Wild Cards XVI: Deuces Down

by Michael Cassutt

  But is it? a small voice in the back of Reiser’s head suddenly asked. Is it the team, or was that kid right? Is it someone just manipulating things, jerking puppet strings, with some kind of power given them by the wild card?

  Reiser would never had thought of it, if it wasn’t for that kid. Sure, it’s crazy to think that the kid was right, but the world was crazy, had been since September 1946 when the wild card virus had rained down out of the skies of New York City.

  Wild carders were banned from pro sports. A guy like Golden Boy would make a mockery of the game. But what if others were subtle, even sly, in the use of their powers?

  Reiser looked down the bench. The Hawk sat in his usual spot next to him. Beyond him were the men who had fought so hard over the long summer to bring pride and faith back to Brooklyn. Was one of them secretly manipulating events behind the backs of all the others, stacking the deck so that the Dodgers would win?

  Reiser snorted aloud. Bullshit. He knew these men. He’d gone to war with them all summer long. They won and they lost, and it was their skill, determination, and, yes, sometimes their luck that bought them their victories. That was baseball. Sometimes luck was on your side and the little pop up off the end of your bat fell in for a double down the line; sometimes it wasn’t and your screaming line drive sought out the third baseman’s glove like a leather-seeking missile.

  Castro caught his eye. “What?”

  Reiser shook his head. “De nada.”

  But, somehow, he couldn’t shake the kid’s question from his mind.

  Tommy Downs could tell that the Ebbets Field press box attendant was a wild carder, and not only because of his sweet smell. The guy was about five and a half feet tall and he was shaped like a snail without a shell. His hands were tiny, his arms almost stick-like in their frailty. He had neither legs nor feet, but his body tapered down to a slug-like tail. He even had snail-like feelers on the top of his head and a mucous coating on his exposed skin. His features were doughy, but good natured.

  “Hi ya, kid,” he said cheerfully as Tommy approached the press box. “I’m Slug Maligne, ex-Yankee, press box attendant.”

  “Tommy Downs,” Tommy said routinely, holding out his press pass, “The Weekly Gospel.” He paused as the joker’s words sunk in. “Ex-Yankee? You mean, the New York Yankees?”

  Slug nodded cheerfully, as if this were a subject he never tired of discussing. “That’s right. I was with them for twelve days in the spring of ’59. Even got into a game. Yogi and Ellie Howard were both hurt. That was why I was on the roster. I was playing for the Joker Giant Kings—you know, the barnstorming team; I played for them off’n’on for over twenty years—and we were in town when Yogi and Ellie went down on consecutive days. Maybe I wasn’t the greatest hitter, but I was terrific defensively. Nobody could block the plate like me,” Slug said proudly. “Game I played was the second game of a doubleheader. Johnny Blanchard caught the first game; we were winning the second twelve to two and I caught Duke Maas for the last two innings.”

  “Wow,” Tommy said. There was a story there, too—The Forgotten Joker of Baseball—but he couldn’t lose sight of the story he was chasing. In fact, maybe here was somebody who could help him, if he played his cards right. “That’s really interesting. Say, do you think you could spot another wild carder, if they were on the Dodgers?”

  Slug frowned. “An ace, do you mean? Because anyone could spot a joker like me—and as far as I know I’m the only one who made it to the majors, even for a single game.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said. “An ace. Haven’t some funny things been happening on the Dodgers this year?”

  Slug’s upper body shimmered, as if he’d shrugged tiny shoulders. “Kid, you hang around any team for a year, you’ll see a lot of funny things. Why, I remember back in ’56 when I was playing with the Joker Giant Kings—”

  A sudden roar again shattered the air.

  “Man,” Tommy said. “I’ve really gotta follow what’s going on with the game. Can we talk later?”

  “Sure, kid,” Slug smiled, and Tommy made his way into the crowded press box where rows of reporters were banging away at their portables.

  “What’d I miss?” Tommy asked.

  “Drysdale doubled two in,” one of the scribes said laconically, shifting his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Dodgers lead three to nothing.”

