by Dan Barry
Some time back, the public-address announcer, Bob Guthrie, broadcast the license-plate number of a black Pinto—“RC 977”—with its lights on in the parking lot. Imagine the press-box hilarity when everyone realized that the car was owned by Dick Courtens, the scoreboard operator, sitting just a few feet from Guthrie. Courtens eventually puts two and two together: His teenage stepson, shy Kenny Laflamme, who eons ago went out to the car to sleep, must have tripped the lights while trying to get cozy. The duty-bound Courtens, though, cannot leave his post. With every zero he posts on the scoreboard, his car lights grow dimmer and dimmer.
But the lights in the kitchens of certain houses, here and there, in northern Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts, continue to burn holes into the blanketing darkness, as family members fear the worst. Their loved ones left for a stupid baseball game half a day ago and have yet to return. McCoy is receiving so many worried telephone calls that Mike Tamburro has developed a rehearsed speech: “No, everything is okay. But they’re still playing ball out there. That’s why he’s late. The score is tied….”
Up in the Massachusetts town of Dudley, Francis Cregg, father of a boy named David and brother of an umpire named Denny, both missing, calls his brother’s new house in Webster, just across the French River, and wakes up his pregnant sister-in-law, Kathy. They have the kind of conversation you dread, something like: Denny and David aren’t home yet, oh my God, something’s wrong. Francis promises Kathy to find out what that something is. He calls the local police to check for any late-night reports of an accident or, God forbid, foul play, involving a boy and a man. Nah. Then he calls the Massachusetts state police and poses the same frantic question. Nah. Then he calls the Rhode Island state police.
Why do you ask?
Because my son and my brother went to the PawSox game last night, my brother was umpiring, and they haven’t come home.
Extra, extra innings, a Rhode Island state police officer explains, as though reciting the rote answer to a routine question. Go back to bed.
At the same time, in a first-floor apartment on Providence’s East Side, Joelle Card is making her own worried telephone rounds in search of her husband and son, while her five-year-old daughter sleeps in another room. First she calls Miriam Hospital, just down the street, then Rhode Island Hospital, on the other side of the city, and then Memorial Hospital, in Pawtucket, a few hundred yards from McCoy. Three times, then, she braces to hear affirmative answers to the anxious question she asks: Have you had any accidents involving a man and a boy named Card? Ronald and Daniel Card?
Three times the answer is no, thankfully, though the central question—Where are they?—remains unsettled. This wife, this mother, has no choice but to sit in the living room, with the television on. Waiting.
A hack’s poem to the 27th inning:
Top.
Strikeout, swinging. Single to right.
Grounder, out. Walk, intentional.
Strikeout, swinging.
Bottom.
Grounder, out. Grounder, out.
Strikeout, swinging.
Scandura of the Times takes note:
Fiftieth strikeout of the game.
Twenty-eighth inning.
Top.
“And believe me, folks, it is real cold here in Pawtucket,” Bob Drew tells Rochester. “Pete and I have been standing up since about, I’d say, around the fifteenth inning, just trying to keep warm…. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven—there are twenty-eight fans left in McCoy Stadium, Pete.”
“Twenty-eight loyal fans, Bob,” Torrez says in agreement.
“We started out with seventeen hundred; we’re down to twenty-eight,” Drew says, before issuing a mock request of fans in Pawtucket, who cannot hear him. “Would you people down there give us a—let us know when you’re leaving so we can keep track.”
Pawtucket Red Sox officials have tried to shepherd the remaining stragglers into one section, thinking that this might create some collective body warmth. But Gary Levin, who left his family’s Seder last night to see this ball game, is too busy at the moment, wandering the empty stands, searching for discarded tickets. With a nineteen-year-old’s missionary zeal, he has been digging through garbage cans, hunting under seats, asking the girlfriends and wives of ballplayers for their tickets. His own date, Lisa, got a ride home several hours ago. She will eventually marry someone else and move to the Midwest. Gary, who will remain single, will at least have these fourteen ticket stubs to remember the night. He will donate five stubs to be auctioned off for the Jimmy Fund charity, and store the nine other stubs in a vault at his father’s jewelry-plating business on Mineral Spring Avenue. Over the years he will give most, but not all, of the stubs away, one by one, to people who would understand the worth of the relic.
