The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Perfect, but who would get in touch with Mr. Wood and persuade him to come out to Yale Field with me for the game? Why, Dick Lee would—Dick Lee, of course. Richard C. Lee (he was the smiling man sitting just beyond Smokey Joe in our row) is a former Democratic mayor of New Haven, an extremely popular (eight consecutive terms, sixteen years in office), innovative officeholder who, among other things, presided over the widely admired urban renewal of his city during the 1960s and, before that, thought up and pushed through the first Operation Head Start program (for minority-group preschoolers) in the country. Dick Lee knows everybody in New Haven, including Smokey Joe Wood and several friends of mine there, one of whom provided me with his telephone number. I called Lee at his office (he is assistant to the chairman of the Union Trust Company, in New Haven) and proposed our party. “Wonderful!” he cried at once. “You have come to the right man. I’ll bring Joe. Count on me!” Even over the telephone, I could see him smiling.

  Dick Lee did not play baseball for Yale, but the nature of his partisanship became clear in the very early moments of the Yale–St. John’s game. “Yay!” he shouted in a stentorian baritone as Ron Darling set down three St. John’s batters in order in the first. “Yay, Ron baby!” he boomed out as Darling dismissed three more batters in the second, fanning the last two. “Now c’mon, Yale! Let’s get something started, gang! Yay!” Lee had told me that he pitched for some lesser-known New Haven teams—the Dixwell Community House sandlot team and the Jewish Home for Children nine (the Utopians), among others—while he was growing up in the ivyless New Hallville neighborhood. Some years later, having passed up college altogether, he went to work for Yale as its public-relations officer. By the time he became mayor, in 1953, the university was his own—another precinct to be worried about and looked after. A born politician, he appears to draw on some inner deepwater reservoir of concern that enables him to preside effortlessly and affectionately over each encounter of his day; he was the host at our game, and at intervals he primed Joe Wood with questions about his baseball past, which he seemed to know almost by heart.

  “Yes, that’s right, I did play for the Bloomer Girls a few games,” Mr. Wood said in response to one such cue. “I was about sixteen, and I was pitching for our town team in Ness City, Kansas. The Bloomer Girls were a barnstorming team, but they used to pick up a few young local fellows on the sly to play along with them if they needed to fill out their lineup. I was one of those. I never wore a wig, though—I wouldn’t have done that. I guess I looked young enough to pass for a girl anyway. Bill Stern, the old radio broadcaster, must have used that story about forty times, but he always got it wrong about the wig.”

  There was a yell around us, and an instantly ensuing groan, as Yale’s big freshman catcher, Tony Paterno, leading off the bottom of the second, lined sharply to the St. John’s shortstop, who made a fine play on the ball. Joe Wood peered intently out at the field through his thickish horn-rimmed spectacles. He shook his head a little. “You know, I can’t hardly follow the damned ball now,” he said. “It’s better for me if I’m someplace where I can get up high behind the plate. I was up to Fenway Park for two games last year, and they let me sit in the press box there at that beautiful park. I could see it all from there. The groundskeeper has got that field just like a living room.”

  I asked him if he still rooted for the Red Sox.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “All my life. A couple of years ago, when they had that big lead in the middle of the summer, they asked me if I’d come up and throw out the first ball at one of their World Series games or playoff games. But then they dropped out of it, of course. Now it looks like it’ll never happen.”

  He spoke in a quiet, almost measured tone, but there was no tinge of disappointment or self-pity in it. It was the voice of age. He was wearing a blue Windbreaker over a buttoned-up plaid shirt, made formal with a small dark red bow tie. There was a brown straw hat on his bald head. The years had imparted a delicate thinness to the skin on his cheeks and neck, but his face had a determined look to it, with a strong chin and a broad, unsmiling mouth. Watching him, I recalled one of the pictures in The Glory of Their Times—a team photograph taken in 1906, in which he is sitting cross-legged down in front of a row of men in baggy baseball pants and lace-up, collared baseball shirts with NESS CITY across the front in block letters. The men are standing in attitudes of cheerful assurance, with their arms folded, and their mushy little baseball gloves are hanging from their belts. Joe Wood, the smallest player in the picture, is wearing a dark warmup shirt, with the sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, and his striped baseball cap is pushed back a little, revealing a part in the middle of his hair. There is an intent, unsmiling look on his boyish face—the same grave demeanor you can spot in a subsequent photograph, taken in 1912, in which he is standing beside his Red Sox manager, Jake Stahl, and wearing a heavy woollen three-button suit, a stiff collar, a narrow necktie with a stickpin, and a stylish black porkpie hat pulled low over his handsome, famous face: Smokey Joe Wood at twenty-two. (The moniker, by the way, was given him by Paul Shannon, a sportswriter for The Boston Post; before that, he was sometimes called Ozone Wood—“ozone” for the air cleaved by the hapless batters who faced him.) The young man in the photographs and the old man beside me at the ballpark had the same broad, sloping shoulders, but there was nothing burly or physically imposing about him then or now.

