Big League Dreams (Small Worlds)

by Allen Hoffman

  “Are you all right, Sirdy?” he asked.

  “Why did you call time?” Matti asked, annoyed at the senseless interruption.

  Chastened, Dufer shook his head slightly. “You seemed so quiet.”

  “Just get on with it!” Matti commanded.

  “What are you looking at, Sirdy?” Dufer asked, his curiosity tinged by a dumb but very real anxiety.

  “You want to win twenty games or not?”

  “What do you mean? You know I do!” Dufer answered enthusiastically, welcoming the opportunity to make a definitive response.

  “Then get going!”

  “You bet!” Dufer pounded his glove with passionate determination.

  “Play ball!” the umpire called.

  “You bet!” Dufer answered the umpire.

  He stalked back to the mound in a fury of indignation that he had not already won twenty games. Throwing blazing fastballs, he managed to strike out the first two Tiger batsmen on six straight pitches that popped into Matti’s large padded mitt with the sharp crispness of gunshots, capturing the crowd’s attention with their staccato report and putting to shame the percussion of the peanut sacks. The fans watched what was sure to be the final out of the game; Detroit’s second baseman stepped into the batter’s box, took a pinch of dirt to rub on his hands for a better grip, and turned to face the overpowering Charles Dufer Rawlings. All business, Dufer kicked the mound in menacing preparation, squeezed the ball ominously, and looked at Sirdy for the sign. To his dismay, he found the catcher crouched behind the plate, paying no attention to the game. Sirdy was staring at the cloudless sky as if he were expecting rain. Rattled by such inattention, Dufer stepped back off the rubber and looked up. A shiny metal airplane lazily droned over the ballpark.

  “Good heavens,” moaned Dufer. “You’d think he’s never seen an airplane before!”

  The pitcher pounded his glove in frustration and stepped back onto the mound. Sirdy wagged one short finger, calling for the fastball, and Dufer reared back to uncork a beauty. As his powerful fluid motion propelled him toward home plate, his masterful right arm beginning to catapult the baseball at nearly a hundred miles an hour, he saw to his horror that Sirdy was gazing up at the sky again, exposing his naked neck under the dark bars of the metal face mask and above the brown padding of the chest protector. Dufer was aiming his hard, lethal pitch at that pale white flower petal, which a moment earlier had been protected by Matti’s poised mitt. Fearful of killing Sirdy, Dufer struggled to release the pitch prematurely, but his controlled, practiced motions made that difficult. At the last moment, he managed to roll his hand off the ball and it sailed away from home plate, driving in toward the batter’s feet. The ball struck Young, the Tigers’ batter, on his toe and careened down the foul line into foul territory, where the third-base coach fielded it. The batter, hopping on one foot, spun about in agony like a wounded whirling dervish.

  “Take your base!” the umpire called perfunctorily and motioned the hit batsman to first base. Young dropped his bat, ceased his whirling, and began to hobble toward first base. Before he got very far, however, Zack Freeling came charging out of the Browns’ dugout.

  “It didn’t touch him. He’s faking! It hit the dirt first!” the manager bellowed indignantly.

  Unfazed by the madly gesticulating manager, the umpire calmly removed his face mask, revealing a slightly weary, indulgent look. A few listless cries of “Kill the umpire” drifted out of the stands.

  “It bounced on the ground first!” Zack yelled. He pointed to the dirt in front of home plate.

  “No, it didn’t,” the umpire answered.

  “Sirdy, show him where it bounced.”

  Matti walked forward several steps. As he crossed the naked dirt patch in front of home plate, Zack spun toward the umpire and began screaming, “See! That’s where it bounced.” Zack didn’t notice that Matti, oblivious to the umpire and to his manager, continued walking onto the infield grass and gazed up at the sky. A thoroughly shaken Dufer came off the mound to join him.

  “Sirdy, what are you looking up at that plane for all the time? Haven’t you ever seen an airplane before?”

  Dufer received no response.

  “Say something, Sirdy!” he pleaded.

  “The rebbe is nuts!” Matti muttered in dazed bitterness.

  “Oh yeah?” answered Dufer, puzzled but happy that Sirdy had at last said something. He didn’t know anyone named “Raby.” Sirdy must have said “Baby,” like in Babe. So he must mean Penny. Dufer certainly agreed. After all, hadn’t the very same Penny Pinkham who said that she couldn’t live without her Charles Dufer Rawlings refused his intimate affections? For that, she said, they would have to stand before a preacher. And she didn’t even go to church as much as Dufer himself did!