  Reiser didn’t have to even think about managing until the fourth when Drysdale showed his first sign of weakness. He gave up a walk and a single. With two outs Ellie Hendricks, the big, hard-hitting Oriole catcher, scorched a line drive into left center. It looked like a certain two-run double, but Tommie Agee came out of nowhere with his smooth center-fielder glide that ate up the ground under his feet, reached his glove back-handed across his body, and snow-coned the ball in the webbing, robbing the stunned Orioles of two runs.

  Sign Man held up his sheet of cardboard and the word “SENSATIONAL” appeared upon it in thick, black, sans serif letters. The Symphony broke into a spirited rendition of . . . something . . . as Agee trotted smilingly into the dugout and the Ebbets faithful shouted themselves hoarse all over again.

  “What do you think?” Reiser asked Castro as Drysdale came into the dugout, put on his warm-up jacket, and sat down on his end of the bench.

  Castro shook his head. “Don’t worry, yet. He’s throwing smooth. His motion is loose. He’s got a couple more innings in him.”

  Once again, the prophet was right. It was the seventh before Drysdale ran out of gas. He retired the first two batters, but then walked three in a row. Reiser hardly needed Castro’s confirmation. It was time for the veteran to come out.

  Reiser strolled out to the mound, and signaled for the right-hander, the twenty-two year old flamethrower out of Alvin, Texas, a tall angular kid named Nolan Ryan. Ryan could throw harder than anyone since Bob Feller. The only problem was, he didn’t have much of an idea where the ball was going once he released it. He struck out more than a batter per inning pitched, but walked nearly that many, and with the bases loaded and a three run Dodger lead, there was no room for error.

  “We need one out,” Reiser told Ryan as he handed him the ball. Ryan nodded calmly, like he always did, and started his warm-ups as Reiser headed back to the dugout.

  “It had to be Blair up next,” Reiser said as he sat down next to Castro. The Hawk, understanding what Reiser meant, only shrugged.

  Paul Blair was a veteran, a patient hitter. He’d know Ryan was prone to wildness, and test him by taking a pitch or two. But today the kid seemed to have his control. He poured over two fastballs for strikes as Reiser, watching, gripped the bench, trying to squeeze sawdust out of it.

  Castro muttered, “Waste one now, hermano. Make him go fishing. Waste one . . .”

  But Ryan, perhaps overly confident in his stuff, came with heat right down the middle. Blair jumped it. He connected solidly, driving the ball on a line to right center, and Reiser knew that this one was going into the gap and would clear the bases for sure.

  But Agee didn’t. He ran to his left with the effortless stride of the born center fielder. Reiser, watching, seemed to see the years fall away and it was as if he himself was out there again, running down the ball. Agee, mindless of the outfield wall as Reiser ever was, dove, skidded, and bounced on the warning track, and some-how managed to spear the ball right before it hit the ground, turning an inside the park home run into an out, and the end of the inning.

  If Ebbets had gone crazy before, now it became totally delirious. Sign Man’s sign read “DID I SAY SENSATIONAL?” and the Sym-phony’s percussionist dropped his base drum and it rolled down the bleacher’s concrete steps rumbling like thunder. In the sky above The Turtle’s speakers blared “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The fans deluged Agee with applause. Reiser and Castro just looked at each other and shook their heads as Ryan strolled calmly off the mound.

  The inning was over, and so for all intents and purposes was the game. Ed Kranepool hit a hom
er in the eighth, making it four to nothing. Ryan went two and a third innings, giving up only one hit and striking out four, and the Dodgers were up two games to one.

  As the team charged the mound at the end of the ninth, engulfing Ryan in a swarming mass of laughing, jumping, hugging bodies, Reiser sat in the dugout and smiled.

  Just another day, he thought, at the ballyard.

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15TH, 1969: GAME 4

  The press box was oddly quiet as the game started. Tom Seaver, who in only his third year with the Dodgers was already known as “The Franchise,” had taken the mound against the veteran screwballer, Mike Cuellar, another of the Orioles’ plethora of twenty-game winners. Reporters were mostly sitting before their portables wondering what would be the next improbable turn of event, who would be the next unlikely hero.

  Tommy found Slug in his favorite perch in the back of the press box, where the joker could see the action on the field below, the action in the box, and the action at the buffet where management fed the reporters hotdogs, burgers, fries, pretzels, and soda. “Hi, Slug.”

  “Hiya, kid,” the joker replied with a jolly smile. “Want a hot dog?”

