Once Upon a Fastball

by Bob Mitchell

  Seth is aware of some sort of movement, subtle at first, but there it is. A vague rumbling, a distinct but nuanced flow of bodies around him, getting up, grabbing coats, moving out. For the first time in the game, fans are beginning to drift toward the exits. It is the top of the ninth, New York is down by three, and apparently some not-so-die-hard Giants fans have given up hope. Seth assumes they are Giants fans, since even the least committed of Dodgers fans would never, ever leave the stadium, with their team leading 4–1, until they had savored the final out, the final nail in the proverbial coffin.

  The top of the ninth passes briskly and without fanfare, a breeze of an inning for Larry Jansen, one of the Giants’ stalwart starters all year, who had come in to relieve a fatigued and battered Sal the Barber.

  Now it is the fateful bottom of the ninth, the bottom of the ninth Seth knows by heart, the bottom of the ninth that will electrify the civilized world.

  Here comes Alvin Dark sauntering up to the plate, the all-American pretty-boy football hero from LSU who years later will be accused of being a racist, coming up to the plate with, ironically, his trademark black bat in tow. And for the first time since Seth found himself here at the game, Papa Sol gets up. Until now, he hasn’t stood up or stretched or left to get a hot dog or a pack of Luckies or gotten up to pee. Has just sat there, riveted to the painted green wooden slats of his seat.

  Sol not only gets up, but he sidesteps out to the aisle, walks up steps, appears to be leaving. Seth follows close behind, puzzled. Maybe he needs to take a leak?

  Sol moves past the stench of the public restrooms, descends the ramp, and now is on the lower grandstand level. Could he be leaving, with all the rest of the Giants fans who’ve surrendered and given in to defeat and despair? Doesn’t sound like Papa Sol.

  Sol is walking down the steps now, on the lower level of seats, closer to the field, closer to the left-field wall. Maybe now that people are beginning to file out, there’ll be a seat closer to the action. Maybe Sol just wants to get away from that moron who was screaming at him.

  There, there’s an empty one over there, in fact three empty seats in a row, and it’s three rows up from the wall and right off the aisle and now Dark is standing at the plate in his familiar crouch, cocking his wrists so that black bat of his is parallel to the ground, and Sol plops down in his new seat and so does invisible Seth.

  The Giants fans in the crowd come to life, slowly at first, then with a little more hope in their voices, as Dark bleeds a single to right that nicks Hodges’s glove and Mueller follows suit with another bleeder to nearly the identical spot. Must be Kismet or something, the crowd must be thinking. Those never-say-die Giants are at it again.

  Irvin steps up to the plate, the always dependable Monte, to continue the last-ditch rally. The Giants’ candle is still flickering, but barely.

  As Monte does his rosin bag thing, Seth happens to look to his left and slightly behind him, looks at the huge column of steel that supports the upper deck, registers in his encyclopedic brain the two white numbers painted on the front of the column and just above the level of his head. Thirty-five. This is Section 35.

  Jeez Louise.

  And the overanxious Irvin fouls out meekly to Hodges and the Giants fans go limp and the Dodgers fans are really into it now, it’s their turn to scream and the momentum has changed once again. The Giants are down to their final two outs and it’s almost curtains and now it’s all up to Whitey Lockman and then Bobby Thomson on deck and Seth knows he’s sitting in Section 35 and is even closer to History.

  Man alive.

  And Whitey flails at a high outside pitch and strokes a scorcher over third past Cox and just inside the foul line and into the corner and the Giants fans are going nuts and the Dodgers fans are squirming and Pafko chases it down and Dark scores and Lockman breezes into second and Mueller tears his ankle to shreds stumbling into third on his non-slide and they cart him off on a stretcher and Hartung runs for him and Big Newk is toast and Dressen brings in number 13, big Ralph Branca, ’cause Oisk is bouncing the curve in the pen and here comes the Flying Scot Robert Brown Thomson to the plate with the score 4–2 and the tying runs in scoring position and himself the winning run and Seth knows exactly what’s gonna happen and ohmydeargod here I am, sitting next to Papa Sol, sitting right here in Section 35.

