The Southpaw

by Mark Harris

  Scarcely 2 days later Krazy Kress come around and spoke to me further concerning Korea and Japan. Well, mention Korea and Red hits the roof, and mention the winter and Goose hits it, and between the 2 of them and Krazy there was a 3-way spat. In fact, mention anything a-tall and somebody had a strong opinion on the subject in those days, and every time there was an argument I got weak all over in the middle of my stomach. So it was really the safest thing for me to start riding the lobbies, and ride them hard, and be out of the way of the fireworks.

  I would find a soft chair in a far corner, and I would buy a murder or 2, them quarter books with the girls on front and their breast all practically bare and the murder generally in the first chapter and the chap that done it revealed at the end, although I pretty soon learned to spot him early, and I spent days and sometimes nights like that because it seemed safer.

  It was a Tuesday. The train was late to Pittsburgh, and we missed lunch and grabbed red-hots outside the park and dressed like 60 and drilled without the red-hots digesting, and we no sooner finished the drill then the rain come down in buckets, and the game was called. We went back in the clubhouse, and the rain was beating against the windows something fierce, and Dutch bellowed over the noise of the rain, “The day ain’t over yet, so nobody get dressed.” We waited, and when it let up a little Dutch led us back out and we drilled an hour. That was the first of the extra drills, and the boys bitched, not only about drilling in the rain but about drilling a-tall, for we still had the 4-game cushion when we left the east and it seemed like the slump had run itself out. Yet we drilled, the bats and the balls so slippery your life was in danger, and nobody could scarcely run 50 feet but he skidded and went down in the mud, and the boys went about saying all sorts of murderous things against Dutch (always when Dutch was 300 feet away at least) until finally he called the halt and we went back in all covered with mud to where you couldn’t see the number on a fellow’s back, and afterwards we went back to the hotel, and I ate my dinner and bought a murder and took up my post in the lobby, and that was when I first heard the news on Dutch.

  I was sitting there, and after a time the elevator starter come past, and he asked me was it true about Dutch. I said that generally speaking 75% of the things you hear about Dutch is 90% hogwash. “But what did you hear?” I said.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said. “Boston beat Cleveland.”

  “That I know,” I said. “What did you hear? About Dutch?” and he stummered around a bit, and then he said that he heard that Dutch was canned. “Who told you that?” I said.

  “I seen it in the paper,” he said.

  “What paper?” I said, for I seen them all, and he said he did not see it himself but he heard it from the clerk, and I said it was the bunk, for I did not believe it. By the end of the evening 6 different people asked me was it true, and I said I did not know.

  In the morning the papers was full of it. There was more writers on that trip then ever before, most from New York, and Bill Duffy was along from the Perkinsville “Clarion.” Perkinsville was so fired up over the Mammoths it would of took fire and flood on the square to get folks interested in anything local. Bill dropped in the room the first thing in the morning smelling of whiskey, and he asked me what was the poop on Dutch, and I said all I knowed was what I seen in the papers.

  The papers said that reliable reports said that Dutch been let out and either Mike Mulrooney or Red Traphagen would take the club over.

  So they were trying to hang it on Dutch! That give me a laugh. We was slipping, not only Dutch, not anybody in particular, and yet they would hang it on Dutch if they could, and there was long pieces in the papers showing where Dutch was a failure, how he done this when he should of done something else, them smart writers with their smart machines. From the sound of what they wrote you would of thought a ball club was as simple as a train on a track, 25 cars and an engine up front, and if she did not roll all you need do was cut loose the engine and hitch up another. But it ain’t that simple, and these damn writers do not know what makes a club roll or not roll, no more then Dutch knowed, no more then I knowed. I did not know. All I knowed was that we blowed a big lead and Boston was hot on our tail, but I did not know why and I never pretended I did.

  If I could tell you why a club slumps I would have 16 big-league owners running after me with pen and ink, and I could name my price. But I am a ballplayer and not no genius, and I did not know then and do not know now. I know only that when you slump you slump, and there is nothing to do but ride it out and play your tops and hope for the best. If you are the type that prays I suppose you pray, or any other superstition you believe in you cling to.

