored. And just this past off-season, after the firing of manager Don Zimmer, he applied again, going up to Fenway and meeting with Haywood Sullivan, the organization’s general manager.
Sullivan: Are you here for the same reason you were last time, Joe?
Morgan: Yes, I am.
Sullivan: Well, the answer is still the same.
For tonight, for now, Joe Morgan keeps his counsel. Here he stays, in the cold that comes from being shunned, surrounded by maintenance equipment in storage, one foot resting on a pile of wooden pallets, hands shoved into the pockets of his navy blue warm-up jacket, eyes trained on the game that gives him purpose.
From above, Drew and his sidekick, Pete Torrez, have been broadcasting for six hours now, with most of the burden carried by Drew, the play-by-play man. He has announced every pitch and catch with the faintest note of urgency, as if to suggest that despite its relentless routine, all of this matters. Just a few moments ago, he told Howie back in the studio to start recording the game, not knowing—how could he?—that at least one listener back in Rochester is doing that very thing. Now his every utterance is recorded for posterity, including an ever-so-faint belch.
“Excuse me,” he says. “And here’s the oh-one pitch to Williams.”
Believe it or not, general managers do not normally go on the road with their teams, let alone broadcast them. But Drew is on the outs with his bosses. Within days he will be fired.
“Low for a ball, evens the count at one and one to Dallas Williams.”
Drew, fifty-one, is a veteran minor-league executive who became Rochester’s general manager two years ago, in the midst of a difficult time for the Red Wings franchise; among other problems, its home field, Silver Stadium, needs millions of dollars in repairs. Attendance and profits have risen under Drew’s tenure, but so have tensions, as he and Bill Farrell, the president of the team’s board of directors, have clashed over who, exactly, is in charge. After being pressured by Farrell to force the resignation of Pete Brown, a beloved veteran radio broadcaster who had recently undergone bypass surgery, Drew submitted his resignation, citing “personal reasons” (a polite way of saying that he cannot stand Farrell), but he has agreed to stay on until season’s end—and is now performing the duties of the man he was forced to fire. At the moment, though, Drew is planning one last power play: to withdraw his resignation as long as he doesn’t have to deal with Farrell—a lame gambit that will only expedite his departure.
Tonight, at least, Bob Drew is the reassuring voice of the Red Wings, describing the pirouettes of shortstop Bobby Bonner, the assuredness of third baseman Cal Ripken Jr., and other matters of more import to the fan than the front-office bloodletting going on behind the scenes. He wonders in vain whether anyone back in Rochester is listening, aside from Linda, his girlfriend and future wife, and so he imagines that he is talking directly to her, pitching baseball woo:
“There’s the pitch. Ground ball on the right side. Koza’s got it, flips to Remmerswaal covering, for out number one.”
Before the game, Drew went into the Rochester clubhouse in search of someone to help him fill the air, and found Torrez, twenty-six, a tall, thin relief pitcher who is on the disabled list and near the end of his playing days. Although his halting performance in the booth tonight might argue against a next career in broadcasting, Torrez has gamely kept up with Drew through the long night, and occasionally has provided the insider’s insight one desires from a color man. For example, he did not hesitate to say Morgan might have been right in arguing the call that led to his ejection: “I tell you, Bob, Joe is really mad. And I think he has reason.”
“I tell you, Bob”—a verbal tic of Torrez’s that accumulates over the hours.
And just as the puckish wind is vexing the players on the field, so too is it flummoxing the two men describing the game. After Ripken pops out to third baseman Wade Boggs, who has to run to the first-base line to track down the ball, pinch hitter Floyd Rayford walks. Then Dan Logan makes contact. “Looping fly ball into left field,” Drew says, his flat tone suggesting that nothing unusual is occurring, but then turning panicked, as though his words cannot keep up with the action. “Chasing it, can’t get it, as Walker—there’s the throw into third base. And over to third base is Floyd Rayford!”
“And, Bob, that was a routine fly ball,” Torrez says. “Chico just misjudged that ball because the wind’s blowing so hard….”
“So it’s going to be a base hit for Dan Logan,” Drew says. “And that’s why I didn’t get too excited about it. It looked like a routine fly ball. But then I look out there and Walker’s having trouble with it, as the wind is blowing back in. And it drops in there.”
The crazy wind seems to be affecting behavior throughout the press box, injecting a certain loopiness into the broadcast. “Here’s the pitch,” Drew says at one point. “High, ball one, and we’ve got a nice fresh hot cup of coffee. Mmmm, that tastes good.” But every so often, Drew pulls back, as if startled by what he is about to say: “So Barrett steps in, his tenth time at the plate tonight. Some of these things sound a little ridiculous, don’t they? The tenth time at the plate? One out awa
y, in the bottom of the twenty-second?”
