The Cincinnati Red Stalkings

by Troy Soos

  Chapter Eleven

  We never did get the game in on Thursday, and continuing rains wiped out Friday’s as well. On Saturday, we had to pay for the respite, plus interest. The heat was back, more searing than it had been all summer, and we had to face the first-place Pirates in a doubleheader to make up one of the washed-out games.

  I played every inning of both contests, substituting for the injured Larry Kopf. I got his spot in the batting order, at least; his shortstop position was taken by Curt Stram, who shifted over from second base, and I took Stram’s place at second. The rookie crowed about getting the glamour position, telling me that my arms and legs were too old to cover the ground at short. I pointed out to him that I had a fist exactly the same age as my limbs, and it was quite capable of knocking out his front teeth.

  By the end of the opener, a pitching showpiece with Eppa Rixey outdueling Wilbur Cooper 1–0, Stram was no longer gloating. Pittsburgh’s batters had kept him moving, driving ground balls to his left and right. He booted two of them, but neither of the errors caused any damage. My running was done on the basepaths, with three singles in four at bats, plus two stolen bases.

  Neither team was in condition to play another game; we were all sapped by the heat, even those who remained on the bench. It was as if the steamy air was leaching energy out of our pores. So, sure enough, we all had to do more running in the second game as both pitchers kept giving up bunches of base hits. Hod Eller, who’d been denied his shine ball when baseball tried to clean up the game last year by banning such pitches, was making his second start of the season for us. No longer permitted to apply talcum powder to the ball, though, he couldn’t get the Pirates batters out; he was tagged for six runs in the first four innings and was relieved by Rube Marquard, who didn’t fare much better. Still, we kept the game close by teeing off on the deliveries of Pittsburgh’s Jimmy Zinn. I contributed three more hits to the barrage, capped by a triple that seemed the longest run of my life. We fell short at the end, the Pirates taking a 9–7 win and a split of the twin bill.

  In the locker room afterward, we were finally able to collapse. The clubhouse was almost completely silent; now and then one of the players would curse the heat, guzzle a bottle of soda pop, or peel off a wet uniform, but hardly any of us had the strength left to walk all the way to the showers. I was the first to make the trek, buoyed by my performance on the field. I’d gone 6-for-9 on the day, with no misplays, while Curt Stram went hitless and committed four errors.

  After dressing, I shifted my attention from running after baseballs on Redland Field to chasing ghosts from the Union Grounds. I’d had another idea of where I might find information on Dick Hurley.

  Inside Redland’s main entrance was the concession area, where construction was under way to remodel a section of it for the exhibit room. Lloyd Tinsley and another man in a business suit were there. The lanky fellow, who looked familiar, stood aside quietly while Tinsley barked orders at several workers in overalls who were tearing out one of the counters.

  The Reds’ business manager turned from the construction workers to me. “Ah, Rawlings. Let me introduce you.” He gestured at the other man. “This is Nathaniel Bonner of the Queen City Lumber Company.”

  I shook hands with Bonner. “Yes, I remember seeing you at the memorial for Ollie Perriman. How did you ever make a bat that big?”

  Bonner was slightly bent at the waist, as if accustomed to having to lean down to talk with people not as tall as he. “Special equipment and skilled craftsmen,” he said proudly.

  “No job too big or too unusual for us to handle.” His hair was inky black, maybe dyed, and his cheeks hollow. He looked a little like a young, beardless Abraham Lincoln. And, like Lincoln’s, Bonner’s appearance would have benefited greatly from some facial hair.

  “Rawlings is going to be at the grand opening,” Tinsley said to Bonner. I was happy to hear that; according to the papers—which were giving the exhibit more and more publicity—Edd Roush and Heinie Groh had agreed to attend, so I thought I might no longer be wanted.

  To me, Tinsley said, “We were just going over how to display that bat. It would look most impressive standing up, but the ceiling’s too low.”

  “My preference,” said Bonner, “is to put it on a couple of sawhorses right in the middle of the corridor here. People can walk around it up close; even touch it if they want.”