  As for me, when the skid took hold I found myself a corner of the lobby, and I crawled in and hid my face behind a murder and sunk as low as I could in the big plush chairs. Then, when tempers broke, when quarrels rose, when the squeeze was on and the clamps was tightened and every day was a new crisis, a new quarrel, I was more or less off by myself. I was never in the middle. It may of been the coward way. But it was safer.

  Wednesday afternoon we drilled, the usual little pepper games and 4-way catch, easy-like, until Dutch showed up soon after. We heard him come up out of the dugout. First we heard him before we even seen him. He was shouting to the coaches, carrying a bat in his hand and pointing and saying what he wanted done. “Strap!” he shouted. “Drive them boys close to the fences. Close, goddam it. Any son of a bitch can stand out in the middle of an acre of lawn and grab a fly ball. Close! Close to them goddam fences,” for Clint was lofting flies with a fungo, and the boys in the field shifted over towards the fences, and Clint begun to hit them so they sailed high and then dropped almost straight and skinned the cement, and the boys raced for the walls and turned and took what Clint hit smack up against the concrete, and I stood and watched a minute, and then I heard my name, and it was Dutch, and he said that for the benefit of Henry Wiggen spectators was not admitted to the park until 6 o’clock. I hustled over to the cage and swiped at a few that Herb Macy throwed down, and Dutch stood by the cage and said through the screen he was sick to death of pitchers that got it in their head that they could not hit. “Stand up there, Henry, and swing like you was swinging at a baseball, like you was a ballplayer, not like some goddam gymnasium teacher on a butterfly hunt.” I hit a few, and then I grabbed a glove and trotted out and parked myself deep in center, keeping my eye on Dutch. When he looked my way I pounded my hand in my glove and shouted and made it look like I was hustling out there at 5 in the afternoon and game time 3 hours off.

  I believe those extra drills was a smart move. It kept the boys busy. Otherwise they would of sat back in the hotel moping and feeling sorry for theirselves and squabbling with 1 another for lack of anything better to do. I seen it happen time after time, the flare-up over nothing. I remember in Pittsburgh I was sitting in the lobby when Sid come out of the elevator and started for the door and then seen the pinball machine, and he felt in his pocket for change and went over, and just when he got there Gene Park was sliding a nickel in the slot, and Sid watched, and the bells rung a few times, not enough I guess, and Gene give the machine a kick and the sign flashed TILT, and Sid laughed. Gene turned on him with murder in his eye. “Why do you laugh, you Jewish horse’s ass?” asked Gene, and he pushed past Sid and went his way, and Sid moved in and slid a nickel in the slot. But he did not play. He looked down at the machine, and then he kicked it, and the TILT flashed again, and he went out the door.

  But on the field there is no time for grudges, no time for touchy nerves, no chance to clam up and say you will not speak to the next fellow. On the ball field you are the fingers of the 1 hand, and you take your sign or your throw from your worst enemy. You need not speak to him once the game is over with but you damn well better love him like a brother whilst the ball is in play, and I suppose that that is why Dutch called the drills.

  I begun to warm with Red when the lights went on, and we done so until the boys come out from changing t
heir shirts and told us there was sandwiches and soup inside. Me and Red went over the hitters eating off our knees on a bench in the clubhouse. Dutch give 1 blister of a lecture, and afterwards Mick give me the works, the whole back, all the way up and all the way down.

  If you will feel behind your neck you will notice a bump. That is the uppermost hinge of your backbone or your spinal column. Doc Loftus told me which, but I forget. That bone runs down to a point just below your belt-line. It has got a lot of little ridges on it like the inside of a steering wheel. That was where it hurt, X rays or no X rays. I do not give a damn what the X rays said, neither the X ray in New York nor the X rays we took later in Chicago. If I say my back hurt I do not want no goddam hospital photographer telling me different, nor Doc Loftus neither, although he is a grand fellow, nor Doc Solomon neither, another grand fellow. If I say I have got a pain in my back I have got 1, and it is in my back and not in my mind. I guess I ought to know.