  “That’s how women are, Sirdy,” he commiserated.

  Zack Freeling, having lost his futile argument with the home plate umpire, jogged toward the mound.

  “It was an accident,” Dufer said lamely, as if he were a naughty child appealing to his parent. “One more out and we got them,” he added.

  The manager looked at his muddled, not too clever pitcher, on whose performance his job depended.

  “Yeah, sure,” he nodded. He turned to the catcher: “Earn your pay, Sirdy. Settle him down and tell him what to expect.” Zack wheeled back to the dugout.

  Dufer stared at the dazed catcher. You would have thought that the pitch had hit Sirdy, the way he was staggering around unconscious on his feet.

  “What’s up, Sirdy?” Dufer asked.

  “Lieutenant Max Miller,” Matti answered, eyeing the plane overhead.

  “Miller, he’s not in the lineup, is he?” Dufer asked, mildly confused. With Sirdy, all he had to do was throw the pitch that Sirdy called for, right where Sirdy put his glove. He wasn’t too good on names.

  “He’ll be here, all right,” Matti answered quietly.

  “Pinch hitter, huh?” Dufer asked.

  “Play ball!” the umpire demanded.

  Matti turned toward home plate, but Dufer stepped forward and grabbed his elbow.

  “Hey, Sirdy, what are we going to do about it?” His handsome face writhed in ignorant frustration. Matti shrugged.

  “What should I expect?” he begged.

  “Flames,” Matti said in stoic resignation.

  “Great!” Dufer crowed. “I’ve got plenty of blazing speed left!”

  He pounded his glove and sprinted back to the mound, saying to himself, “He wants flames. He won’t even see it.”

  The crouching Matti certainly didn’t. He might have, but suddenly the all-metal plane began to rev its engine and tilt forward to make a soaring, sweeping dive over the ballpark. Matti held his giant catcher’s mitt over his head to shade his eyes against the bright sky above the plane. Aiming at the glove, Dufer dispatched his blazing fastball. As it came in high, Matti squinted painfully and brought his glove down. The ferocious pitch barreled into the unsuspecting umpire’s thin chest protector with a dull thud, knocking him unconscious as if he had been pounded by a hammer. He fell in a black, dusty heap, grazing Matti’s back with his head. Matti turned, picked up the ball, and threw it to Dufer, who was staring in horror at the flat black puddle, seemingly much too small to be the tall umpire he had just felled. “Jesus Christ!” Dufer whispered in fright. He looked at the ball as if it were a smoking gun.

  A hush gripped the crowd; the ever raucous beast finally had grown mute in the face of catastrophe. The Browns’ infielders and the other umpires came racing in fearfully. The team trainer, followed by a stretcher crew, arrived soon after. They straightened the body, rolled it onto its back, and began removing the face mask and not-very-effective chest protector. The trainer stuck strong smelling salts under the victim’s nose. With the crowd agonizingly silent, the sputtering roar of the airplane overhead sounded loud and harsh, as if its propeller were cutting its way through the air, shredding it to bits in the process.

  Finally
, the umpire’s foot began to twitch. The trainer called for a water bucket and towel. The cold splashing water revived him further. When he opened his eyes in mute, dull curiosity, like a fish plucked from the water into the strange horror of a dry atmosphere, no one bothered to tell him where he was or what had happened. He was too far gone for that. The trainer merely advised him that it would be all right. As he departed on the stretcher, his dusty little umpire’s black beanie cap riding alongside like a sad reminder that its owner had once held his head upright, brief applause burst forth.

  “Jesus Christ,” murmured the Tigers’ batter. “You can say that again,” agreed the Browns’ third baseman. The great Ty Cobb, who was swinging two bats in the on-deck circle to warm up, didn’t even shrug as one of the other umpires hurriedly suited up in the face mask and paltry chest protector to assume his fallen colleague’s duties behind home plate. “Play ball!” the new umpire cried with more loyalty than enthusiasm.

