Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "They've really been beating up on you," I said.

  "That's what happened to my arm," he said, reaching across with his right and rubbing his left arm. "These fingers go numb. They want to give me a new jaw, but I don't know if I'll get it. They cut me enough, and I've got a hernia now, too."

  I was groping again, but on the TV the announcer's voice and the crowd noise had risen, and his eyes went toward the set. In the backfield Fran Tarkenton was scrambling, with two big Redskin linemen lumbering after him, and then he released the ball and it fell short of a receiver who was coming back for it.

  "How long have you had this place?" I said.

  "Seventeen years ago I bought it," he said. "First I had one down in Irwin called 'The Bull Pen.' I closed up here about three months ago. I couldn't take that stuff at the bar any more. You ever see any of the guys?"

  "No," I said. "I've been writing other things."

  "I miss all you guys," he said. "It was a strange life, but once you're out of it there was nothing else like it. DiMag was here, though. They give me a testimonial, and he come in from Frisco. The same old Daig. When was that, Joe?"

  "It was two years ago," young Joe said.

  "They had Spec Shea here and Tommy Henrich," he said. "It was a nice party. Seven hundred people. The Daig was the same old Daig. He asked me about my back."

  "I heard he had trouble with his back," Skipper Lofting said.

  "That's right, Skip," he said. "I told him I had jammed up vertebrae and they opened it and straightened it out, and that's been fine ever since. You see him on that TV commercial? What's that thing he's doin'?"

  "For the coffee maker?"

  "Yeah," he said. "He sent me one. I got the filter, but not the maker."

  "When I watch him on those commercials," I said, "I remember a story Frank Graham told. It was a couple of years after Joe came up to the Yankees, and he was still very shy and very quiet.

  They were at Shor's—Frank and Toots and Joe and a couple of others at a table—and Lefty Gomez stopped by. He told some story, as he can, and made a couple of quips, and when he left, Joe said, 'Gee, I wish I could be like that.' "

  "He's some Daig," he said. "When Joe wasn't hittin', you remember that Del Prado where we stayed in Chicago? They had those big mirrors on the doors, and at five o'clock in the morning I'd hear him, and he'd be up there in front of the mirror practicing hittin'."

  "One year," I said, "the Giants and the Dodgers opened the season in Brooklyn the same day that you people opened at the Stadium. Joe had the bad heel then, and he wasn't playing, and the next day, when Jimmy Cannon and I walked into the clubhouse, he was taking a treatment. He asked us where we'd been the day before, and we told him we'd been to Ebbets Field. He said, 'Where was the wind?' Jimmy said, 'Behind the hitters.' Joe said, 'The same here. I was coming up here in the taxi and there's a flag on a building about four blocks away and I always look at that to see where the wind is. The wind was just right. It broke my heart.' He was probably the only guy on the ball club to check the wind before he got there, and he did it even when he wasn't playing."

  "He's some Daig," Page said, "and Yogi's still goin' all right."

  "He was another shy one," I said.

  "Yeah," he said. "You're right."

  When Yogi Berra came up to the Yankees to stay in 1947, they almost hazed him out of the league, the other Yankees among them. They mocked his squat, early primate appearance and quoted his malaprops, until Bucky Harris, who was managing them then, put a stop to it. In the seventeen years that Yogi caught for the Yankees, he played in fifteen All Star games and three times won the American League's Most Valuable Player Award, and in 1972 they elected him to the Hall of Fame.

  "It was touch-and-go with Yogi for a while," I said now, "before Bucky straightened you guys out on him."

  "Yeah," Page said. "We had a meeting and he told us to lay off. He told a few of the writers, too."

  "I remember the day before the '47 series opened," I said. "You people had worked out at the Stadium and several of us writers were hanging around the clubhouse. They had the table in the middle of the room, with the cartons of balls to be autographed, and Yogi and Spec Shea were sitting there and signing. One of us asked Shea how he felt as a rookie about to pitch, the next day, the opening game of the World Series, and he said something about it being just another ball game where you still just had to get twenty-seven outs."

  "Yeah," Page said. "He would have said that. He was like that."

  "So Yogi said, 'Yeah, but them shadows come awful early here this time of year.' He was worrying about those hits, with the ball coming out of the sunlight and then into the shadow of those three decks."

  "That's the way it is there."

  "Then one of the writers said, 'Come on, Yogi, stop worrying about it. You don't figure to get a hit, anyway.' With that, he and the others walked away. Yogi was sitting there with a ball in one hand, a pen in the other, and he said in that low voice, kind of to himself, 'Them writers think I'm kiddin', but they don't have to get up there and hit. They don't have to do nothin'."

  "Yogi said that?"

  "Yes," I said, "and it's a truth I have never forgotten, any time I have interviewed an athlete, or any time I have had to lay a critique on one."

  "Yogi was the best receiver I ever pitched to," he said.

  "And he could snap that bat," I said. "He had great wrists, so he could wait on the pitch. That's why he could get around on the breaking stuff, and even reach those bad balls."

  "And he had a brain," he said.