  Make it easier to read Queen City Lumber Company on its side, too, I thought.

  “Well, I suppose you’re right,” Tinsley said. “But if it’s out in the open, they won’t have to pay to come into the exhibit room to see it.”

  “It might get them interested in seeing the rest of the stuff,” I said. “You know, like a free sample.”

  “Well, there’s no alternative anyway,” Tinsley decided. “If it won’t fit inside, it will have to be out here.”

  With that issue settled, Bonner and Tinsley briefly discussed the arrangements for moving and mounting the bat, then Bonner left for his lumberyard.

  Alone with Tinsley, I said, “I came by to ask if I could take a look at the collection again.”

  He hesitated. “I suppose that’d be okay. I’ll have to let you in, though—we keep the office locked now.” After giving the workers a few more instructions, Tinsley started toward the stairwell and I followed.

  As we walked upstairs, I asked, “Still no date for the opening?”

  “No. We’re going to wait until after the trial; wouldn’t want the opening to be overshadowed by what’s going on in Chicago. And that’ll give us time to finish building the exhibit room, and try to arrange for George Wright and Cal McVey to come to the opening—they both came for the 1919 World Series. Don’t know if they’ll be up to making the trip again, though.”

  The way the trial was proceeding, Tinsley would have all the time he needed to try to persuade them. In the last three days, only one more juror had been seated.

  We’d reached the second floor and started down the hallway. “Mr. Bonner’s going to use the time to have some more bats made up,” Tinsley went on. “His company’s giving free bats to the first thousand kids who come to the exhibit.”

  “Bet they all have ‘Queen City Lumber’ printed on them,” I said.

  “Something wrong with that?”

  “I don’t think Ollie Perriman would have liked it. He was putting together a shirne—something about memories and history.” I shrugged. “Now it’s business—charging admission to the exhibit, advertising a lumber company ...” What’s next, I thought, having ballplayers sell autographs? “The bats will probably be made from scrap, and break the first time a kid tries to hit a ball with them.”

  Tinsley stopped and gave me a hard look. “Come into my office for a minute.” He led me into a room a few doors from Perriman’s. It was smaller than I would have expected, and plainly furnished.

  He sat down behind a desk covered with stacks of paperwork, and pointed me into one of the room’s other two chairs. “You don’t like baseball being ‘tainted’ by financial interests, I take it.”

  “No, I don’t. It’s the game that matters. Seems whenever it’s treated like a business, things get messed up.”

  “Does your salary mess things up?”

  “Well, no, fans buy tickets to watch me—the team—play. So that’s a fair deal.”

  Tinsley slapped his palm on a stack of papers. “I am tired to death of ballplayers who complain about the game becoming a business at the same time they’re drawing salaries bigger than almost anyone else can ever earn.” His mouth was partly agape, and those big teeth of his exposed; for an instant, I had the bizarre fear that he might bite me.

  To my relief, he took a deep breath, then patted the papers and eased back in his chair. “Don’t mean you in particular. Edd Roush holds out every spring and refuses to play in exhibition games. Then there was Heinie Groh demanding to be traded to New York. Must be nice to pick when and where you’re going to play while somebody else has to make
sure there’s money to pay you, and feed you, and put you up in decent hotels, and arrange for Pullmans. Well, I’m the one who takes care of those things.”

  “I don’t mean—”

  He waved off my interruption. “Let me tell you something. I get the same salary if there’s 5,000 people in the stands or 20,000. I try to make sure we draw good crowds because it’s my job. If I could have been a player, I would have; but I got a head for business not baseball, so I do what I can as well as I can. Same with the vendors who sell the hot dogs and the clerks who sell the tickets. You think there’s one of them who wouldn’t rather be in your shoes, out on the field? But they can’t. So we all do our part; there’s more to a ball club than the nine men on the field.”

  “I never thought about—”

  “Same with this exhibit,” Tinsley cut me off. “If it draws people into the park, the gate receipts go up and the club benefits.”

