The Southpaw

by Mark Harris

  After lunch he would change to his suit. It was gray, and the stockings were gray with scarlet stripes, and the letters across his shirt were scarlet, but small, because it is hard to say all the letters in Perkinsville on a shirt, and there was a white “P” on his cap. The rest of the cap was scarlet. Then he would say, “Hank, my glove,” and that was me. I always carried Pop’s glove, and I was proud to do it. Sometimes he would let me oil it. It had that leathery oily smell which is 1 of the best smells I know. Then he would get his shoes, and sometimes he would let me carry them, though not always. His shoes had a steel toeplate on the left 1 because that was the foot he dug around with on the mound when he was pitching, to make the mound just right. When you are pitching everything has got to be just right. The spikes on the shoes were bright and silver, not all run down like you see on seedy ballplayers that don’t care how they keep themself up. Every year Pop bought new shoes, which is what any self-respecting ballplayer will do. You have noticed how these straggley semi-pro clubs wear run-down shoes. But not Pop. Nor me. I have saw players that wore shoes 3 and 4 years, and they never amounted to much.

  Then we would pile in the 32 Moors and start for the park. I would sit high in the seat when we went rolling in town so as everybody could see me with Pop. Everybody in Perkinsville knowed him.

  Pop would say, “Now, Hank, the first thing I do when I come near the park is look up and see which way the flags is blowing. Keep studying the flags all through the day, for you have got to know what the wind is up to.” If the wind is blowing towards the right field fence you want to take care not to give anything too good to a lefthanded hitter, and so forth and so on.

  Or Pop would say, “Look at the sky and see how many clouds is in it,” for there is much to the weather. If it’s cloudy and hard to see you will throw your fast ball more then your curve, and the other way around.

  We would pile out in the lot behind the park, and Pop would walk in his stockings in through the private gate that was only for players and relations. As a kid it always give me a great thrill to go in any park through the player gate. It made me feel important—made me feel like I was somebody. These thrills wear away with the passing of time. I would go up in the seats right next to the rail, and Pop would lean with 1 hand on the rail and rub off the bottom of his stockings and make sure there was no stones nor pebbles in them, and then he would put on his shoes and lace them with a double bow. Then Slim Doran would come over and toss a ball to Pop, and the 2 of them would toss it back and forth easy between them. Slim was up with Newark for a time and had a good year and would of rose to the majors but for a cold he caught in his arm in Montreal. Slim was a righthander. There was always a wad of tobacco in his mouth. Pop never chewed, nor never smoked nor drank. Slim was used mostly in relief. They would lob it back and forth, and then when Pop was ready to warm he would yell to Tom Swallow, the Perkinsville catcher, and he would start throwing serious, and here is where the beauty come in.

  I have seen many a pitcher, but there’s few that throw as beautiful as Pop. He would bring his arm around twice and then lean back on 1 leg with his right leg way up in the air, and he would let that left hand come back until it almost touched the ground behind, and he looked like he was standing on 1 leg and 1 arm and the other 2 was in the air, and then that arm would come around and that other leg would settle down toward the earth, and right in about there there was the least part of a second when his uniform was all tight on him, stretched out tight across his whole body, and then he would let fly, and that little white ball would start on its way down the line toward Tom Swallow, and Pop’s uniform would get all a-rumple again, and, just like it was some kind of a magic machine, the split-second when the uniform would rumple up there would be the smack of the ball in Tom’s mitt, and you realized that ball had went 60 feet 6 inches in less then a second, and you knowed that you seen not only Pop but also a mighty and powerful machine, and what he done looked so easy you thought you could do it yourself because he done it so effortless, and it was beautiful and amazing, and it made you proud.

  He would do it time and again, maybe 20 times, and he would be all a-sweat, and his arm would loosen, and by 15 of 2 he was warm and ready to go. Then he would go to the batting cage and swipe out a few. The Scarlets always hire a high-school lad to throw batting practice. Pop could hit, too, but he didn’t put no effort in it. A pitcher is supposed to pitch, not hit.