  "Which a lot of people found hard to believe at first," I said. "I remember that night game at the Stadium against the Red Sox— the game that made you. The bases were loaded, and you threw three balls to Rudy York; and Yogi came out from behind the plate and waddled up to you. As you two stood talking, somebody in the press box next to me said, 'This is ridiculous. What can he tell him?' "

  It was May 26, 1947, and there were 74,000 in the stands that night, and all that Joe Page became and all that happened to him afterward stemmed from it. The Washington Senators had knocked him out in his first start that season, and several times he had failed in relief. In the third inning, with the Red Sox leading, 3-1, two men on base and nobody out, Bucky Harris brought him in for a last try. He got Ted Williams to ground to George McQuinn, a great glove man, but McQuinn bobbled it. Now the bases were loaded, and he threw those three balls to York and, as Yogi walked to the mound, Bucky Harris had one foot up on the dugout steps, and Joe Page was one pitch away from the minors.

  "I forget what Yogi said," he said now.

  York took two strikes, and then he swung at that fast ball and missed. The count went to 3 and 0 on Bobby Doerr, and again Harris was at the steps and again the future of Joe Page hung on the next pitch. He threw three strikes past Doerr, and got Eddie Pellagrini to lift an easy fly ball up into that rising thunder of sound for the third out. The Yankees won, 9-3, and Joe Page was on his way.

  "Yogi knew baseball," he said now.

  "I know," I said. "You guys won the opening game of that '47 Series, but Yogi had a terrible day. He went 0 for 4, and Burt Shotten had Peewee Reese and Jackie Robinson running. They each stole second, with Yogi bouncing the ball down there, and afterward he was sitting in his dressing stall, with his head down. I said to him, 'Yogi, forget it. You guys won, and you'll have a better day tomorrow.' He said, 'I guess I ain't very smart.' I said, 'Yogi, let me tell you something. I once asked you about last year when the Cardinals were in the Series and you were home in St. Louis. I asked you if you went to the games, and you said, 'No, I don't like to watch games.' I said, 'Why not?' You said, 'It makes me nervous, just to watch.' It makes you nervous to watch because you're always playing the game. Don't ever think that you're not smart enough, because you have a fine baseball brain. And Yogi said, 'I don't know. I don't know if you're right.' "

  "Bucky knew it," he said now. "Bucky was the best manager I ever played for, but I was sor
ry when Stengel died. Rough to work for, you know? I'd come in, and Casey would come out talkin', but I never knew what the hell he was saying."

  "You weren't the only one," I said.

  "After I had the operation," he said, "I saw Yogi in New York at the Old Timers Game, and he didn't recognize me with this hollow neck. Jon said to him, 'It's my dad, Joe Page.' "

  Young Joe had left the room. As he returned I watched him walk across in front of the television with its screen filled with a close-up of uniformed bodies and the sound voluming, and then sit down.

  "He walks like you," I said. "When I watch him walk, I can see you coming in from that bull pen."

  "The pup's got it, too," he said, nodding toward Jon. "I hope you get a chance to meet the wife. Mildred, but we call her Mitz. In 1954 I got married with Mitz. I think it was 1954. She's great. She's got her own insurance business, and I think she'll be back soon."

  She came in a few minutes later. She is slim and dark-haired, and he introduced us to her. She took off her coat and she was wearing a denim jump suit. Skipper pulled up another straight back chair, and she sat down between him and Joe.

  "What have you been talking about?" she said.

  "The old days," Joe said.

  "I can imagine," she said.

  "Do you ever get people dropping in here," I said, "who see the sign outside and wonder if it's the real Joe Page?"

  "Oh, yeah," he said. "Quite a few people. A guy would come in and say, 'Are you . . .?' And I'd say, 'Yeah.' "

  "One guy came in," young Joe said, "and he said, 'I'm from New York, and I'd like to take Joe Page to dinner.' "

  "Joe was in the hospital then," Mitz said. "I told the boys, 'If anybody comes in, don't tell them your dad's in the hospital.' So he told him, 'He's not in now, but if you want to see my mother, she's at work.' He came to the office, but I was at a restaurant, and when I came back to the office he'd gone.

  "He came back here," she said, "and our other son here told him, 'My dad's in the hospital, and you can't see him.' I'd gone to the hospital by then, and this fellow came in. I told him he couldn't see Joe, and he said, 'I have to. When your husband was pitching, I was five years old. I sold newspapers, and one night I fell asleep where I was selling them. Your husband came along and he saw me there, and he woke me up and he said, 'You have to go home and sleep.' I said, 'I can't, until I sell these papers.' Your husband bought all my papers, and then he took me in and fed me. That's why I have to see him.'

  "By now," she said, "he had the nurses and the doctor and me in tears. So we took him in to see Joe, and when we came out he told me, 'If there's anything you need, money or anything, just let me know.' He's a fine man."

  "He must be," I said.

  "He does hair replacement," she said, and then to young Joe, "Find that card he gave me."

  On the business card was imprinted, "International Transitions Center." Under that, "Orange, Conn." Then, in the lower right corner, "George DeRosa, President."

  "Where was it," I said to Page, "that you found him asleep and took him in to eat?"