Remember that nice postgame dinner of chicken and pasta that Hood, the clubhouse manager, lovingly made for the Rochester team? It has long since turned to macaroni mush. A dispirited Hood has laid out the meal for anyone who wants it. But to the famished and frozen Red Wings hustling in and out, his culinary effort ranks with anything they’d find among the fine Italian restaurants on Federal Hill in Providence. This is not quite the tip-inducing feast that Hood had in mind, but still: Bon appétit.
Remember Harold Cooper, the missing-in-action president of the International League, the only one with power to stop this craziness? Mike Tamburro has called Cooper’s home again after another frustrating go-around with the umpires, who are refusing to postpone the game. This time, Cooper’s wife, Eloise, has answered the telephone to say that her husband is not in.
This is what Tamburro thinks: Not in? At—what the hell time is it—at two o’clock on Easter Sunday morning?
This is what Tamburro says: Well, would you please tell Harold to call Pawtucket as soon as he gets in? We’re still playing baseball here! And we have to figure out how to stop this game!
Remember Danny Card, the boy who struck a deal with his father to stay until the end of the game? Well, Danny is reconsidering. His father seems fine, joking with other stragglers on the first-base side about when the number of innings will surpass the temperature, which hovers now just above 40 degrees. But Danny, a self-described McCoy rat, a beggar of balls, a kid who, in a couple of years, will write a paper for Miss Rini’s class at Nathanael Greene Middle School on Pawtucket’s backup catcher, Roger LaFrancois, has had enough of the night’s cruel bluster and athletic drudgery. Hard to believe, but Danny Card has had enough of baseball. His thin body is cold and his heavy-lidded eyes have taken in all 22 innings. He tells his father that he wants to go home.
One day, Danny will become skilled enough at baseball to play catcher, just like LaFrancois, for Rhode Island College. Then he will wait tables at a Federal Hill restaurant. (It is owned by a very nice man who, years earlier and unbeknownst to Danny, joined one of the restaurant’s regular patrons—another very nice man, by the way—in murdering a handsome local hood who was called Onions because he supposedly made all the girls cry. They buried Onions in a secret hiding place that would not be revealed for thirty years, and only after the last of the killers, in the final stage of a terminal illness, decided to give it up, which was very nice of him.)
Danny will spend twelve years in the navy, become a contractor for the Department of Defense, and pass on his abiding passion for the game to his own son. And whenever he remembers the Easter of 1981, he will think of his late father, Ron, who struggled with his weight, who tried but could never quit smoking those cigarettes, who died too young, at fifty-eight, of cancer and other complications—and who, on this night, said:
No. We’re staying.
Danny Card will come to understand that his father’s insistence has less to do with a love for baseball than with the sanctity of their pact to stick out the game no matter what. “I learned what a promise meant,” he will say.
The sandy-haired boy settles back into his seat, beside his father.
Not far from where Danny Card desires to leave, the batboy, Billy Broadbent, desires nothing more than to stay. His mother has driven to McCoy Stadium from their two-bedroom cottage on Greeley Street, intent on collecting Billy and his younger brother, Kevin, the visiting team’s batboy. She is now in Mondor’s box at the lip of the field, asking—demanding, actually—for custody of her two sons. But Mike Tamburro is gently stalling her, explaining that the batboys play a vital role in the game. Billy is avoiding her gaze and pretending that he cannot hear her, even though every spoken word now seems to resound through the stadium’s emptiness. He does not want to go home. He cannot go home. His team needs him.
Just think. A year ago, he showed up at McCoy’s doorstep, a baseball-besotted boy with no father at home, freshly cut from the Tolman High School baseball team, dreaming of the outfield. He asked for a job in the stadium’s concessions and wound up becoming a batboy. How anxious was Billy that first year? He was so awestruck by the athletes padding about the clubhouse that, as one player later put it, “He would step in front of a car if you told him to,” and so nervous, or so enthusiastic, that he got tagged with the clubhouse nickname of “Panic.” He fretted over everything, from the proper arrangement of bats in the dugout to the supply of towels available to players coming in off the field. He even developed anxiety over the infield practice balls. After warm-ups before the start of every inning, first baseman Dave Koza would lob the infield practice ball toward the dugout, making sure that it bounced, as though presenting itself obediently to Billy, who would be waiting with open glove. But Billy would attach outsize importance to the ball, approaching it as though it were live and in play (“Ground ball, hit sharply to Broadbent…”). As this inconsequential ball bounced toward him, he would work up the fear that he might make an error in front of the thousands of fans taking absolutely no notice of him. And whenever he did muff the ball, someone in the dugout would say, “E10.” Error—batboy.
But nothing caused him as much heartache last year as the time he got ejected from a ball game. That’s right: Wide-eyed, anxious, and painfully earnest Billy Broadbent, all of fifteen, got tossed from a ball game in an episode that made the news.