  And Bobby takes a fastball right down the pipe and shit he shoulda swung at that one, the Giants fans are thinking, and he’ll never get another good one ’cause Branca’ll come back with Uncle Charlie and now Ralph winds up and delivers and crap it’s another goddam fastball, the Dodgers fans are screaming silently, and why didn’t the dumb sonuvabitch go with the curve? and the fastball’s up and in and not a pitch to hit at all but Bobby catches it just right and tomahawks it, I mean he coldcocks it good, with plenty of topspin and mustard, and there’s a long drive…it’s gonna be…I believe…

  And this is History and Seth is here seeing it and smelling it and tasting it and he glances at the Longines clock in center and yup sure enough it says 3:58 just like Papa Sol told him and the Polo Grounds simultaneously erupts with ecstasy and sags with disgust as the ball Bobby hits is tied to a rope but begins to spin downward and will it clear the fence? and now it is sailing right over Andy Pafko’s limp body, Pafko standing there helpless in a heap of strewn paper and beer cups and cigarette butts and ticket stubs, and somehow it sails miraculously under the upper deck that is hanging defiantly fifteen feet in front of the left-field wall and dips crazily below the overhang and the ball just clears the 16.81-foot green concrete wall, clears it just barely and disappears somewhere into the lower left-field stands and half the crowd goes berserk.

  Seth has heard the story a thousand times maybe, straight from the lips of his Papa Sol, but this is different. He is here, and he is watching The Giants Win The Pennant! But something else is different, and here it comes.

  And the ball is coming toward Seth and Papa Sol and the fans all around them are cheering and whooping it up and hugging one another or else cursing and screaming sonuvabitch! and ripping up their programs and no one seems to know exactly where the ball has gone and who cares? but Seth who already knew what would happen is following the precise flight of the ball for History’s sake and here it comes and it smashes into the steel column, smashes right into it, not on the flat front part but on its edge, obliquely, like a pointer when you’re playing stoopball with a Spaldeen and it has lots of topspin so it bounces down and to the left and here it comes on a fly right toward Papa Sol’s back and Papa Sol sort of senses where it is behind him and the ball is still spinning down, down…

  Seth is speechless as, in one seamless split second of an instant, no, a split millisecond of an instant, the ball is snared, crisply and unnoticed, by the mighty left hand of Papa Sol, this carpenter’s hand of his that clamps down on the ball clean and sure and pure, plucking it out of the air nearly invisibly, like a chameleon nabbing a beetle from a distant leaf with its silent, stealthy, sticky tongue before the poor unsuspecting bug knows what hit him.

  It all happens so quickly, like a single beat of a hummingbird’s wing, that no one in the ballpark notices it, no one except for Seth, that is. To him, it is a catch of miraculous proportions even greater than Willie’s over-the-shoulder, back-to-the-plate catch off Vic Wertz in the ’54 Series, or Ron Swoboda’s diving, sprawling, one-handed grab off Brooks Robinson in the ’69 Series, because it is executed backhanded, and blind, with Sol’s back to the ball and with forty or so screaming, jumping, distracting, maniac fans surrounding him, to boot.

  No one in the Polo Grounds has the slightest inkling of where the ball has landed, no one but the two Steins in the middle of all the bedlam, and fans are jumping under seats and scrambling around clueless, like rats in a maze, in a crazed and abortive search for a baseball that is not there.

  And there stands Sol, cool as a chickpea and not moving a muscle, stands there stock-still so the enemy won’t notice him, just like Lieutenant Dunbar i
n Stalag 17 standing motionless in the water tank with his legs freezing like hell, and the ball is safely hidden in the impressive palm of Papa Sol’s left hand and his right hand, clasping the top of his left one, presses the ball firmly against his chest and he is filled with joy at the Giants’ victory but can’t get too excited and risk dropping the ball or tipping someone off as to its precise whereabouts.

  Seth stands there beside a happy Papa Sol, watching him, still speechless. It all happens so fast, before you can say Jack Robinson, and now Seth is having a flashback (can I have a flashback if I’m already in one?).