  Everybody in the world become an expert on the pain in my back. After we hit the east again I got a baby chinchilla in the mail from a man in Arizona that had the same kind of a pain in his back until he took up the raising of chinchillas, and he said the little baby that he sent would do the trick. There was a picture in the paper. A man from the Human Society come down and took it away, and then things come hot and heavy in the mail, a snake, about 2 dozen boxes and bottles of pills and lotions and all kinds of lucky gadgets ranging from a hand-carved statue of an Indian lady with her little baby in a sack on her back to the usual things such as horseshoes and rabbit’s feet, plus a flood of letters and wires from people that knowed the sure cure for the backache until finally I could spot that kind of a letter before I ever opened it, and out it went in the basket. I have the statue yet of the lady and the baby.

  But all that was later, and generally the back let up long enough to see me through my assignments, for when the ball game is on there ain’t the time to think about anything except what you are doing, or what you are not doing, and I was fine and fast with good control and all my stuff in Pittsburgh. That was number 21 for me, a quick, neat job, 2 runs for Pittsburgh on 7 hits nicely scattered, and 8 runs for us, 4 of them on a drive by Sid with the bases loaded in the fifth. It cleared the barrier in right. They stay hit when Sid hits them. We had our 3½-game cushion again though it was skinned away to 3 the following day when we split 2 with Pittsburgh whilst Boston swept its third in a row in Cleveland.

  My back felt pretty much okay on the train out of Pittsburgh. I do not mean to harp and carp about my back. That is all over with now, and you can believe that the pain was real, or you can believe it was all in my mind, for I do not care what you believe, nor what anybody believes. It is a free country. There was a doctor in Cleveland that called me and said what I had was a ruptured spinal disk. I asked him if that was something that could be fixed up quick, and he said he would need to take a fluid test, and if the fluid test turned out like he thought it would I would have to go under the knife, and I said I would think it over and maybe do it in the winter, and he give me his number and I wrote it down across Hams Carroll’s picture in the Cleveland paper, for Hams pitched Friday there and turned in a 4-hit job, and it was Saturday morning that his picture was in the paper, and it was that afternoon, in the first game of a doubleheader, that Lucky’s back give out on him for good. And losing Lucky was just about equal to the death blow. He opened our seventh with a 2-base wallop, and Vincent Carucci followed with a drive that raised the dust behind second base, and the next thing I seen was Reynolds taking the throw from Barkowski and wheeling and throwing home, and I wondered had Reynolds went mad because surely Lucky was in by now. But he had wrenched his ailing back making the turn at third, and he was 20 feet from home and moving ever so slow, and in pain, and Taggart took the throw and come down the line and tagged him, and Lucky plunged forward and down on his knees with his hands over his face, and then he rolled over on his back and let his legs down gentle and laid there straight out.

  When they brung him in his face was all white and his lip all bloody from where he bit it to stop the pain, and Doc Loftus rushed him off to the hospital, and Mick took his clothes and stuck them in a canvas sack and wrote on the sack with the iodine stick, “Judkins,” and under it he wrote in small letters, “also the flag.” Then he scratched that out.

  We lost the game 5–2.

  Between games I warmed with Bruce, and I latched on a way to let the screw slide more off my hand. I had less power, for there was not so much weight behind it, but it broke just as good and was easier on my back, though tougher on my wrist and arm. It made my whole motion different. Red took over from Bruce about 10 minutes later. He said what was I doing different, for he noticed it quick, and I told him, and he said I better not tamper with my motion, and I went back to the old way and the back did not bother me until late in the game.

  I breezed right along, and twice we busted out with a cluster of runs. Sunny Jim hit 2 home runs that day, playing in center in place of Lucky.

  The last 2 innings I throwed the new way, and Red give me hell, and I said it was my back and not his, and he said I would throw out my arm in 5 years if I kept putting all the strain in the arm and not get no help from my body. I said it was not the 5 years I was worried about, but the coming month of September, for I would go under the knife if need be in the winter.

  Lucky caught up with us in Chicago. He traveled with the club until we hit the east again. Then Dutch sent him off to watch Boston, wherever Boston would be, giving him charts to keep on pitchers and hitters, for it begun to look like there might be a showdown with Boston in the end. Cleveland was out of it now, for Boston swept 3 up there and we took 2 out of 3. Brooklyn was barely an outside possibility, 4½ behind Boston and Bill Scudder down with the grip and missed part of the western swing.