  By this time the park would be full (or as full as it would get, for there was times when we drawed some fairly sprinkley crowds) and I would be nervous for Pop. I was always nervous until after he went out to the hill and throwed that first pitch through and there was the first thump of that fast 1 in Tom Swallow’s mitt.

  I would generally get terribly nervous when Pop got in a jam. Maybe he would relax too hard and whoever the other team was they would bunch a couple hits and Pop would be in a tight spot. I would shout “Bear down, Pop!” I would yell “Strike this bum out, Pop!” and the people around me would laugh. I was just a little kid. Sometimes Pop smiled, and some of the other players, and he would pitch out of the jam and toss down his glove near the baseline and stroll to the bench. He would pull on his jacket and take a swig of water out of the bucket and spit it out in a straight silver stream.

  Maybe once or twice in a summer he would lose. I remember 1 time he got lumped up pretty bad by a team that called themself the Westchester Rockets. Teams give themselves names that make them sound fierce, such as Lions and Tigers and Indians. These Rockets had an old-time ballplayer name of John Zack that been up with Pittsburgh, and he started the trouble with a home run out into Lincoln Avenue. I didn’t think nothing of it, for many a second-rate ballplayer will lay hold of 1 once in awhile. Then he will go around in life talking about the time he homered off a great pitcher that he couldn’t hit another 1 off in 70,000 years. Pop was so surprised that an old broke-down ballplayer like Zack had tagged a home run against him that he lost control and walked 2 men and then went to work on the third but couldn’t seem to find the plate. I seen Jack Hand come up off the bench, and I knowed that Pop had struck a bad day.

  Then Jack lifted him and Pop went down to the bench and slipped on his jacket and took a swig of water and sat down. The people give him a hand and he touched his hat and probably coached at first or something of the sort the rest of the afternoon. The Scarlets never carried more then 12 or 13 men at 1 time.

  As for me, everything busted loose, and I cried for 2 innings. I was ashamed, but I was very small. Yet even ballplayers will cry. I seen them. I might of cried the whole game through, but then I looked up and Mr. Horace Cleves was by my side. He was a very old man at the time in a wheel chair with an electric motor that it used to be the most marvelous thing to see him get around in. I never seen him except in that chair unless you count the statue on the square where he is standing with his hand inside his coat. There is a joke in Perkinsville that he has got his hand in there wiping off the pigeon dung. Many a battle Aaron Webster had with Mr. Cleves, and I suppose I will never forget standing on the square with Aaron when the funeral went by, and Aaron muttering that Mr. Cleves had at last met a foe that he could not swindle.

  “Boy,” said Mr. Cleves, “why are you crying?”

  I don’t know if those was his exact words. When I put down words that I say somebody said they needn’t be the exact words, just what you might call the meaning. You must keep that in mind as you plow on through this book. Many a time in the Mammoth clubhouse the writers will say to the skipper, “Dutch, what do you think about so-and-so or this and that?” and Dutch will say, “I think that so-and-so or this and that is a load of crap.” The next day I will look, and they have wrote, “Mammoth manager Dutch Schnell expressed the opinion that so-and-so or this and that will probably never come to pass” and a lot more fancy words which I guess what they amount to is the same load of crap Dutch was referring to in the first place.

  “On account of Pop getting knocked out of the box,” I s
aid. “Why do you think?”

  “That ain’t no reason to cry,” said Mr. Cleves. He had a blanket around his legs, and he dug under it and come up with a purse, and he opened it. My eyes was blurry, but I could see a big stack of money there, and he tore off a dollar and give it to me and rumpled his hand in my hair.

  That was the first dollar I ever made in a ball park. Pop got 25 per Sunday from the Scarlets in the early days, 50 and 75 and as much as 100 in later years.

