Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  exception of Mays. At that, he was even faster

  than Willie.

  Leo Durocher

  "What times your plane leave?" he said, turning to me after I had settled myself into the cab. It was 1:20 in the afternoon.

  "In forty minutes. It leaves at two."

  "No problem," he said. "You from New York?"

  "I used to be," I said.

  "I can still tell," he said. "I'm from Rockaway myself."

  "I remember Rockaway," I said, thinking that between the two of us, we've at least got the title. If you can write the music, I can write the words.

  "Down on business?" he said, over his shoulder. He had the cab moving now.

  "That's right," I said. No golf clubs, no tennis racket, and no tan.

  "What business you in?"

  I could have told him dry goods or hotel supplies or computer analysis, but I didn't. Even as a lot of cabbies play their passengers, writers, reaching too, often play cabbies.

  "That so?" he said. "You ever write about the Dodgers?"

  "Brooklyn, yes. Los Angeles, no."

  "That's what I mean," he said. "That's what I'm talkin' about. The old Dodgers. Ebbets Field. You remember Furillo?"

  "Of course. A great arm."

  "How about Gil Hodges?"

  "They brought him up as a catcher," I said, "and I saw him play his first game at first on a western trip in '48. He fielded it as if he'd been there all his life."

  "Talkin' about fieldin'," he said, "how about Billy Cox?"

  "Absolutely great. "I didn't see Pie Traynor, but at third base, Billy Cox was . . ."

  "The best," he said.

  "Talking about old Dodgers," I said, wondering what kind of a rise I would get from the cast, "I'm on my way to St. Pete to see one now."

  "You are?" he said, glancing back at me. "Who?"

  "You remember Pete Reiser?"

  "Pete Reiser?" he said. "Pete Reiser?"

  He had turned his body so that he was half-facing me and half-facing the road and the traffic ahead.

  "Pete Reiser?" he said, his head turning back' and forth. "Do I remember Pete Reiser? You got to be kiddin'. Just a great ballplayer."

  He was right. When Pete Reiser first came up to the majors they said and wrote that he might be the new Ty Cobb. The Cardinals grabbed him out of the St. Louis Municipal League when he was fifteen, and Branch Rickey, as astute about the game and ballplayers as any man ever, said he was the greatest young ballplayer he had ever seen. After Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of baseball, freed Pete and seventy-two other ballplayers from what was called "The Cardinal Chain Gang" and the Dodgers grabbed him, the Yankees offered $100,000 and five ballplayers for him .before he had played his first major league regular season game.

  "Pete Reiser?" the cabbie was saying again. "You know he like to almost kill himself playin' ball."

  He was right again. In two and a half years in the minors, three seasons of Army ball, and ten years in the majors, Pete Reiser was carried off the field eleven times. Nine times he regained consciousness in the clubhouse or in the hospitals, and once at Ebbets Field they gave him the Last Rites of the Church. He broke a bone in his right elbow, throwing. He broke both ankles, tore a cartilage in his left knee, and ripped the muscles in his left leg, sliding. Seven times he crashed into outfield walls, dislocating his left shoulder or breaking his collar bone, and five times he ended up in an unconscious heap on the ground. Twice he was beaned and suffered concussions at the plate, and once he was operated on for a brain clot, and the ever-diminishing few who still remember him must still wonder today how great he might have been.

  "Hell," the cabbie was saying now, "they put the padding on the walls there for Pete Reiser."

  He was right once more. After the 1946 season the Brooklyn Dodgers, in a classic demonstration of a ball club's concern for the health and welfare of its employees, changed the walls at Ebbet's Field. They added boxes, cutting forty feet off left field and dropping center field from 420 to 390 feet. In a night game on the following June 5, the Dodgers were leading the Pirates by three runs with one out in the sixth inning when Cully Rickard hit one. Pete made his turn and ran. Where he thought he still had those thirty feet he didn't.

  "The crowd," Al Laney wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, "which watched silently while Reiser was being carried away, did not know that he had held onto the ball . . . Rickard circled the bases, but Butch Henline, the umpire, who ran to Reiser, found the ball still in Reiser's glove. . . . Two outs were posted on the scoreboard after play was resumed. Then the crowd let out a tremendous roar."

  It was at the end of that season that the Dodgers had the outfield walls at Ebbets Field covered with the one-inch rubber padding for Pete, but he never hit them again. He had headaches most of the time and played little, and in 1949 he was traded to Boston. In two seasons there he hit the wall a couple of times and twice his left shoulder came out while he was making diving catches. Pittsburgh picked him up in 1952, and the next year he played into July with Cleveland, and that was the end of it for him.

  "So what's he doing in St. Pete?" the cabbie was saying now.

  "He's with the Cubs," I said. "He's in charge of some rookies in training there."

  "How about that?" he said. "Listen. Tell him you met a guy remembers him."

  "I will."

  "You're gonna see Pete Reiser," he said. "How about that?"