  “What kind of a pitcher were you, Mr. Wood?” I asked him.

  “I had a curve and a fastball,” he said. “That’s all. I didn’t even have brains enough to slow up on the batters. The fastball had a hop on it. You had to be fast to have that happen to the ball.”

  I said that I vividly recalled Sandy Koufax’s fastball, which sometimes seemed to jump so violently as it crossed the plate that his catcher had to shoot up his mitt to intercept it.

  “Mine didn’t go up that far. Just enough for them to miss it.” He half turned to me as he said this, and gave me a little glance and an infinitesimal smile. A twinkle. “I don’t know where my speed came from,” he went on. “I wasn’t any bigger or stronger-looking then than I am now. I always could throw hard, and once I saw I was able to get batters out, I figured I was crazy enough to play ball for a living. My father was a criminal lawyer in Kansas, and before that out in Ouray, Colorado, where I first played ball, and my brother went to law school and got a degree, but I didn’t even graduate from high school. I ate and slept baseball all my life.”

  The flow of recollection from Joe Wood was perhaps not as smooth and rivery as I have suggested here. For one thing, he spoke slowly and with care—not unlike the way he walked to the grandstand at Yale Field from the parking lot beyond left field, making his way along the grass firmly enough but looking where he was going, too, and helping himself a bit with his cane. Nothing infirm about him, but nothing hurrying or sprightly, either. For another, the game was well in progress by now, and its principals and sudden events kept interrupting our colloquy. Ron Darling, a poised, impressive figure on the mound, alternated his popping fastballs with just enough down-breaking sliders and an occasional curveball to keep the St. John’s batters unhappy. Everything was thrown with heat—his strikeout pitch is a Seaver-high fastball—but without any signs of strain or anxiety. He threw over the top, smoothly driving his front (left) shoulder at the batter in picture-book style, and by the third or fourth inning he had imposed his will and his pace on the game. He was rolling. He is a dark-haired, olive-skinned young man (he lives in Millbury, Massachusetts, near Worcester, but he was born in Hawaii; his mother is Chinese Hawaiian by birth) with long, powerful legs, but his pitcherlike proportions tend to conceal, rather than emphasize, his six feet two inches and his 195 pounds. He also swings the bat well enough (.331 this year) to play right field for Yale when he isn’t pitching; in our game he was the designated hitter as well as the pitcher for the Elis.

  “That’s a nice build for a pitcher, isn’t it?” Joe Wood murmured during the St. John’s fifth. Al
most as he spoke, Darling executed a twisting dive to his right to snaffle a hard-hit grounder up the middle by Brian Miller, the St. John’s shortstop, and threw him out at first. (“Hey-hey!” Dick Lee cried. “Yay, Ronnie!”) “And he’s an athlete out there,” Wood added. “The scouts like that, you know. Oh, this fellow’s a lot better than Broaca ever was.”

  Frank Viola, for his part, was as imperturbable as Darling on the mound, if not quite as awesome. A lanky, sharp-shouldered lefty, he threw an assortment of speeds and spins, mostly sinkers and down-darting sliders, that had the Yale batters swinging from their shoe tops and, for the most part, hammering the ball into the dirt. He had the stuff and poise of a veteran relief pitcher, and the St. John’s infield—especially Brian Miller and a stubby, ebullient second baseman named Steve Scafa—performed behind him with the swift, almost haughty confidence that imparts an elegance and calm and sense of ease to baseball at its best. It was a scoreless game after five, and a beauty.

  “What was the score of that game you beat Walter Johnson in, in your big year?” Dick Lee asked our guest between innings.

  We all knew the answer, I think. In September 1912, Walter Johnson came to Fenway Park (it was brand-new that year) with the Senators and pitched against young Joe Wood, who then had a string of thirteen consecutive victories to his credit. That summer, Johnson had established a league record of sixteen straight wins, so the matchup was not merely an overflow, sellout affair but perhaps the most anticipated, most discussed non-championship game in the American League up to that time.

  “We won it, 1–0,” Joe Wood said quietly, “but it wasn’t his fault I beat him that day. If he’d had the team behind him that I did, he’d have set every kind of record in baseball. You have to remember that Walter Johnson played for a second-division team almost all through his career. All those years, and he had to work from the bottom every time he pitched.”

  “Were you faster than he was?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t think there was ever anybody faster than Walter,” he murmured.

  “But Johnson said just the opposite!” Dick Lee cried. “He said no one was faster than you.”

  “He was just that kind of fellow, to say something like that,” Wood said. “That was just like the man. Walter Johnson was a great big sort of a pitcher, with hands that came clear down to his knees. Why, the way he threw the ball, the only reason anybody ever got even a foul off him was because everybody in the league knew he’d never come inside to a batter. Walter Johnson was a prince of men—a gentleman first, last, and always.”