  Another thing I remember from way back was the picture of Sad Sam Yale that hung over my bed. It was not as big as the picture that hung in Borelli’s barber shop, but it was pretty big, and you could see why they called him Sad Sam. He had a sad face. He had just come to the Mammoths at the time, nothing but a raw youngster with a powerful amount of baseball in his bones and a sad, sad face, and they called him Sad Sam because of that. Most writers rate him the equal of Grove or Johnson or Mathewson, and even now, at 34, though much of his stuff is gone, on a good hot day with a break or 2 he can make most hitters wish that they never showed up at the park.

  You may not believe it, but I used to talk to that picture. Practically every night when I went to bed I looked up at Sam and I said, “Well, Sam, I am 19 years old and we are off to spring training.” I thought 19 was awful old. The bed become a car to me, and I shoved over behind the wheel and opened the door and left Sam in, and I would say, “You got your glove and shoes and all?”

  He would say, “How is that great left arm of yours, Henry old boy?”

  “Never better,” I would say. “How many games do you think we ought to win between us this coming year?”

  He would say, “Well, 25 for me and 20 for you,” and then he would laugh and I would laugh and we would argue about who was the best pitcher in baseball, me or him, and laugh and joke and zoom along at 60, and all the people along the way would look at us and say, “There goes Henry Wiggen and Sad Sam Yale off to spring training. Notice how friendly they look. They are probably great friends, them 2.”

  Somewhere in about that point I drifted off to sleep. But I must of begun that trip with Sam 1,000 times at least over the years. This is the first time I ever told a soul.

  Another crazy thing I done as a kid was I pitched about 5,000 games of baseball against the back of the house with a rubber ball. I had a regular system. I throwed the ball from out where the clothesline begins, and if I hit the house in 1 certain spot and caught the ball it was a strike. If I missed that spot it was a ball, and if I missed the ball but recovered in 1 bounce it was a single, 2 bounces a double, 3 a home run. All over 3 was a triple, triples being rarer in baseball then home runs, and I kept a score with pebbles, putting some in 1 pocket and then moving them to the other when runs was scored against me. I used to cheat a hell of a lot, though.

  It was all very real to me. Out behind the house was Moors Stadium in New York City, thousands of people and a good deal of cheering. Sometimes the ball would hit the clothesline, and there was no way to explain that, and I did not try.

  Or sometimes it would bounce crazy off the side of the house and roll in Aaron Webster’s yard, in amongst the flower beds, and I could not explain what flowers was doing in the middle of Moors Stadium. Or sometimes Pop would poke his head through the window and shout advice, “Follow through a little more when you throw so as to get more power,” and I would pretend that Pop was Dutch Schnell shouting from the dugout.

  Or sometimes it was Ladies Day, by which I mean that Holly would be over in Aaron’s yard and watching. Holly is Aaron’s niece that when she was a little kid used to live partly in Baltimore with her own folks and partly with Aaron, there being a running family squabble between her mother and her father for many years. When she was 18 she come and lived with Aaron for good, hating and detesting her own folks and giving them no end of trouble until they turned her loose.

  As a kid I couldn’t stand her, though Aaron was forever trying to make us friends. She wanted to, for she was a sweet and gentle little kid, and I suppose I wanted to, too, but I fought against it because of some idea I must of had that your real ballplayer steered clear of girls. This makes me laugh when I think of it now. Aaron would come out in the yard and look up at the sky and just happen to notice the moon, and he would say something about the moon. Or he would find a rock in the ground and pick it up and show it to me and her and tell us something about it, how old it was or how it come to have its shape. Or he would have a leaf in his hand, and he would show us the leaf, and it looked like any other leaf I ever seen, or a piece of bark from a tree, or a bug he caught in the ground, or a baby bird that fell down from the nest.

  Or he would have a book such as “Moby Dick” concerning the white whale, and we begun to read it together, Holly and me, and we never come to the whale so I give it up. And there was “Huckleberry Finn” that begun “You do not know about me without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”,” and I told Aaron that was a dirty trick to start a book that you no more opened then the writer was telling you to read still another as well. He just laughed, though probably I flung the book at him. I was a terrible kid for flinging things at people. I once knocked Holly unconscious with a sour apple.

