The Southpaw

by Mark Harris

  It was not so much the pain. But I could not get the full motion, and the curve and the screw broke crazy, not like they should of broke a-tall, and I worried so much about my motion that I believe I give myself away on several pitches, particularly on the 1 to Blodgett that opened the eighth. He singled, and Toomy Richardson singled, and I finally walked Devereaux after he bunted foul twice. Then Dutch come out from the dugout. We could barely hear each other speak, for the noise was so great, and Red said he believed I ought to be lifted because the curve never broke and the fast 1 did not hop and my control was off, and Dutch said that was reasons enough for him, and Keith Crane come down from the bullpen and I give him the ball and said I was sorry to leave him in such a fix, and I walked off.

  He pulled out of it that inning, fanning Black and getting Granby to hit into a double play, Gene to Ugly to Sid, and he got a terrific ovation from the crowd. But then he lost it in the eleventh after throwing 3 innings of perfect baseball on a home run by Granby that cleared the fence in right by 3 feet, if that much.

  Dutch done away with the extra drill beginning on Friday. We did not even begin to warm until just before the lights went on. It was cooler, and the tenseness seemed to lift with the heat. The crowd was quieter though the figures showed that it was about as large as the day before, not capacity but a good 55,000 at least, and Keith Crane drawed the assignment, the second straight day he worked.

  The boys did not seem so tight, nor Boston neither. There was lulls in the game, times that you would of thought everybody lost interest, times when there was no insults floating back and forth, sometimes 2 and 3 innings at a stretch and not a beef against an umpire. There was times on the bench when there would be laughter, and something might come under discussion having nothing a-tall to do with the ball game, and then you was brought back sharp because suddenly you remembered that the melon was riding on every pitch and every hit, and everything anyone was ordered to do they tried to do it perfect at least just this once because it was not only their piece of the melon but also the next fellow’s, and every man’s hope hung in the balance.

  Yet we must of been tight all the same. I remember along about the sixth inning, when Dutch sent me down to the bullpen, I looked at him and he sweated so free you would of thought it was the middle of yesterday afternoon when the heat hit the peak, and Joe Jaros beside him was as wet as Dutch, and Clint and Egg the same, their faces glistering under the lights, and up and down the line, 1 after the other, I studied their faces, and all was wet and shining, and I felt of my own, and the same was true.

  We was 1 up after 6, but in the first of the seventh Boston got to Keith. Sharpe walked and Heinz singled and Chickering powdered 1 high up, high in the lights and down again, and Pasquale raced and stood with his back flat against the wall, waiting, and then he dropped his hands and walked forwards, back towards his position, and that was the end, as quick and as sudden as I give it to you here, and Boston had it, 6–4, and the cushion was 1½ again.

  There was nothing said. There was no lecture. There was nobody eat out. There was only silence, and I suppose you would call it a peaceful silence except that it was not peaceful neither, and I do not know what sort of a silence it was, only that it was thick and heavy. Dutch went through to his office in back, and soon he come out again, and he called 5 names, looking down in his hand at 5 shreds of paper. He called, “Simpson, September 1—Park, September 2—Wilks, September 3—Gonzalez, September 4—Wiggen, September 5,” and we each come forward and took the shred of paper with our name and the date that we wrote down on the shreds and put them in a glass way back around the first of July, betting 5 apiece on the day we would clinch the flag. I took my shred and folded it and give it a flip with my finger, and it bounced off the wall and landed amongst Hams Carroll’s gear, and he scowled and swore.

  “There is 150 wrapped in a towel on the shelf in my office,” said Dutch. “If nobody wins it we will send it off to some f—ing charity or other,” and he turned and disappeared through the door.