  It came to me that this was the first time I had ever heard anybody use the phrase “a prince of men” in a nonsatiric fashion. In any case, the Johnson-Wood argument did not really need settling, then or now. Smokey Joe went on to tie Johnson with sixteen straight victories that season—an American League record, subsequently tied by Lefty Grove and Schoolboy Rowe. (Over in the National League that year, Rube Marquard won nineteen straight for the Giants—a single-season mark first set by Tim Keefe of the Giants in 1888 and untouched as yet by anyone else.) Johnson and Wood pretty well divided up the AL mound honors that summer, when Johnson won thirty-two games and lost twelve, posting the best earned-run average (1.39) and the most strikeouts (303), while Wood won the most games and established the best winning percentage with his 34-5 mark (not including his three World Series wins, of course).

  These last figures are firmly emplaced in the baseball crannies of my mind, and in the minds of most students of the game, because, it turned out, they represent the autumn of Joe Wood’s pitching career as well as its first full flowering. Early in the spring of 1913, he was injured in a fielding play, and he was never near to being the same pitcher again. One of the game’s sad speculations over the years has been what Joe Wood’s status in the pantheon of great pitchers would be if he had remained sound. I did not need any reminder of his accident, but I had been given one just the same when Dick Lee introduced me to him, shortly before the game. We had stopped to pick up Mr. Wood at his small, red-shuttered white house on Marvel Road, and when he came down the concrete path to join us I got out of Lee’s Cadillac to shake the hand that once shook the baseball world.

  “Mr. Wood,” I said, “this is a great honor.”

  “Ow—ow!” he cried, cringing before me and attempting to extricate his paw.

  “Oh, oh…I’m terribly sorry,” I said, appalled. “Is it—is this because of your fall off the roof?” Three years ago, at the age of eighty-eight, he had fallen off a ladder while investigating a leak, and had cracked several ribs.

  “Hell, no!” he said indignantly. “This is the arm I threw out in 1913!” I felt awful. I had touched history—and almost brought it to its knees.

  Now, at the game, he told me how it all happened. “I can’t remember now if it was on the road or at Fenway Park,” he said. “Anyway, it was against Detroit. There was a swinging bunt down the line, and I went to field it and slipped on the wet grass and went down and landed on my hand. I broke it right here.” He pointed to a spot just below his wrist, on the back of his freckled, slightly gnarled right hand. “It’s what they call a subperiosteal fracture. They put it in a cast, and I had to sit out awhile. Well, this was in 1913, right after we’d won the championship, and every team was out to get us, of course. So as soon as the cast came off, the manager would come up to me every now and then and want to know how soon I was going to get back to pitching. Well, maybe I got back to it too soon and maybe I didn’t, but the arm never felt right again. The shoulder went bad. I still went on pitching, but the fastball had lost that hop. I never threw a day after that when I wasn’t in pain. Most of the time, I’d pitch and then it would hurt so bad that I wasn’t able to raise my hand again for days afterward. So I was about a half-time pitcher after that. You have to understand that in those days if you didn’t work you didn’t get paid. Now they lay out as long as they need to and get a shot of that cortisone. But we had to play, ready or not. I was a married man, just starting a family, and in order to get my check I had to be in there. So I pitched.”

  He pitched less, but not much less well. In 1915, he was 15-5 for the Red Sox, with an earned-run average of 1.49, which was the best in the league. But the pain was so persistent that he sat out the entire 1916 season, on his farm, near Shohola, Pennsylvania, hoping that the rest would restore his arm. It did not. He pitched in eight more games after that—all of them for the Cleveland Indians, to whom he was sold in 1917—but he never won again.

  “Did you become a different kind of pitcher after you hurt your arm?” I asked. “More off-speed stuff, I mean?”

  “No, I still pitched the fastball.”

  “But all that pain—”

  “I tried not to think about that.” He gave me the same small smile and bright glance. “I just loved to be out there,” he said. “It was as simple as that.”

  Our afternoon slid by in a distraction of baseball and memory, and I almost felt myself at some dreamlike doubleheader involving the then and the now—the semi-anonymous strong young men waging their close, marvelous game on the sunlit green field before us while bygone players and heroes of baseball history—long gone now, most of them—replayed their vivid, famous innings for me in the words and recollections of my companion. Yale kept putting men aboard against Viola and failing to move them along; Rich Diana, the husky center fielder (he is also an All–Ivy League halfback), whacked a long double to left but then died on second—the sixth stranded Eli base runner in five innings. Darling appeared to be struggling a little, walking two successive batters in the sixth, but he saved himself with a whirling pickoff to second base—a timed play brilliantly completed by his shortstop, Bob Brooke—and then struck out St. John’s big first baseman, Karl Komyathy, for the last out. St. John’s had yet to manage a hit against him.