Another fan, Bob Brex, has respectfully waved off the invitations to sit with the others, though not because he is trying to be aloof, or antisocial. He simply prefers to experience the ball game in meditative solitude, sitting in his lonely wooden perch in the lower grandstand along right field—though when the wind stiffens, and his warm-up jacket fails to live up to its name, he takes shelter at the entrance between the grandstand and the box seats, beside the stadium’s ancient concrete.
Brex is twenty-nine, a state government employee, unattached, overweight but shedding some of it, and expected at his grandmother’s house in a few hours to help pound those veal cutlets for the family’s Easter dinner. If there is church in his life, it is here, and now. He considers himself a longtime congregant of McCoy Stadium. He remembers the early days, the days under Joe Buzas and Phil Anez, when silly gimmicks overshadowed the game in the same way that a theatrical organist can detract from a Sunday service. Now, under Ben Mondor, the ballpark experience centers on the game and on community, however you define it.
At one point, Brex retrieves a foul ball that clatters in the gape of empty seats several rows behind him, the first he has ever snagged at a baseball game: a trophy. But racing over from the third-base side comes a boy, maybe ten years old and a few seconds late in the pursuit of the same foul ball. He looks at Brex with an expression that blends sleep deprivation with a baseball yearning, and what can the man do but surrender the ball to the boy. Then a young woman, either the girlfriend or wife of one of the Rochester players, notices Brex sitting alone, and walks over to hand him a cup of hot coffee. Two quiet, unifying gestures. Community.
A little while later, a Rochester player steps out of the Rochester dugout, sees that the woman is still here in the desolate stadium, and calls up to her: Are you crazy? And Brex wonders whether the question might as well be directed at him. Is he crazy for still being here? Why is he still here? Part of the answer reaches back to his childhood, when he and his father left a game at Fenway with Boston several runs behind, in what seemed certain to be a losing cause. But the Red Sox stormed back and won the game, after which Brex vowed to see future games to the end—not knowing, of course, that one day he would bear witness to a game without end. Mostly, though, he stays because he is mesmerized by the ball-and-strike rhythms, finding in its almost purposeful avoidance of conclusion an indefinable beauty. This singular feeling, of having entered into a soothing otherness, will stay with him forever, as he moves from Rhode Island to Connecticut, as he becomes the executive director of the Northeast Communities Against Substance Abuse, as his hairline recedes and his waistline shrinks, as his grandmother passes on. What he will also remember of this night is a quality not usually associated with a professional baseball game: the stillness.
Depending on how it is measured, the time is now either the top of the 28th inning or close to three in the morning. Bruce Hurst, a tall, well-built lefty, with dark eyebrows that emphasize the intensity in his eyes, enters the game as Pawtucket’s seventh pitcher of the night. H
is teammates are probably chuckling that this is the latest Bruce has ever been up in his life. Hah-hah. Typical Mormon. Hah-hah.
One day, Bruce Hurst will rank among the toughest, most competitive pitchers ever to wear a Red Sox uniform. Fans will remember an almost unnerving game-day resolve, a locked-in steeliness that seemed all the more daunting because the rest of the time he came off as the affable Ward Cleaver of the clubhouse. Combining intelligence with great control and a mastery of several pitches, he often won games when his team most needed them. Revisit the statistics for the 1986 World Series, for instance, when the Red Sox came within one strike of winning their first championship since World War I, only to lose to the New York Mets. Before Mookie Wilson’s elusive ground ball passed through the croquet-wicket legs of Boston first baseman Bill Buckner in the 10th inning of the sixth game, ensuring a doomed seventh, it was Bruce Hurst—not Roger Clemens, or Wade Boggs, or Dwight Evans, but Bruce Hurst—who was about to be named the most valuable player of the series. He won Game One, 1–0, giving up only four hits over 8 innings, then completed Game Five, to win 4–2. It was not until the 6th inning of Game Seven, after he had pitched 5 shutout innings, that Hurst proved to be mortal, giving up three runs in a Red Sox loss that brought winter early to New England. Still, if any Red Sox pride is to be found in the disastrous 1986 World Series, it is in the performance of Bruce Hurst. Tough; very, very tough. As the baddest of the Mets’ bad boys, Darryl Strawberry, will put it: “Clemens is tough, but he’s no Hurst.”