  “Don’t you get a share of the admission to the exhibit?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  That didn’t seem proper, somehow, but I couldn’t think of anything specifically wrong with it.

  “Mr. Herrmann knows about the arrangement, and he’s given his approval,” Tinsley said. “It’s not unusual, you know. On some clubs, a coach’s wife might be paid to do the team’s laundry. In Chicago, William Wrigley sells his gum at the ballpark.” He stood up. “Well, like I said, I guess this has been bothering me for a while. Sorry you had to be the one to bear the brunt of it.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Maybe I needed to hear it.”

  When Tinsley unlocked the door to Perriman’s office, he added, “As for the exhibit, I put my own money into helping Ollie buy some of the items he wanted. And I’ll be paying expenses if McVey or Wright come, as well as advertising and the construction downstairs. If the admissions are enough to cover those expenses and earn me a little extra, I won’t apologize for that.”

  “No reason you should,” I said. It was foolish of me to insist on the game being kept “pure” because it never had been. Not on the professional level, anyway. As Ambrose Whitaker had told me, there had been a lot of people working hard to make the Red Stockings financially viable, even though the players were the only ones being paid.

  Once inside, Tinsley asked, “You looking for anything in particular?”

  “No, just thought I’d poke around,” I lied.

  He left me alone, and I went directly to the desk. Perriman had mentioned having the Red Stockings score books. In the top drawer, I found them: two books, one dated 1869 and the other 1870.

  I sat down and started leafing through the pages, beginning with the first entry for 1869. The names of the players were written in elegant script. They were almost the only thing I could understand, because the scoring system wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. There were records of “muffed balls,” “foul bounds caught,” and “bases on slow handling.”

  But it was the players’ names I was interested in anyway. After July 2, the name “Hurley” didn’t appear in another lineup. I even went through the 1870 book to make sure he hadn’t returned to the team that season, and found no mention of him.

  The last couple of pages in the 1870 book contained detailed entries of attendance, gate receipts, and expenses. Lloyd Tinsley was right, I thought. As long as there’d been professional baseball, business considerations had been part of the “game.”

  Finally, I looked again at the July 1869 entries. Dick Hurley had played with the “picked nine” at the homecoming game on July 1. And he disappeared from the record book the very day that Sarah was supposedly murdered.

  It was Margie’s suggestion to have dinner here, and like so many of her ideas it was a good one. The Zoo Clubhouse had a fine restaurant that served full-course turkey, steak, or lake trout dinners for $1.75. The location was convenient—I’d simply taken the trolley to meet her after her final show—and the view from our balcony table overlooking the gardens was splendid.

  As we started on the iced consommé, I told Margie all about the doubleheader. One of the few things I regretted about her working now was that she couldn’t see me play at the ballpark. But I recounted every one of my at-bats and most of the fielding plays in enough detail so that she didn’t miss much.

  Soon after the main dishes arrived—Margie having ordered the trout while I opted for the turkey—the atmosphere changed, and not for the better. The nightly opera performance began at the nearby band shell. The orchestra wasn’t bad, but the squalling of the vocalists was an awful thing to hear. Zoo animals joined in, adding a chorus of howls and grunts to the din, but unfortunately they weren’t loud enough to drown out the singers.

  The tone of our conversation changed, too. “I have a bad feeling about the Carnivora House,” Margie said.

  “You don’t like the job?”

  She jabbed her fork into the fish. “The job is fine. I love performing again, and talking with the children. It’s the cats. I don’t think they’re as healthy as they should be.”

  “What’s wrong with them?” I didn’t like the idea of her working with lions or tigers that might be sick or injured; that’s when those animals could be most dangerous.

  “They’re too skinny. I don’t think they’re eating right.”

  “Did you tell the keeper?”

  “I sure did, and that was a big mistake.” She rolled her eyes. “He told me that just because I was capable of standing next to an animal and looking pretty didn’t mean I knew anything about them.”

  “How hard did you slap him?”

  She let out a small giggle. “Wish I’d thought of that.”