  It is the year 2000, he is twenty-seven, and he has just finished reading the prologue to Don DeLillo’s amazing novel Underworld. He is so excited to be reading about the Bobby Thomson pennant game, and he is telling Papa Sol all about Cotter Martin, the black kid in the novel who sneaks into the Polo Grounds and ends up fighting Bill Waterson for the famous ball and wrestling it away from Bill and keeping it—the actual Bobby Thomson ball! And after telling Papa Sol all this, he remembers to this day hearing his grandfather’s strange laugh and how a surprisingly petulant Papa Sol shot back something to the effect that, “Well, it’s fiction, what do you expect, and those goddam novelists can make up whatever flights of pure fantasy they damn well please!”

  And Seth realizes that this is not a novel now, this is the real deal. And it is not the fictional character Cotter Martin who ended up with Bobby Thomson’s historic blast, or anyone else on the planet for that matter.

  It is Solomon Stein.

  Seth is feeling exhausted, and a little light-headed. Could it be all this excitement? He rubs his eyes…

  …and he is standing behind Papa Sol in the basement of 1270 Forty-ninth Street in Brooklyn, New York.

  It is October 11, 1951, eight days after the big game. Seth knows that, because a copy of a local paper sitting right there on Papa Sol’s workbench says so. Sol has cut two articles out of the sports section.

  Sol walks to the basement cabinet, opens the bottom drawer, pulls out his personal baseball scrapbook, which is tucked way in the back, under a pile of rags. Before Sol closes the drawer, Seth notices a baseball way in the back, too, a baseball with a nasty one-inch-long blackish scuff mark, a ball that looks very much like the one Papa Sol left for him in that handcrafted wooden box.

  Sol picks up the two articles and, one by one, pastes them with great care in the scrapbook. He scrutinizes them both as Seth watches him from behind.

  The headline of the first article is YANKS NIP JINTS 4–3 IN GAME 6 DESPITE NINTH-INNING RALLY, TAKE SERIES, 4–2.

  And the second: HUNDREDS OF FANS CLAIM TO OWN BOBBY THOMSON HOME-RUN BALL.

  Solomon Stein has a funny look on his face as he rereads the second newspaper clipping. Funny as in odd.

  Seth skims the same article, from just behind his grandfather. Something about hundreds of letters pouring in to newspaper editors and radio stations, written by earnest baseball fans who swear that they were at the game, sitting right there in Section 35, and that they, and nobody else, owned the famous Bobby Thomson clout. Caught it on the fly or dug it out from under the seats or grabbed it off of somebody else or whatever.

  Seth thinks how bizarre and how can people lie like that? And then he remembers a quote he learned way back in one of his undergrad World History courses, attributed to David and Leigh Eddings:

  The notion that any one person can describe “what really happened” is an absurdity. If ten—or a hundred—people witness an event, there will be ten—or a hundred—different versions of what took place.

  And he thinks how true the quote is, except in this particular case, if Sol described “what really happened” that afternoon in the Polo Grounds, it would not be an absurdity, he would in fact be telling the truth, the only correct version of what took place.

  Seth is still pondering and doesn’t notice Sol getting up and going back to the same bottom cabinet drawer and now he does notice and Papa Sol reaches in the back of the drawer and removes what appears to be a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and checks to see if there are cartridges in the cylinder.

  Papa Sol owned a handgun?

  Sol stands there, pistol in hand, with the same odd look on his face, in front of the workbench, with the baseball scrapbook opened to the clipping about the hundreds of fans. Seth cannot imagine what Papa Sol might be thinking.

  “Papa Sol?”

  Papa Sol’s right hand clutches the .38 delicately, as if he were holding a sparrow with a broken leg. Slowly, he brings his hand with the .38 in it toward his head and presses the barrel firmly against his right temple.

  Seth is thinking about how baseball and passion are inextricably entwined, how the game can pull you in and take your breath away, how it can wrap you around its little finger and keep you there for life and maybe sometimes make you do things you don’t mean to do.

  “Papa Sol, it was just a game, a stupid baseball game!”

  Papa Sol does not hear his grandson. Still the odd look on his face.

  “Don’t do it, Papa Sol! I love you so much! Papa Sol, please! NOOOOOOO!”

  “NOOOOOOO!”

  Seth Stein, slouched in the Naugahyde La-Z-Boy in his Cambridge town house, looks down at the pool of sweat that soaks his shirt.

  How’d he get back home? It wasn’t by clicking together his ruby slippers. This was all a dream, right? I mean, come on, going back to visit 1951?