  Chapter 33

  YET it begun to look like the 150 would fall after all somewhere amongst the club. Boston moved out and the west moved in, Cleveland for the weekend plus a make-up game on Monday, and Knuckles won the opener, and Hams lost the second, but Sam Yale beat Rob McKenna on Monday. Boston split 2 with Pittsburgh and then was idle Monday, so the cushion was 2 with an even 20 games to go, and Cleveland moved out and Pittsburgh moved in, and I lost on Tuesday night, and Crane on Wednesday, but Hams come back and won the final. Boston lost 2 out of 3 to Cleveland, and the cushion still was 2, Boston muffing their golden opportunity and Alf Keeler roundly eat out and told to resign by the Boston writers according to information brung back by Lucky Judkins. Lucky spent the week in Boston seeing what he could see and keeping the charts for Dutch. But Dutch called him back after the Pittsburgh series and made him drill regular and sent Clint Strap up to Boston with the charts because if Lucky could whip the trouble in his back and be put on the active list again he figured to be no little help. Lucky come home with a cold. He was sneezing in the clubhouse Friday before the first Chicago game, and Dutch seen him sneeze and told him go down and get a shot of penicillin from Doc Loftus, and then, on further thought, Dutch made everybody on the club go and get a shot and keep it from spreading.

  It was this same Friday, not long before game time, that Holly hit town. The first I knowed of it Dutch was in the middle of the lecture when the clubhouse cop come in with a note. Dutch eat the cop out. But nonetheless he took the note and looked at the name and give it to me, and it was from Holly, saying she was in town and would see me after the game.

  She was there till Monday morning, putting up at the hotel with the club, 3 floors downstairs. The Mammoths picked up the bill. Anything that might possibly have a good effect on the club they was happy to pay for, including shelling out 5,000 dollars right about that time for Hams Carroll’s little cripple girl to get worked on by the doctor in Minnesota.

  This had a good effect on Hams. He beat Chicago that day, the first time we won 2 in a row since the weekend in Washington just before Labor Day, and afterwards Holly was waiting out under the El tracks where the wives and the girl friends wait.

  It was really terrific to see her. I had not saw her since the night of the Opener in April after having just won my first big-time victory and my head was about 97 times the size it ought to been. She was standing and chatting with a number of the others. When the club wins it is a happy little group out there. Days we lose they are libel to be sitting alone, each in their own car, like strangers. We drove back to the hotel with Red and Rosemary Traphagen, and we had supper together, the 4 of us, and then we went our different ways. Holly and Rosemary become fairly thick over that weekend. Also Holly and Patricia Moors. Holly takes this morbid interest in Patricia.

  I told her I had considerable interest in Patricia myself, though probably for different reasons, and then I was sorry I said it. I am always sorry for things 10 seconds too late, and I apologized about 11 times, and she said forget it. There was a kind of a tightness between us that I do not know if it come from the general atmosphere around the hotel or what. It wound up in a brawl, the first really big brawl we ever had, which I will discuss further on in this chapter if I do not wander off too far on other things.

  Friday night we went to an open-air concert. Actually it was my idea, for Holly is not 1 of them girls you can simply lug off to the nearest movie, and she said she was happy to see that life in the big-time was drilling a little culture in me. I suppose I must of told her that going to concerts was practically a habit, though to tell you the truth I only went once before—1 time with Red and Rosemary. I said I not only went to concerts but read about 14 books a week. I did not tell her they was these quarter murders, for I knowed she would think them trash, which they was. But I begun to understand—along with 1,000,000 other things I was beginning to understand—that time was running out with her and me and that I had best begin to
show that I had more in my head then just baseball.

  We heard that Boston beat St. Louis on the way back to the hotel, and the cushion was 2 again, and Saturday she sat back behind home plate and seen a wonderful job turned in by a wonderful ballplayer name of Sad Sam Yale, no runs for Chicago on 4 scattered hits, only 1 man reaching second, and we took it 6–0, and the cushion was 2½, Boston rained out in Boston.