  Most airports are cattleyards, but the one at Tampa was designed and built to accommodate people. I took the elevated that runs from the docking area to the main terminal and picked up my bag and walked out across the carpeting to a phone booth. Some weeks before, when I had phoned him at his home in Woodland Hills, California, he had said he would be staying in St. Petersburg with the Cubs and Mets rookies at something he named as the Downtowner Motel. In the directory I found a Downtowner Apartments, and I dialed the number.

  "This is the operator," the voice said. "May I help you?"

  "Yes. I'm calling the Downtowner Apartments."

  "Just a moment, sir. I'm getting an intercept on that. Just a moment, sir. That phone has been disconnected."

  "Thank you."

  I wrote down the address and I walked out to the taxi station. There were three cabs in line, the cabbies standing and talking, and the starter walked up to me.

  "You want a cab?"

  "Yes," I said, "and I want a driver who knows St. Pete. We may have to do some riding around."

  "He'll take you," he said.

  "Where to?" the cabbie said.

  I gave him the address and got in. He was young—I judged still in his twenties—and so I didn't try Pete Reiser on him. I told him we would probably draw a blank at the address I had given him, but that I had to find some young ballplayers and we might as well start there.

  "Sure," he said, "we'll find them somewhere."

  When, about twenty minutes later, he pulled up at the curb I could tell from the cab that there were no signs of current life. It was just beyond the sidewalk, what had probably once been a modest private home, and behind it were several cottages, everything painted white with red roofs and red trim. I got out and tried the jalousied front door and came back and got into the cab.

  "Closed," I said, "but this can't be the place anyway. What do you suggest now?"

  "Well," he said, "I'll tell you what we can do. The Hilton is right near here. Why don't you check in there, and then try to find them?"

  "I thought we were going to drive around until we found them?" I said.

  "You see," he said, "I'm not supposed to work the city here."

  "All right," I said. "You win."

  After I had signed for the room I gave the girl at the desk the problem. She listened and nodded and then thought a moment.

  "You know what you might do?" she said. "When you get up to your room you might call the Edgewater Beach. Some ballplayers stay there."

  I went up to the room and looked up the number
and dialed it.

  "Pete Reiser?" the woman's voice said. "There's nobody under the R's. I think he left yesterday."

  "He's with the ballplayers," I said. "Do you have any ballplayers there?"

  "Oh, no," she said. "They all left on March 26."

  "I don't mean the major leaguers," I said. "He's with some Cubs and Mets minor leaguers."

  "Oh," she said. "Well. Then you might call the Payson Complex. That's where they'd be. I can give you the number. It's 347-6138, but you'd better call in the morning, when they'll be there."

  "Thank you," I said. "Thank you very much."

  I dialed and waited, listening to the phone ringing at the other end. Then the ringing stopped and a male voice answered.

  "Payson Complex."

  "I'm trying to reach Pete Reiser."

  "He's not here," the voice said. "He's in the hospital."

  "What?" I said. "In the hospital?"

  "That's right," he said. "He went in yesterday."

  Oh, no, I was thinking, not again. The last time I had seen him, twenty years before, I had left him in another hospital—St. Luke's, in St. Louis. I had driven him there from Kokomo, Indiana, where he was managing a Class D ball club in the Dodgers' chain. I had gone out there to do a magazine piece about him and Class D ball, and when I arrived I had found him moving and talking slowly and suffering with chest pains, and he had just come from seeing a doctor.

  "He says I should be in a hospital right now," he said, "because if I exert myself or even make a quick motion I might go—just like that."

  He snapped his fingers.

  "He scared me," he said. "I'll admit it. I'm scared."

  "What are you planning to do?" I said.

  "I'm going home to St. Louis," he said. "My wife works for a doctor there, and he'll know a good heart specialist."

  "How will you get to St. Louis?" I said.

  "It's about three hundred miles," he said. "The doctor says I shouldn't fly or go by train, because if anything happens to me they can't stop and help me. I guess I'll have to drive."

  "I'll drive you," I said.

  He had a seven-year-old Chevy, and it took us eight and a half hours, driving from midafternoon late into the night. I would ask how the pain in his chest was and he would say that it wasn't bad or it wasn't good, and I would get him to talking about this manager and that one and one ballplayer and another. The lights of the oncoming traffic flashed in our faces and trucks crowded us, and each time we left a town and its hospital behind I wondered if we would make the next one.

  "What's wrong with him now?" I was saying on the phone.

  "He had trouble breathing," the voice from the Payson Complex said. "He wanted to try to get home, but he's in St. Anthony's Hospital. That's all I know."

  I looked up the number and I dialed it.

  "Are you calling 894-2151?" the woman's voice said.

  "Yes."

  "You want 823-5111."

  "Is that St. Anthony's Hospital?"

  "Yes, it is."

  "St. Anthony's Hospital," another woman's voice said, after I had dialed the second number. "May I help you?"

  "Do you have a Pete Reiser there? That's R-e-i-s-e-r."