  “Sure.”

  “Help yourself.”

  Tommy fixed himself a dog from the covered serving tray and took a bite, savoring for a moment his favored status as a member of the fifth estate. For the paying customers dogs were fifty cents each. And he could have as many as he wanted. For free.

  “Take a coke to wash it down with,” Slug said.

  “Thanks.”

  But being a reporter wasn’t all free dogs and cokes, clearly. He was getting nowhere with his story. He had managed to strike maybe about ten names off his list of possible aces, and even then he couldn’t be sure he was right. He didn’t trust his nascent power. It seemed to be working pretty well now, standing next to Slug. He could smell the wild card odor come off him in waves, dampened only a little by the mucous layer which covered his body. But in the locker room it was confusing. Today he’d only managed to get close enough to Jerry Grote, Tommy Agee, and Al Weis to cross them off his list. If he had the time, maybe he’d eventually be able to eliminate all the innocent Dodgers. But he had only the rest of today and tomorrow. If he couldn’t find the culprit by then, bye bye story.

  He needed help. He needed a strategy, a way to approach the hunt that might lead him to the more likely suspects. There must be some way to eliminate some of them. If anybody knew, Slug, who had seen all their home games, might.

  “I looked you up in The Baseball Encyclopedia this morning,” Tommy said. It wasn’t much of an entry. One game for the 1959 Yankees, zero at bats, four putouts. But somehow Tommy knew that Slug would be pleased if he mentioned it.

  And he was. The joker nodded happily. “That’s right. It wasn’t much of a career, but it’s more than any of those joes had,” he said, waving his frail-looking arm at the legion of reporters before them. He looked at Tommy. “You know, some people think the Yankees put me in a game as sort of a joke. You know, ‘Look at the joker, ain’t he something?’” Slug shook his head. “But, if they did, the joke was on them. Me, I get to say I was a major leaguer. I’m in the Encyclopedia. I still have my Yankee hat. Out of all the millions and millions of kids who grew up playing and loving baseball, I could say I made it. I was a big leaguer.”

  Tommy nodded. This was exactly the mood he wanted Slug to be in. “And you know a lot about baseball.”

  “It’s been my life,” Slug said simply. “I played it for over twenty years. Wasn’t a greatly remunerative life, barnstorming around the country with the Joker Giant Kings. Sometimes we barely got out of town with a nickel between us all . . . but the places we seen, the things we did, the boys we played against . . .”

  “What about the Dodgers?” Tommy asked, steering the conversation back at least to basic relevancy. “What happened to them? They were so great in the fifties, then they got bad . . . real bad. How come?”

  Slug shrugged nearly non-existent shoulders. “Nature of the game, Tommy. Branch Rickey bought the team when Walter O’Malley turned into a pile of ooze back on that first Wild Card Day in 1946.” Slug shuddered. He looked remarkably like a bowl of sentient jello. “Every time I feel sorry for myself, I think of what could have happened, and I feel grateful. Anyway—Rickey was a great man. A great thinker. They called him the Mahatma because he was so clever. He bought the colored man back into the major leagues. Jackie and Campy and Don Newcombe and the rest. Other teams followed him quickly, but he was there first and he got the best. It gave him a couple of years where he was ahead of everybody. He made some great trades. He kept the Dodgers together.

  “But nothing lasts forever in baseball, kid. The Dodgers won their last pennant in ’57. They came close in ’58. Finished second to Milwaukee, who they’d just beaten the year before. But after that it just went bad. All of a sudden the team seemed to get old, all at once. Jackie was gone, retired after ’57. Campanella battled age and injury. He hung on for a few years, but he was just a shadow of himself. Pee Wee, Newk, Carl Furillo, all faded. Only Reiser played on, but one man can’t carry a team. Their only decent pitchers were Drysdale and Castro, and Rickey traded Drysdale. In a last attempt to capture past glory, Rickey traded Duke Snider for five prospects, none of whom panned out. Rickey was in his seventies then, and not as sharp as he used to be. His son, who they called The Twig (but not to his face), took over more and more of the operation, but he was never as sharp as the Mahatma. When Rickey died in 1962 the Dodgers started their long stretch on the bottom of the league.”