  It was your old Sad Sam that day, not Sam of 4 years ago or 6 years ago but a full 10 years back, all speed and wicked curves and the screw to boot, all control, all brains, and the sad, sad face and the limber arm, and he made it look easy, and you would of thought it was easy except that you seen from his face between innings that it was not easy, that it was harder work then most men done of an afternoon, and he spoke never a word all day, for he was breathing hard and needed the wind, and he wrapped it up in the ninth with 2 strikeouts and a weak pop to the box. He took the pop with his bare hand and laid the ball in his glove and folded it over and stuck the works in his pocket and broke for the clubhouse like a fellow in an office might pull down the top of his desk at quitting time and break for the streetcar, a great job by 1 of the greatest that ever pulled on a pair of baseball shoes. Maybe his last great job. I don’t know. We will see what the spring brings.

  Afterwards, in the hotel, she asked me 500 questions, why did Sam do this and Red do that, why did Sid do this and George do that, and I told her, explaining the game of baseball backwards and forwards, and she said it was marvelous how 1 head could know so much about so little. That was when the brawl begun. “So little?” said I. “Do you call it little? Ask Red Traphagen if it is all so little that a man with a Harvard education cannot bring the price of a man with a good hopping curve.”

  “Is that how you have learned to measure things?” said she. “Do you now measure a man by the size of his pay?”

  “I measure people like everybody else measures them,” I said. “This is a rich man’s world, and the richer the better. I will draw down 8,500 this year plus a Series share if we make it, second-place money if we do not. I will hit the club for 15,000 at contract time in the spring. I believe it all adds up to slightly more then I could get pumping gas for Tom Swallow.”

  “I am not asking you to pump gas,” said she.

  “Then what are you asking?” said I.

  “Nothing,” she said. “You are no property of mine and I have no right to ask nothing.”

  “Damn right,” I said. “Damn right. I am nobody’s property.”

  “You are the property of the New York Mammoths,” she said.

  “Like hell I am,” I said. But then I thought about it and realized she was right.

  “Are you not, Henry? Are you not a little island in the Moors empire?”

  “At 8,500 a summer,” I said. “For 8,500 I can belong to somebody a little. I will hit them for 15,000 next year. Who would not belong to somebody at prices like that?”

  “I,” she said.

  “So who is asking you?” I said.

  “You,” she said.

  Well, that was true, too, for I had asked her Friday at the concert if she would marry me, and she said we would talk about it. And now we was talking about it. “Okay,” said I. “Go ahead. Go ahead and marry some gas pumper. I am sure they are the salt of the earth.”

  “Henry,” said she, “you are a stupid goon. Could you try for 5 minutes to listen to somebody that loves you? Not somebody that cheers for you, and not somebody that simply pays you your salary, but somebody that has lived next door to you off and on for a number of years and does not really care if you are a New York Mammoth or a Perkinsville Scarlet.” She was awful mad and at the same time extremely pretty, though I did not particularly care for her calling me “a stupid goon.” “It is not a matter of me marrying either you or a gas pumper. It is a matter of marrying a man. I do not much care what he does, so long as he is a man. You are 21,” she said, “and under the law you are a man, and your height and weight is that of a man. In the bed you are a man,” and she smiled a little. “But you are losing your manhood faster then hell. Pretty soon in bed will be the only place you are a man. But that is not manhood. Dogs and bulls and tomcats do the same. Yes, you are losing your manhood and becoming simply an island in the empire of Moors.”

  “Crap,” said I.

  “I suspected it,” she said. “And then I knowed for sure a week or so ago. I really did. I seen you on the TV. I seen you throw that spitball at the man from Boston. And your Pop seen it clear up in Perkinsville, and he said only a few words. He said, “I am sorry to see Henry stoop to do a thing like that,” and he cried a few tears right there in the midst of all the people in the Arcade Department Store.

  “Is it worth it, Henry? Suppose you killed that man? Where is my Henry Wiggen that I remember could never even swing his fist at a man? Where is my Henry that used to go down in his old Coward Crouch rather then lay a hand on his worst enemy?”

  “Things are tight,” I said. “Terrible tight. Every pitch is cash, Holly. Big cash. Not only my cash but the cash of all the boys. It is a brick house for Coker Roguski’s folks and a new start in life for Hams Carroll’s little girl. This is for keeps. This ain’t playground baseball.”