Batboy Ejected.
Oh, Billy.
It was the second game of a doubleheader against the Charleston Charlies, and things were testy. Joe Morgan had already been thrown out for arguing balls and strikes with the home plate umpire, Zach Rebackoff, who was also known as “the Flying Birdman” for his elaborate delivery of certain calls. “It was an out call that I made,” Rebackoff will say years later. “I’d be in a crouch position and all of a sudden I would jump high, forward, and land. The whole bit. The fans liked it.”
One of the duties of a batboy, meanwhile, is to provide the home plate umpire with a continuing supply of fresh baseballs. But among Billy’s various apprehensions was the fear of getting hit by a pitcher’s warm-up throw. So he would wait at the on-deck circle like a scared puppy until the pitcher had thrown his last warm-up, just before the start of another half inning, then trot out to home plate with a handful of balls. Billy’s habit of waiting, though, began to annoy Rebackoff, who suspected it was one of the sophomoric ways that the Pawtucket bench was getting back at him for having just ejected Morgan. “They were a pain in the ass, by the way,” Rebackoff will recall. “The truth of the matter is that the team takes on the personality of the manager. With the manager being such a fucking nuthead, those guys picked it up like it’s allowed.”
As Billy will remember it, Rebackoff kept yelling at him to get over here—now!—with more baseballs, in barking snatches of words that got nastier with each passing inning. Finally, the men in the Pawtucket dugout noticed how upset Billy had become; the boy had no poker face. Hey, Panic, what’s blue saying to you? When Billy explained that the umpire was riding him for not supplying the game balls fast enough, the pitcher Bob Ojeda, the trainer Dale Robertson, and a few others saw opportunity. They could teach a boy how to be a man and set fire to a dull June day at the ballpark. They told Billy that the next time he runs out to home plate, he must tell Rebackoff to go fuck himself.
Words like these did not skip freely over Billy’s tongue. But here he was, stinging from his clubhouse nickname and eager to prove that he belonged—that he was part of the team. He looked up to these men in the dugout. He worshipped them. He was fifteen.
This is how Billy will forever remember the moment. In the brief period between the pitcher’s last warm-up throw and the commencement of another half inning, a shy batboy hustled up to a flamboyant home plate umpire, handed him some fresh baseballs, and softly said:
Go fuck yourself.
The umpire may not have trusted what he had just heard. If he understood the lowly batboy correctly, this would
be the baseball equivalent to Oliver Twist defying the beadle Bumble. What did you say to me?
The boy’s body trembled like a grass blade as he whispered in reply: Go fuck yourself.
In Billy’s memory, the umpire did not contort into one of his elaborate play-calling gestures, with face flush and finger pointing to an imaginary shower stall somewhere beyond the diamond; there was no variation of the Flying Birdman. Rebackoff just said—politely, when you think about it—he just said: You’re not working anymore tonight.
When Billy returned to the dugout, ashen and confused, the ballplayers pestered him until he finally admitted that, like Morgan, he had been ejected from the game. Now here was a story for the ages, a story to break up the monotony of long bus rides and endless practice drills—a story of distinction and pride. Ojeda, one of the batboy’s profane muses, may have felt guilt, or he may have simply wanted to prolong the absurd, diverting moment. Whatever his motivation, he began screaming and tossing baseballs onto the field until he, too, was ejected.
Reporters in the press box took note of Ojeda’s ejection, of course, since he wasn’t even in the game. Their postgame questions led to other questions, which led to a reference in the Pawtucket Evening Times to the ejection of “one of Pawtucket’s peerless batboys, for conduct unbecoming,” which led to an account of the incident in the Sporting News, the baseball bible with a national circulation.
Rebackoff, though, will have a somewhat different recollection. He will say that Billy defiantly dropped the baseballs in front of him, and refused to pick them up. He will say that he was being shown up by a fifteen-year-old kid who didn’t seem that bright, and that he had no choice but to throw the boy out of the game. And he will say that the notorious episode would become one of the reasons why the Flying Birdman never became a major-league umpire.
Thirty years after this otherwise uneventful minor-league doubleheader, Billy Broadbent will shake his head no as he eats dinner in a Fort Myers restaurant, following another day of working at spring training camp for the Boston Red Sox. He will have become the indispensable video coordinator for the Red Sox, the man who helps the team find advantage in the slightest on-field moment. Remember when the pinch runner Dave Roberts stole second base off the New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the 9th inning of the fourth game of the 2004 American League Championship Series? A steal that led to a victory that changed the course of the series and propelled the Boston Red Sox to their first World Series championship since 1918? Billy Broadbent helped Roberts to prepare for that moment with videotaped breakdowns of Rivera. Billy Broadbent has a piece of that World Series.