  "Just a moment," the voice said, and then there was a wait and then another voice said, "Yes?"

  "Do you have a Pete Reiser there?" I said, spelling it again.

  "Just a moment. Is he a new patient today?"

  "I believe he came in yesterday. He may be listed as Harold Patrick Reiser."

  "Just a moment. Harold Reiser?"

  "Yes."

  "He's in room 632. Would you like me to ring it?"

  "Please."

  The phone rang three times.

  "Hello?" the deep voice said, and I could hear the breathing, the breaths short but heavy.

  "Pete?" I said. "This is Bill Heinz."

  "Hello, Bill," he said, breathing it.

  "What's going on?" I said. "I see you once every twenty years. I leave you in a hospital, and I find you in one."

  "I know," he said.

  "What's wrong, and how are you?"

  "Not too good," he said, pausing. "I've got pneumonia and a heart murmur. I tried to get home, but I decided I'd better come in here."

  "Well," I said, "I don't think we should try to drive home this time."

  "No," he said. "It's much too far."

  "I'll be over," I said. "Tonight? Tomorrow?"

  "Tomorrow," he said, breathing it. "I'm a little rocky."

  "Sure," I said. "Now, listen. I'm at the Hitlon, and if you need me just call."

  "Yeah," he said. "Thanks."

  His first full season with the Dodgers was 1941, and he was beaned twice and crashed his first wall and still bit .345 to be the first rookie and, at twenty-two, the youngest ballplayer to win the National League batting title. He led the league in triples, runs scored, total bases, and slugging average, and tied Johnny Mize with thirty-nine doubles.

  He was beaned the first time at Ebbets Field five days after the season started when a sidearm fastball got away from Ike Pearson of the Phillies. Pete came to at 11:30 that night in Peck Memorial Hospital.

  "I was lying in bed with my uniform on," he told me once, "and I couldn't figure it out. The room was dark, with just a little night light, and then I saw a mirror and I walked over to it and lit the light and I had a black eye and a black streak down the side of my nose. I said to myself, 'What happened to me?' Then I remembered.

  "I took a shower and walked around the room, and the next morning the doctor came in. He looked me over, and he said, 'We'll keep you here five or six more days for observation.' I said, 'Why?' He said, 'You've had a serious head injury. If you tried to get out of bed right now you'd fall down.' I said, 'If I can get up and walk around this room, can I get out?' The doc said, 'AH right, but you won't be able to do it.' "

  He got out of bed, the doctor standing by ready to catch him. He walked around the room.

  "I've been walking the floor all night," he said.

  On the promise that he wouldn't play ball for a week, the doctor released him. He went right to the ball park. He got a seat behind the Brooklyn dugout, and Durocher spotted him.

  "How do you feel?" Leo said.

  "Not bad," Pete said.

  "Get your uniform on," Leo said.

  "I'm not supposed to play," Pete said.

  "I'm not gonna play you," Leo said. "Just sit on the bench. It'll make our guys feel better to see that you're not hurt."

  Pete suited up and went out and sat on the bench. In the eighth inning it was tied, 7-7. The Dodgers had the bases loaded, and there was Ike Pearson again, coming in to relieve.

  "Pistol," Leo said to Pete, "get that bat."

  On the two ball clubs and up in the press box they were watching Pete at that plate. After a beaning a man may shy up there, and many of them do. Pete hit Pearson's first pitch into the center-field stands, and Brooklyn won, 11-7.

  "I could just barely trot around the bases," Pete said when I asked him about that. "I was sure dizzy."

  Two weeks later they were playing the Cardinals, and Enos Slaughter hit one, and Pete turned in center field and started to run. He made the catch, but he hit his head and his tail bone on the corner near the exit gate. His head was cut, and when he came back to the bench there was blood coming through the seat of his pants. They took him into the clubhouse and pulled his pants down and put a metal clamp on the cut.

  "Just don't slide," they told him. "You can get it sewed up after the game."

  In August of that year big Paul Erickson was pitching for the Cubs and Pete took another one. Again he woke up in a hospital, but he walked out the next morning. The Dodgers were going to St. Louis, and he didn't want to be left in Chicago.

  I waited in the hotel now in the event he should call. The next morning I phoned the hospital and asked for his room.

  "How do you feel today?" I said. When he had answered his voice had still sounded heavy and his
breathing still labored.

  "A little rough," he said.

  "Then I won't come over and bother you," I said.

  "I hate to hang you up," he said.

  "Forget it," I said. "You don't think I'd leave you now."

  "I think tomorrow I'll be better," he said.

  Pete always said that his second year up, 1942, was the beginning of his downfall. It was early in July, and Pete and the Dodgers were tearing the league apart. They opened a western trip in Cincinnati and went from there to Chicago, and in those two series Pete went 19 for 21. In a Sunday double-header against the Cubs he went 5 for 5 in the first game, walked 3 times in the second game and got a hit the one time they pitched to him. He was hitting .391, and they were writing in the papers that he might end up hitting .400.