All of this is five years in the future, and far, far from Pawtucket. That ground ball hit by Wilson; that error made by Buckner; that series-ending, knife-in-the-heart moment when Jesse Orosco launches his glove high into the New York night after striking out Marty Barrett. Marty is here now, harvesting and tossing away the infield pebbles that might lead to bad hops around second base. And Wade Boggs, who will weep in the Boston dugout after that World Series, is here, muttering curfew, curfew, isn’t there any such thing as a curfew. And Rich Gedman, who will be unable to block an errant Bob Stanley pitch in the 10th inning of that fateful Game Six, allowing the Mets to tie the game, is in the bullpen, having left the game hours ago. And Bobby Ojeda, Hurst’s brother in the slightly odd fraternity of left-handers, somehow convinced Joe Morgan to let him go home a few innings ago. Ojeda will also appear in the 1986 World Series, but for the New York Mets. In the moments leading up to the climactic seventh game of the World Series games, the two former teammates will spot each other, one in a Red Sox uniform, one in a Mets uniform, and their eyes will lock in wordless communication, conveying so much, including: Pawtucket.
Of all the Shea Stadium revelry that followed the last out of the World Series, Ojeda will remember one moment above the rest. He sees them now, two Red Sox players making their way through the champagne-soaked chaos of the Mets jubilant clubhouse, through a party at their expense. Boston’s starting battery for Game Seven: Bruce Hurst and Rich Gedman, his Pawtucket brothers, coming to hug him and offer their heartfelt, heartbroken congratulations.
“I won’t ever, ever forget it,” Ojeda will say.
Tonight, though, the chance that Bruce Hurst might one day pitch in a World Series, much less dominate a World Series, seems as remote as Bruce Hurst one day walking on the fat moon above. It was only last year, while he was briefly up with Boston, that manager Don Zimmer dressed him down on the mound at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore for not being in the right place during a costly rundown. Zimmer yelled, Hurst said something juvenile in response, and Zimmer, a horse-betting, tobacco-chewing cuss who was not known for nurturing rookies, called for a relief pitcher—but not before screaming at Hurst to grow up or go home. This is fucking baseball.
Hurst, who had cried and nearly quit after Zimmer’s humiliating reproach, understood the game. It was all the auxiliary stuff—the swearing in the locker room, the ribaldry on the bus—that sometimes disoriented him. He was raised by his Mormon mother in the small, lily-white Utah town of St. George. A goofy kid who threw a baseball well enough to be Boston’s first-round draft pick in 1976, he was just a wholesome American boy, really, ready to play the wholesome national pastime. But when Hurst arrived for rookie-league ball in Elmira, wearing a suit and a tie with a pattern of tiny baseball pitchers, it was as though Andy Hardy had wandered into a production of Hair. He was taken aback by all the cursing and drinking and boasting of sexual conquests; taken aback, then, by aspects of professional baseball as elemental to the culture as pine tar and sunflower seeds. And in the clubhouse culture, if you let on that you are offended by something—if you let on that you even care about something—you set yourself up for endless abuse. Hurst let on.
Night after night, after every game, his chops-busting teammates—not above shoving porn or six-packs of beer into his locker—would go out to the bars to drink and carouse, and Hurst would go back to his room to telephone Utah. When Elmira won the league title, teammates showered him with champagne and beer, daring him to allow the liquor to pass his lips. Even in team victory, he was made to feel apart.