  Who would of figured us to drop 3 in a row in Chicago? But we done it, first Sam, then Knuckles, then Hams, the Sunday doubleheader and Monday, and the writers all scurried for the records and we took what little pleasure there was to be had from the fact that Chicago was long overdue for a stunt like that. They had not beat New York 3 in a row since 1939, had not took a doubleheader from the Mammoths since 1943, and no Chicago pitcher had throwed a shutout against the Mammoths since 1945 until Lavalleja on Monday.

  Boston copped 2 out of 3 in St. Louis, and our cushion was only 1½ now, and I knowed, and most everybody knowed, that it was due to shrink some more, and there was not much left to shrink, and somehow we was in a terrible spin, and even if you pull out of a spin it takes a little time, and there was not much time left neither, and nobody knowed exactly when or where or why the spin begun, nor how much more downwards there was to go before the spin would stop and the tide would change.

  We left Chicago Monday night. I was sitting and looking out the window when Goose come down the isle, and Goose said I had best go and look after Bill Duffy and quieten him down before the railroad tossed him off, and I went back and found Bill standing on the seat in the car behind reciting “Casey At The Bat” whilst 2 conductors tried to coax him down like you try to coax a cat out of a tree, and I laughed and said why did they not just drag him down, and they said it was against the rules of the railroad. I said I was not under railroad rules myself, and I grabbed Bill’s ankles and pulled his legs out from under him, and down he come, still reciting, and I stretched him on the seat with his legs draped over the end, and he slept that way all night.

  I remember when I left him the line of the poem begun to beat in my mind, the opening line that Bill never got very far beyond any more. The poem goes as follows:

  “Oh, the outlook was not brilliant for the Mudville 9 that day,

  For the score stood 4 to 2 with but an inning left to play,

  And so when Cooney died at first and Burrows did the same,

  A gloomy silence fell upon the patrons of the game.”

  That is the first stanza. There are many stanzas, but they come harder and harder for B
ill the older he gets, and the drunker. Sometimes he will get to “Cooney,” and sometimes to “Burrows,” and sometimes as far as the “gloomy silence,” but generally he never gets very far beyond the “outlook,” where “the outlook was not brilliant,” and that was what beat in my mind, over and over, “Oh the outlook was not brilliant,” for that was how it was, not brilliant a-tall.

  I believe the words of the poem run around in my mind 3 or 4 days, probably until after we hit the east again, and I never remembered it till now, thinking back on everything that happened.

  Yet as far as that goes nothing ever really happened a-tall, at least nothing to write about, and probably that was what the trouble was, that nothing happened, that all was quiet. The things that was eating away at our mind was never mentioned. The rumors about Dutch was pretty much at an end, yet it hung over our head, though we never spoke of it, just like it hung over our head that the fat lead we had not many weeks before was now scarcely a lead except on paper, and Boston was coming on in a rush, and the Series melon that dangled before our eyes might 1 of these days move clear out of reach, and yet we never mentioned it nor ever admitted that we was nervous and afraid.

  Now, in the spin, there was nothing but silence, and nobody had a good word for the next 1, and tempers was short and you waited around expecting any minute that somebody would blow their top, and all you hoped was that you was somewheres in a far corner of the lobby when it blowed.

  Lindon drawed the assignment the first day in St. Louis. He had my sympathies. It was supposed to be Piss but his sinuses dripped like crazy and his bladder acted up. He has a bad bladder, which is how he got his name, and when he is nervous he cannot control it. It would of been my turn after his, but I had worked Saturday and so it was Lindon, and he blowed up at Piss in the clubhouse beforehand, and Piss never answered but just stood there at the trough with 2 cotton sticks up his nose, leaning with 1 hand against the wall and standing maybe 5 minutes and then going back and laying down on a bench and then getting up and going back to the trough, and you could see he was in no shape to pitch, and I said so to Lindon, and Lindon said if he worked regular like me he would not care, but here he was supposed to go out and turn in a job after not working for weeks except an inning in relief just before we left New York, and he called me a dirty name, which he would not of ordinarily did.