  “That reminds me of something,” she said. “I run across it and stuck it in my purse.” She went over and got her purse off the hook and fished around. “It is a statement by Leo Durocher in the “Times.” I suppose you probably know Durocher personally.”

  “Just to say “Hello” to,” I said. “He is a great hustler. He was a great ballplayer’s ballplayer in his time.”

  “Durocher says the following,” she said.

  “What’re we out for, except to win? This is professional, not amateur. If I’m losing, I’ll be bleeding in my heart; inside, I’ll be dying. I’ll congratulate you, but did I like losing? Hell, no. Look, I’m playing third base. My mother’s on second. The ball’s hit out to short center. As she goes by me on the way to third, I’ll accidentally trip her up. I’ll help her up, brush her off, tell her I’m sorry. But she doesn’t get to third. That’s just an exaggeration. But it’s an illustration of what I mean. I want to win all the time. If we’re spitting at a crack in the wall in this office for pennies, I want to beat you at it. Anybody can finish second.”

  I laughed. “That is pretty good,” I said.

  “Save it for future consideration,” she said, and she give me the hunk of paper and I stuck it in my pants. “I will quit the club first thing in the morning,” I said, joking.

  “No, you will not,” she said. “You will go on playing baseball till your feet trip over your beard. It is a grand game. I love to see it, and I love to hear you talk about it. It is a beautiful game, clean and graceful and honest. But I will be damned if I will sit back and watch you turn into some sort of a low life halfway between a sour creature like Sad Sam Yale and a shark like Dutch Schnell.

  “You are a lefthander, Henry. You always was. And the world needs all the lefthanders it can get, for it is a righthanded world. You are a southpaw in a starboarded atmosphere. Do you understand?”

  “Sure I understand,” said I. “I am not such a stupid goon as you might think.”

  “Exactly,” she said. Then she begun to cry a little, and she fought against it, and when she had control over herself she spoke further. “I hold your hand,” she said, “and your hand is hard, solid like a board. That is all right, for it must be hard against the need of your job. On a job such as yours your hand grows hard to protect itself. But you have not yet growed calluses on your heart. It is not yet hard against the need of your job. It must never become hard like your hand. It must stay soft.

  “In most places of the world hardness is a mark of credit. I do not believe that. I believe the best hand is the soft hand, the best heart is the soft heart, the best man is the soft man. I want my old soft Henry back, Henry the Coward Navigator.” And then she busted out crying all over the place.

  Chapter 34<
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  SHE seen a beauty on Sunday. I beat Chicago, the first game I won since the tail end of the western trip in St. Louis 17 days before, and Boston took a doubleheader, and the cushion was 2. She went home on Monday, and Knuckles and Hams beat St. Louis on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the winning streak stood at 6, though St. Louis snapped it on getaway day, blasting Sam from the box, and we moved out for Friday and the weekend in Washington, Boston hot but a 2½ cushion between us.

  We had time on our side, and the 2½ looked big. It looked a good deal fatter then it looked on Labor Day, even fatter then the 3½ after the first game of the Boston series on the third of September.

  It was 2½ almost all the month, a little 1 way, a little the other, and the later it got the better it looked. We was ready to settle for 2½. We would of loved 4 and we would of been in heaven with 5, but it was 2½ most of the way and we got used to 2½.

  You have got to hand it to Boston. They clung to our tail, refusing to be shook, hanging on, hanging, hanging, knowing that with every passing day their chances took a downwards dip, yet clinging, fighting, tore through the middle with friction and illness (at 1 time there was 6 Boston players with a cold in their head because the weather was miserable up there all through September) yet never saying “Die,” but seeing things through to the bitter finish, and you have got to admire them for that.

  The west went west for good and the east settled down for the last 10 days, and we worried, for worry was a habit by now, and we fretted and snapped, and Dutch rode us, first pleading then scolding then pleading again, and I counted the days and the hours until it would be over and settled 1 way or the other, and sometimes I hardly cared which.