  Bush, the Tiger shortstop, stepped up to the plate only to walk on four straight pitches, each a laborious herky-jerky effort on Dufer’s part. Sweating, Dufer would have given anything to get the inning over with. Suddenly that no longer seemed possible. As destiny bore down on him in the ninth inning, he seemed to have forgotten how to pitch. His once-magnificent spray of hair hung limp and stale on his tortured, suffering brow. He squinted as if he were going blind when he looked at Matti for the sign, and pitched as though he had been beaned by the ball. When Ty Cobb reached out over home plate and hammered a fat pitch to left center field, the distressed Dufer looked relieved, as if he had been expecting worse. The two base runners raced around for two runs, tying the score. The throw from the outfield barely managed to hold Cobb to a triple. Determined and brutal, Ty Cobb stood on third base with an impatient, savage arrogance. His work wasn’t finished yet; the score was only tied—and he would be the winning run.

  Zack Freeling climbed out of the dugout, and the Brownie third baseman called time out as the manager trudged toward the pitcher’s mound. Behind him the crowd howled and moaned with all the surly humiliation and disappointment of a mutt who has just had a juicy bone plucked from its lazy jaws. In a vengeful mood, Zack marched right up to Dufer, who wore a long, hangdog face.

  “This has been the dumbest performance I’ve ever witnessed. Goddamnit, Dufer, where do you think you are? You want to pitch in the big leagues?”

  Dufer slackly nodded his head.

  “Well, you couldn’t even pitch in Tulsa like this!”

  The pitcher winced at the mention of the minor league town.

  “What in blazes is happening here?”

  “Sirdy keeps looking up at that little bitty airplane,” Dufer said weakly, less by way of explanation than accusation.

  “What?” Zack asked. He hadn’t been expecting this. “What airplane?”

  “That bright, shiny one up there,” Dufer said bitterly, even a bit jealously, too, that Sirdy should find anything more worthy of attention than his fastball.

  Zack and Dufer both looked up at the airplane. The manager spat in disgust and turned to confront his catcher, but Sirdy continued to follow the all-metal plane as it described lazy arcs in the sky.

  “Sirdy, look at me, damnit!” Zack growled.

  Matti looked at him.

  “Do you know we’re playing a ball game today?” he asked in sarcastic fury. “You’re looking at airplanes! This is not a Sunday afternoon church picnic, Sirdy. This is a Saturday, and those are the Tigers, and you’re being overpaid to catch a ball game that we should be winning. Do you know that?”

  Zack saw the distant, troubled look in his catcher’s eyes. Matti didn’t respond to the stinging sarcasm, but nothing he could have said would have upset Zack more than his unexpected silence. That positively infuriated him.

  “Holy smokes! Someone cast a spell on you, Sirdy? Are you bewitched?”

  “A witch? What made you say that?” Matti asked in a weak and scratchy voice as if his throat were very dry and he were frightened.

  “Jesus Christ, Sirdy. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!” Zack said.

  “You believe in those, too,” Matti sneered.

  Although Zack bridled at the short catcher’s tone, he was pleased that Sirdy was paying attention.

  “You weren’t listening, Sirdy. I said this wasn’t a church picnic and this isn’t Sunday, the Lord’s day, but I guess as a Hebrew you wouldn’t know about such things,” Zack said in undisguised contempt.

  “I do know, and you’re wrong. This is the holy day,” Matti informed him very deliberately.

  “This isn’t Sunday, Sirdy,” Dufer protested.

  “No, it’s not. That’s why we’re going to win this game,” Matti informed the two men.

  “Well, are you going to stop gawking at that miserable little airplane!”

  “Yes, I am. Anyway, it will be leaving soon.”

  Dufer and Zack looked up. The bright monoplane stopped its acrobatics and droned off into the pale blue sky above the left field fence. They turned back to Matti for an explanation, but he was already squatting behind home plate, waiting for the game to resume.

  “Okay, Dufer, just play catch with me, big boy. Nothing to it. Just like eating cake!” Matti called.

  “Get him, Dufer, and you got twenty,” Zack said and slapped his pitcher on the rump.

  “You bet, skipper,” Dufer said. “You bet.” And he stared at his brainy catcher for the sign.

  Matti called for the fastball. Dufer wound up and let fly for a strike that popped into Matti’s glove like a bullet.

  “That’s it, baby! That’s it!” Matti called.

  Dufer, smiling, pushed back his cap and brushed his handsome hair off his shining forehead in triumph. He was back in the groove, only two more quick pitches away from ending the inning. Few in the ballpark would have disputed his confidence. Veach, the Tiger batsman, stood with a queer little smile, as if he had not seen the pitch and didn’t expect to see much more of the next two.