  No, there was only 1 thing I was fond of, not moons nor rocks nor leafs nor trees nor bugs nor books nor baby birds, nor least of all Holly Webster. Only baseball. And the older I growed the greater my interest become.

  I give up the game behind the house and begun to play catch with Pop with a regulation ball and gloves, and after that I would pitch to Pop and he would catch me with a lefthanded catcher’s mitt made on order through a connection of Mr. Gregory N. Oswald, baseball coach at Perkinsville High, and a grand fellow. I should say a word of thanks here to Mr. Oswald, my coach for 3 years at Perkinsville High. Though there was much that he learned me that I later realized was strictly crap I know that he also drilled in me many good habits.

  But as time went on both books and girls come under my notice. These will be covered in Chapter 3. Chapter 2 is already longer then I originally figured it for.

  Chapter 3

  THE way I first knowed for sure I was growing was I was out behind the house 1 day, throwing the rubber ball, and the clothesline kept rubbing me along the top of my head.

  Later on my eyes was so high they was over the clothesline, and I kept seeing it all the time, and it spoiled the game for me because there was no way to explain it.

  Then too all kinds of things begun to happen that scared me at the beginning until after I read about them in these various books of Aaron’s. Aaron has 2 rooms full of books, 1 of them the big living room, the other being the sun porch at the west end. The other sun porch used to be Holly’s bedroom.

  1 of the things that happened was I kissed Holly Webster 1 day. I thought nothing of it until about a week later I told some kids on the William B. Saddleman playground what I done, and they said she would get a baby, and I told Pop, saying I had kissed her not knowing she would get a baby, and Pop told Aaron, and Aaron invited me in 1 night. He said he did not believe Holly would get a baby.

  Then he showed me these books, and he give me 1 that he believed I could whip, and I took it home and read it through. It turned out you didn’t get a baby from kissing, but from intercourse (fornication), and a load was lifted from my mind. The book was quite helpful in many other ways as well. I was about 10 at the time, and my mind settled down a good bit, and I just went on growing and not worrying. It said in the book that when we was at the age of fornication there would be new worries crop up. As it turned out, when I come to it it all went off rather pleasant.

  As near as I can figure out that was the first book I ever read clear through. This does not count Pop’s scrapbook, covering his years at Perkinsville High plus the 2 at Cedar Rapids in the Mississippi Valley League plus 20 with the Scarlets, all yellow by now and tore in many places that I must of read once a week at the very least between the age of 6 and 13.

  There was o
ther ways I could tell I was growing. First off, Pop said I was because I had developed a good deal of speed. In a few years I was ready for the regulation distance, and we went out in the field across the road and measured it off—60 feet 6 inches—and after I got used to it it seemed like that distance was a part of nature. It was natural. If Pop would move 3 feet back or 3 forward I would know it. Sometimes he done it a-purpose to see if I would notice, and I would, and I would stand there with the ball in my glove looking down at him and not saying a word, just waiting for him to get back in the right spot. He would. Then he would say, “That is right, Hank. Never throw that ball until all the conditions is exactly how they should be,” and I would be proud that I done it, and I knowed I was growing by the way the ball begun to zoom in there, not on a lob nor as if it was about to peter out, but with plenty of smoke, and it would whack in Pop’s mitt and send up a little puff of dust, and Pop would shoot it back to me and crouch down again and hold the mitt for a target, and I would wind and pump and rear and let fly, and down she come. Wham!

  Then we would set up an imaginary team and I would pitch to it. We would work on the different batters like they was right up there, according to whether they was lefthanded or righthanded or big men or little and which way the wind was blowing and what inning it was and what was the score. Pop would crouch and give me the sign, what kind of a pitch and where. Sometimes I would disagree and step off the mound and come down a bit and make Pop come for a conference. Pop learned me to always make the catcher do most of the walking so as to save energy. “What is wrong?” he would say. “I want you should follow them signs.”

  “There is a man on third with only 1 out,” I would say, “and I ain’t going to throw high and give the hitter a chance to fly to the outfield and leave the runner score after the catch.”