  I could see that she was imagining taking a swing at the man, and she looked to be feeling better just at the notion of it.

  “Or you could feed him to the lions,” I said. “That should help fatten them up.”

  Margie’s eyes showed that she liked that suggestion even better.

  We finished eating quickly, then headed downtown to dance to jazz and try to get the opera out of our ears.

  Chapter Twelve

  Almost two hours before game time, I hopped off the Liberty Street trolley and walked the three blocks up Dalton. Redland Field came into view directly ahead, and it struck me how well the park fit into the working-class neighborhood. Its plain redbrick walls matched those of the Findlay Street row houses and the factories on Western Avenue.

  I was coming to realize that a ball club is part of a community; their fortunes are intertwined. I used to think it was simple: fans who supported the team bought tickets and those gate receipts paid the players’ salaries. But there’s more to a professional baseball franchise than what transpires between the foul lines. It was apparent here: the newsboys hawking papers to early; arrivals, the vendors setting up peanut and lemonade carts, the trolley conductors—they all depended on the games for their own livelihoods. We were in business together.

  Automobiles darted around the trolleys and pedestrians, heading for the tiny parking lot next to the railroad tracks west of the park. Anyone arriving by car had to come early to get parking. When Herrmann built the park in 1912, he’d neglected to take into account that more people would soon be driving automobiles. Some enterprising residents near the field rented their front yards and driveways for parking—another venture benefiting from the games.

  At the corner of Dalton and Findlay, some fans turned east to buy bleacher tickets at the Western Avenue office. Most of the others turned left toward the main ticket office, which was the direction I also went.

  The administrative wing of the ballpark, on the southwest corner, housed the offices, ticket windows, and clubhouse. This was of a more elegant construction, with white-stone inlays among the bricks, arches over the second- and third-floor windows, and ticket windows that looked like castle turrets.

  I was half a block from the entrance when a bareheaded man in a pumpkin-colored suit stepped toward me. “Rawlings! Mickey Rawlings!” He was of medi
um build and average appearance in every respect but his ears: one lay flush with his head, while the other stuck out at a right angle, giving him the look of an inquisitive terrier.

  I stopped. “Yes?”

  He offered his hand. “Helluva game you played yesterday!”

  “Thanks,” I said, returning his grip. There was always close contact between fans and players in Cincinnati; we even had to go through the concession area filled with fans to get from the clubhouse to the field. But most of them didn’t stop me; they went for Roush or Groh or Rixey. This was new—and flattering.

  He continued pumping my arm. “You gonna be in the lineup today?”

  “Sure am.” I hoped.

  “Well, you go get ’em.” He finally broke off the grip. “Say, can I bother you for an autograph? For my kid. He’d sure be thrilled.”

  “Be happy to. Is he here?”

  “No, home with the measles.” He dug into his coat pockets. “Damn. Nothing to write on.” Then he pulled a plain brown envelope from an inside pocket. “This’ll have to do I guess.” He handed it to me along with a pencil stub. “Could you sign this?”

  I signed the blank envelope and gave it back.

  “Thanks!”

  “My pleasure.”

  He shook my hand once more, then again wished me a good game.

  As I suited up for the game, I was thinking that Cincinnati would be a nice place to live and hoping that I’d get to stay here for a while. I’d always moved around so much that I never got to feel part of a community. But the notion of settling down was becoming more and more appealing to me. Maybe I’d even make things a little more formal with Margie.

  On the other hand, I could see one big plus to being on a different team: I’d get the chance to play against Curt Stram. His youthful pride had been wounded yesterday by the difference in our game performances, and he was now trying to salvage some of it. Throughout the pregame pepper, he kept riding me, pointing out that I was dependent on the starters getting hurt in order to have a shot at making the lineup. I didn’t let him get to me, though, and didn’t bother responding. For one thing, the odds were that someday we’d be playing on opposing teams; at some point he’d have to face me as I came sliding into second base—and he was going to lose that showdown. The other reason I let him chatter on was because what he said was true.