  But it seemed so real. He’s sure he saw those sights and smelled those smells and heard those sounds, as if he were actually living them. And he was living them. Wasn’t he? Plus, how could he have just made up all those details, like those humongous cars on Thirteenth Avenue and Papa Sol’s funky old Philco radio and Uncle Miltie’s shtick? And how do you explain the ball? Is he really in possession of the Bobby Thomson ball? Does it have magical powers? Did it really transport him back in time? Were Papa Sol’s love for his grandson and passion for baseball drawing Seth back to him?

  Seth is running on empty, but he can’t stop himself from cogitating.

  Did he actually witness the past? If so—like a religion scholar being granted a visit to Eden or a biology scholar being allowed to go back in time to witness the first lizard, the tuatara, walk on dry land—will it give him historical insights into his writing, his research, his teaching?

  And what about Sol? Did he pull the trigger? Of course not, since he made it to seventy-six, last time Seth saw him. But what a scare. And who knew about that side of him? Suicide? Papa Sol? No way.

  And why did Papa Sol withhold from him and Grandma Elsie the fact that he caught the famous ball Bobby hit? What about that suicidal episode, what was that? Who knew he even owned a gun? Did he ever mention it to Elsie? Why suicide? It was just a ball. Was it the humiliation, the frustration of not being able to share it with anyone—even his loved ones!—since he must have known no one would ever believe him? Was it his resentment of the greed and the lust for fame of other people? Or the shame of wanting, like them, to have his own fifteen minutes in the sun? Seth knows Sol didn’t pull the trigger then, that night in the basement. But did he do it two years ago, which would explain his disappearance?

  Were there in fact two Papa Sols? The Sol who lived by the rules of honesty and integrity and the Sol who bent the truth? The Sol who loved life and the Sol who pondered taking his own? The Sol who was hopeful and passionate and the Sol who was cynical and disillusioned? The sweet, soft Sol and the seething, smoldering Sol?

  Why did Seth never see this side of Papa Sol, the side that was flawed? Did he only want to see the ideal version, or was that the only image Sol ever cared, or dared, to project?

  And if Sol withheld information from his loved ones about catching the ball and owning the pistol and attempting suicide, what other little secrets did he hide from them and harbor deep within the recessed privacies of his soul?

  What’s more, historian Seth thinks, all this can’t be true of just Papa Sol. Doesn’t everyone
have these hidden parts, these tucked-away compartments that no one else, including loved ones, can ever know? Doesn’t this mean, historically speaking, that we can never know other people? That we can never know what motivates them deep inside and why they do what they do?

  Seth struggles to get up, staggers to a pile of books on the floor at the other end of the study, rummages, brings a slender morocco-bound tome back to his chair. It is a volume of Schopenhauer, and he thumbs his way to the section titled “Aphorisms”:

  It is my belief that the events and characters narrated by history compare with reality more or less as the portraits of authors on frontispieces of books usually compare with the authors themselves, that is to say they do so only in outline, so that they bear only a faint similarity to them, or sometimes none at all.

  Seth’s body is ready to pack it in, but his brain is still mulling over unresolved issues. Should he tell his sweetheart, Kate, about this, like he tells her about everything else? And also Grandma Elsie, when he visits her tomorrow? And Sammy, too? He wants to, wants to share his extraordinary journey to the past with them all, every last tidbit, but he knows he can’t. Not yet. He still has questions, lots of them. And now that Pandora’s box has been opened, he needs to find more answers, about Sol’s life, about his disappearance into thin air. No, he must keep this to himself, for the time being, anyway.

  Seth’s bleary eyes glance at Papa Sol’s opened yellowed note. It remains cryptic, and the deciphering of its secrets will have to wait for another day.

  Then at the ball. He closes the top of the box over it, shakes his head, sighs.

  His eyes weigh about a ton and slam shut like the door to a cartoon dungeon. And as Morpheus whisks him away in his arms, Seth reviews the litany of recent events: the note…the ball…the tornado…the stroll down Thirteenth Avenue…the visit to 1270…Papa Sol’s carpentry…Uncle Miltie…Grandma Elsie in pj’s…seeing his toddler father…the Polo Grounds…the Game…the Catch…the pistol to the temple…