  “But what was special about this year? How come they won the pennant?” Tommy asked.

  Slug laughed. “Hell, kid, if I knew for sure I’d write it down in a book and somebody’d pay me ten thousand dollars for it.”

  “Do you think,” Tommy said carefully, “someone could be, well, manipulating things . . . using some kind of power to change the outcome of the games?”

  “What, like an ace or something?”

  Tommy nodded. “Or something.”

  Slug laughed again, giggling like a bowlful of jelly. “If they were, kid, they’re doing a hell of a job. Listen, I’ve watched them all season. They win games every way imaginable. Why, one night Carlton struck out twenty men! Twenty! That’s a record. But he lost four to two because Ron Swoboda hit two two run homers—”

  “Then Swoboda—” Tommy interrupted eagerly.

  “Swoboda hit .237 with nine home runs for the season. Does he sound like a secret ace to you?”

  “No . . .”

  “Another time they had a doubleheader. They won both games one to nothing. In both games the pitcher knocked in the run, Jerry Koosman and Don Drysdale.”

  “Then—”

  Slug shook his head. “All I’m saying, kid, is that these guys win by every means imaginable. By pitching, by clutch hitting, by hustling on every play. It isn’t one man.” Slug gestured down to the field, where Seaver had retired the Orioles one-two-three again and was running off the mound. “Not even him. And he’s great. He’s terrific. But the Dodgers didn’t win in ’67 or ’68 when they had him. And this year he’s still their greatest player, their only great player. Nope. Nobody’s pulling any strings behind the scenes.”

  “What about Reiser?” Tommy said quietly.

  Slug frowned momentarily. “Reiser? Well, no one was greater them him. No one wanted to win more than him. I don’t know, kid. What kind of power would he have? The will to win? How would that work?”

  Tommy shrugged. As it happened, Tommy knew that Reiser couldn’t be the secret ace. He smelled totally normal. Unless. Tommy thought, somehow he, Reiser was clouding his Tommy’s mind. Tommy sighed. Best not start thinking like that, he thought. That way lay craziness.

  “Uh-oh,” Slug said with some concern. “Looks like Seaver could be getting into trouble.”

  In the ninth inning the Dodgers were up one to nothing. Seaver needed only three more outs to nail d
own the Dodgers’ third win. He retired lead-off man Don Buford, but then Blair got only his second hit of the Series. Frank Robinson followed with another single, putting men on first and third. “He’s tiring,” Reiser said.

  Castro nodded. “Let him gut it out.”

  Reiser blew out a deep breath. “I’m going to go talk to him. We can’t let this one go.”

  Castro nodded, and Reiser sauntered out to the mound, taking his time. The bullpen was up and working. Given a few more minutes and Gates and McGraw would both be ready, but Reiser didn’t want to take Seaver out. You had to show faith in the youngsters. You had to let them work out of their own trouble, or else they’d never learn how to do it. He’d learned that lesson under Leo Durocher, his first Dodger manager, and it was a lesson he’d never forgotten.

  When he got to the mound the look in Seaver’s eyes told him everything he wanted to know. Very few pitchers would actually ask to be taken out. Their eyes told the real story, whether they were tired, hurt, or scared. Seaver’s eyes told Reiser that he was just impatient to get back to work. Reiser nodded.

  “Right,” Reiser said. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay, and I’m sure. Remember—Boog Powell is up. Jam him, jam him, and jam him again, but if the pitch catches any of the plate on the inside he’ll hit it out. If you want to waste one, waste it outside, far outside. Don’t let the big son of a bitch get his arms extended. If you do, he’ll hit it out.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the umpire hustling up to the mound to break up the conversation. He looked at Seaver, who still had that somewhat far-away look of glassy-eyed concentration. He looked at Grote, who snapped off a nod and a wink. Grote couldn’t hit much, but he was a great defensive catcher and called the finest game in the majors. He’d make sure Seaver kept his wits about him.

  “Okay,” Reiser said. He turned and strolled back to the dugout as Powell approached the plate.

  Boog settled into the batters box and pumped the bat twice, three times at the mound. Seaver stared into his catcher’s glove like an automaton, then went into his windup and unleashed his arm like an arbolast blasting a rock at a castle wall. The ball whistled out of his hand, fastball, inside, on the black.