After Elmira came Winter Haven, then Bristol, then Pawtucket, where he quickly made an impression on Ben Mondor by becoming the first ballplayer ever to ask for two apartments: one for him and one for his girlfriend, for they were not yet married. Hurst often returns from road trips and talks to the worldly Mondor about the museums he visited while most of his teammates were sleeping off the previous night’s antics. He has also endeared himself to Hood and Billy Broadbent, taking them out for hamburgers and ice cream, treating them with the affection and concern of an older brother. Here is a man who has the willpower not to succumb to the seductive clubhouse culture; who sets himself apart by knowing what he does not want to do with his nights and his life.
But this isn’t to say that Hurst necessarily knows what he does want in life; his consuming self-doubt is well known in the Red Sox organization. More than once, Mondor and Mike Tamburro have had to convince the left-hander to take a deep breath and stick it out, because he has the talent. And Lou Schwechheimer will never forget the sight of Bob Ojeda storming into Mondor’s office, screaming that Hurstie, his good friend, rival, and fellow lefty, was quitting again, and someone has to stop him, because, goddamn, he can play.
Just three weeks ago, in fact, Hurst quit—again. After making it late into spring training with the Boston Red Sox, he was cut from the major-league roster and sent back to Triple-A. He returned to his apartment, wept, and decided to retire, even though he was only twenty-three. These were the “darkest days of my life,” he would later say, days that he managed to work through by focusing on the long term, the still possible. He soon changed his mind and joined his Triple-A teammates, resolved to try—again.
This is not to say that Hurst’s doubts have entirely lifted. Later this season he will quit once more, for three days, only to return after receiving a pep talk from a high-ranking elder in the Mormon Church. Though much has been made, and will continue to be made, of the cultural obstacles Hurst navigates as a devout Mormon—the “easy story,” he will later say—most of his doubt is actually rooted in the universal questions now plaguing him.
“Am I chasing a pipe dream? Am I just a Triple-A player?”
But Pawtucket’s beloved pitching coach, Mike Roarke, the pride of West Warwick, Rhode Island, will help to ease Hurst’s worries. A longtime friend of Joe Morgan’s—they were at Boston College together— Roarke played for four years as a catcher for the Detroit Tigers, then applied what he had learned behind the plate to become a revered pitching coach, known for his keen eye for mechanics and his dry, tension-puncturing humor. (In his 2006 induction speech at the Hall of Fame, former pitcher Bruce Sutter will single out Roarke for special praise and thanks.) Roarke will tell Hurst that the Triple-A is the “frustration league,” where you can waste too much energy muttering to yourself, Why not me? Forget it, he tells Hurst. Put it out of your mind. Now listen: You need to keep your posture throughout your delivery….
The night wind is at his back. He is locked in.
But his Rochester opponent, Jim Umbarger, is benefiting from the same wind, and from the same sting felt in the chilled hands of batters anytime they make contact. He is also pumped up, perhaps too pumped up, gulping down vitamins and coffee between innings, soaking his hands in warm water, working his way through a tin of chewing tobacco. At one point Umbarger tells his third baseman, Cal Ripken, to watch for the bunt. Ripken, who does not take kindly to being told how to do his job by a pitcher, wearily replies that he’s been watching for the bunt for 23 innings now.
You see, this is Umbarger’s night, his chance; he feels it. What a turnaround from just the other day, when only the assurances of his fiancée and his agent—People will be watching!—kept him from calling it quits, after he didn’t make the Baltimore team, and was then told he wouldn’t even be a starter in Rochester. People will be watching. Someone will be watching. This Easter morning at McCoy, though, only two dozen people in the stands are watching, and not one is a scout bearing witness to perhaps the best performance of his career. No one will call Baltimore in the morning and say, Umbarger’s ready to come back.
Jim Umbarger will not come back. He will play out his string in Rochester, never realizing his dream of joining the talent-packed Baltimore bullpen of Tippy Martinez and Sammy Stewart. In a couple of years, at thirty, he will retire after playing for teams from upstate New York to Hawaii, giving it his last best shot. Years from now, he will become a professional golf instructor, with a specialty in putting and a distinguishing back story that includes the four years he spent in the major leagues and the night he pitched in this long, long game, still unfolding.