  "Patsy's," he said. "You remember we used to eat there? At 112th Street?"

  "I remember," I said.

  We went there a couple of times, after those bad ball games, when I was trying to console them. I would be trying to get their minds off the game, and so I would get him to talking about what it had been like growing up playing ball around Springdale. The field had been cleared of rocks and stumps, but it was uphill to first and second base, and downhill from third to home. They traveled in the Lockerman's Meat Market panel truck, but they had no money for tires, so they packed them with sod and wired them to the rims.

  "I don't suppose," I said now, "that Lockerman is still in business with his meat market."

  "Yeah," he said, "the sons are."

  "Sam and Jim and Howard," young Joe said.

  "They come up to see Joe once in a while," Mitz said.

  "I was telling Skipper," I said now, "about the last time I saw you in '50, in the clubhouse right after the last time you pitched for the Yankees. I was working on that magazine piece that never came off, and you looked at me and you said, 'Billy, you're jinxin' me.'"

  "I didn't mean it," he said now.

  "I understood," I said. "You were reaching for anything. As I remember it, it was Aaron Robinson who'd got a double off you."

  "I don't think so," he said. "Them left-hand hitters didn't hit me. After this throat, though, I couldn't remember nothin'."

  "His memory was bad for a while," Mitz said.

  "My back's givin' me hell now, too," he said.

  "They took his lymph glands," she said.

  She got up. She pushed her chair back and, standing behind his, began to knead his shoulder muscles.

  "That feels good," he said.

  "I think it was Aaron Robinson, though," I said, "because I was struck by the irony of it. He'd caught you on the way up, in Augusta and Newark and then on the Yankees, and it was his hit that sent you down to the minors."

  "He was a hell of a catcher," he said. "He took a bottle of Seagram's to bed with him every night."

  "He's dead," Mitz said.

  "Yeah," he said, turning his head and touching the left side of his neck again. "Cancer."

  "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "You read what that Lopat said about me?" he said. Eddie Lopat was a left-hander who threw breaking stuff for the Yankees from 1948 to 1955.

  "No," I said.

  "That Lopat blasted me," he said. "It was in that book they wrote about Joe. They talked to people about Joe, and that Lopat was never in my apartment and he said I used to drink all night and come out the next day. He said I was lushed up every night, so how could I be ready sixty times a year?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I didn't read the book."

  There was that time, though, in '46, I was thinking, when Joe McCarthy let you have it out on the team plane two days before he quit managing the club. He figured you couldn't find the plate during the day because you'd touched too many bases the night before.

  "Then a couple of days after I left you that last time," I said, "they sent you down to Kansas City."

  "Casey never called me in the clubhouse," he said. "He saw me in the dugout, and he said, 'I've got your pink slip.' I said, 'Where am I goin'?' He said, 'Kansas City.' "

  "What was that like?"

  "Bad," he said. "That was more like a rest home. Johnny Mize was there with something wrong with him. Then I went to Frisco under Lefty O'Doul. That was bad, too. Cold, nobody in the stands and all that goddamn dampness. I never worked for a ball club like I did here."

  He came back up to pitch in seven games for Pittsburgh in 1954. His record that year was 0 and 0, and that was the end of it.

  "The Old Man," he said, meaning Branch Rickey, who was trying to rebuild the Pirates then with youth, "had kids. They had kids from all around, and we called them 'Rickey dinks.' "

  While we had been talking, the game on television had finished, the Vikings winning on their way to the Super Bowl. Jon stood up and said he would be going out for a while, and he and his friend shook hands with Skipper and me and left.

  "The buck's a good football player," Joe said. "They call him 'The Monster.' "

  "He's got a lot of schools looking at him," young Joe said.

  "What does he play?"

  "Linebacker and fullback," Page said, and he got up out of the chair. He walked slowly to the front door and opened it and went out.

  "Where's he going?" Mitz said.

  "To get wood," young Joe said.

  "You should get it," she said.

  When he came back in he was carrying two splits of log. He bent over and put them on the fire.

  "They didn't call him 'The Fireman' for nothing," she said, as he sat down. "You watched him pitch. He was always arrogant, and that's the way our youngest son is."

  But that was just the pose, I was thinking. When he used to walk in there, he told
me once, with those men on base and the thousands screaming, he could feel his heart pumping, and he said it seemed as if his stomach and all its contents were coming up into his throat.

  "There was a fellow here from Bethany College, who was watching Jon," she said. "He said, 'You know, I don't think you'll ever make it in football.' Jon said to me, 'You know, Mom, I told him, 'I don't know about football, but I'm gonna make it somewhere.' He's just like his father."

  As he walked from that bullpen, Tommy Henrich, in right field, would say to him, "Joe, you stop them, and we'll win it for you." Frank Crosetti, who was coaching then, told him, "If you knew how scared they are of that fast ball, Joe, you wouldn't worry about anything." When his control would begin to go and he would start to miss the plate, "Snuffy" Stirnweiss would come trotting over to the mound from second, and he'd say, "You're not bearing down on the left leg again, Joe." It would get him out of it.