  Determined not to die on third, Ty Cobb realized that with Veach’s impotence at the plate, there was only one way that he could score the winning run. As Dufer began his full windup, Cobb sprang off the bag and began a wild sprint in his effort to steal home and victory. Concentrating on his pitch, Dufer never saw him, but Matti, once again alert, picked up the charging figure out of the corner of his eye. Dufer’s smooth delivery was quick and his pitch as fast as they come; Cobb couldn’t possibly hope to beat it.

  In a flash, Matti realized that Cobb intended to knock or kick the ball away in a jarring slide. The pitch blazed into his catcher’s mitt. Clutching the ball firmly in hand, Matti lunged to protect home plate. For all his swiftness, Cobb was not a graceful runner, but he was an exceptionally powerful one. Churning like a locomotive, he bore down the line with singleminded ferocity. Assuming that Cobb would hook-slide with his flesh-raking spikes tearing into his mitt, Matti remained in a low crouch. Then at the final moment when Cobb committed himself, Matti could plunge to either side and block home plate. Cobb, however, continued his upright dash. When he was two steps away, Matti realized that his clever opponent was not going to slide at all and would make no effort to avoid the tag. He was going to barrel into Matti full force in a collision calculated to jar the ball loose. Matti was much too low to be able to meet the thrust of the great center fielder’s sinewy body. Cobb might even attempt to kick Matti’s mitt as if it were a soccer ball. Fierce, almost maniacal competitor that he was, Cobb was not above kicking a catcher or any other infielder in the head if he thought it could contribute to victory.

  Seeing this mad, sprinting, chopping machine of spiked shoes, gouging elbows, and smashing knees one step away, Matti realized that his disadvantage was potentially disastrous. Surrendering to the imminent and unavoidable impact, he began to straighten up, but as he did so, he instinctively turned his body slightly to avoid what he calculated would be Cobb’s leading knee. Cobb tried to swerve sufficiently so as to sma
sh Sirdy with that malevolent bony instrument, but he was like a mad charging bull, and his momentum prevented him from adjusting. His knee merely grazed the catcher.

  Tightly clutching the small, hard ball inside his mitt, which he held tilted forward like a blunt pike, Matti, slightly off balance, lunged forward and upward in a corkscrewing motion, trying to penetrate as harshly and deeply as possible into the underside of his opponent’s sore muscles and ribs. Utilizing the brief moment before the charging Cobb would strike the inevitable punishing blows, Matti drove forward in his strange spiraling wedge, assaulting Cobb’s lower left side. A jarring sensation immediately thrashed through his arms to his shoulders. Sore or not, Ty Cobb was all muscle and bone; there seemed nothing so soft as cartilage. Having made contact, Matti lowered his head, trying to pierce the iron rib cage. Straining to keep his momentum, he pushed his arms forward, forcing Cobb to impale himself on Matti’s ball and glove before he could launch his own attack. A great pressure burst on his wrists and elbows, and his joints felt as if they were being hammered, but Matti stabbed and twisted the blunt instrument of his arms as deeply as he could.

  Although he successfully maintained his position, Matti had no sensation of having inflicted any pain or damage before the indomitable Cobb was upon him. With an animal instinct, Matti knew that he must not drop the ball. Even as Cobb’s forearm, swinging forward like a prizefighter’s, struck the side of Matti’s head with deadly accuracy, he was telling his body one thing—to hold on to the ball. Matti felt himself falling to the side when Cobb’s trailing knee moved forward with the full force of his sprinting body to kick him in the groin. As a terrible searing pain tore through Matti, Cobb’s talonlike spikes ripped ravenously at his shins and ankle. The merciless trampling ended as Cobb lowered his shoulder and butted into Matti’s chest and stomach with the considerable velocity generated by his weight, speed, muscle, and mad passion for victory. Cobb now thrust his head and entire body upward, tossing Matti into the air. As Cobb stepped onto home plate, Matti was flying through the air backward in a curled, closed posture like a comma. This curve saved him both from dropping the ball and from the serious injury that would have occurred had he landed flat on his back or on his unprotected head. He absorbed the shock of crashing into the ground on his coiled back, rolling like a ball in a perfect back somersault and stopping with an abrupt jolt as his knees and feet hit the ground.