Still Pitching

by Michael Steinberg

  I was never very close to Koslan. In fact, because of our similar roles, I always tried to disassociate myself from him. But his death was a numbing reminder of just how quickly and suddenly your whole life can change. It made everything feel just a little bit more urgent.

  On September 27th, a sunny, chilly afternoon, I journeyed alone to Ebbets Field—for what I sensed would be the last time. The 6,702 other Dodger fans in attendance seemed to think so too. We all watched in gloomy silence as Danny McDevitt, a promising lefthander, shut out the Pittsburgh Pirates, 2-0. In a curious twist of fate, the Pirate team president at the time was Branch Rickey, the ex-Dodger owner who, in 1947, had signed Jackie Robinson to a Major League contract.

  I can’t recall feeling so listless and melancholy at a Dodger game before. Even Tex Rickert’s voice on the P.A. didn’t have its usual resonance and pizzazz. Between each inning, the organist, Gladys Gooding, played a selection of sad, torchy songs: “Am I Blue,” “What Can I Say Dear, After I’ve Said I’m Sorry?” “Thanks for the Memories,” “When I Grow Too Old to Dream.” She capped the medley during the seventh inning stretch with a solemn rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” It was only the second time I’d cried over a major league ball game. The first was Bobby Thomson’s home run. But back then, I was only eleven.

  Most of the crowd left before the game was over—in protest of O’Malley’s still-pending announcement of the move. I stayed until the end, wishing that I could stamp all my Dodger memories in my imagination forever.

  As the players ran off the field for the last time, I stood up with the few thousand remaining diehards cheering my old heroes, tears streaming down my cheeks. One second I’d be overcome by a feeling of pride and admiration for all their achievements, and the next moment I felt bitter and resentful. Until, finally, a profound sadness set in. In addition to the Dodgers, I was mourning Henry Koslan’s untimely death. In the larger scheme of things, I was unconsciously grieving the loss of my childhood.

  A few days after Koslan’s funeral I went down to Kerchman’s boiler room office. I’d had a week to think it over. Naturally I was curious to see what he had up his sleeve. But I was also testing my own resolve. This time it would be my call. No more trade-offs. If I didn’t like the deal, I’d walk.

  I made it as tough on him as I could—or so I thought. I told him I’d take the job, but only if I got time off to write my column and make the four campus visits I’d already scheduled. I even wrote the dates out and handed the piece of paper to him; “Trinity/Hartford in mid October; Syracuse in late October; Boston U in early November; Columbia, right before Thanksgiving.” I deliberately made no mention of baseball. And neither, to my slight disappointment, did he.

  Kerchman readily agreed to my demands. A bit too readily, I thought. He said “Okay” like it was no big deal. For a minute I felt like he’d trumped me again—that he’d gotten just what he’d wanted. But to hell with what he thought. I’d already made the deal. I’d wait and see what happened next.

  The following day Mr. K held a special squad meeting in the boy’s showers. He had only a single item on the agenda.

  “Anybody gives Steinberg here any flak,” he told the troops, “you’ll answer to me.” It was the first time he’d ever pronounced my name correctly.

  He’d never said anything like this about Krause or the other student managers. I was flattered, of course. That was his intent, wasn’t it? Still, I decided to reserve my judgment.

  As head football manager I delegated all the menial jobs to the new assistants. I also cut out of practice early on the days when we had editors meetings at the paper, and when we did page proofs and layout. I even missed two games because of my campus visits. But he never said a word to me about any of it. Whatever else he might have thought, Kerchman kept up his end of the bargain.

  Over the course of the season I became an unwitting accomplice to this obsessed, inscrutable coach. While the other managers scurried around servicing the players and doing their bidding, I stood next to Kerchman, taking notes on a clipboard while he muttered complicated strategies to me—all of which I somehow comprehended. I felt a secret pride at being taken into his confidence, even as I was annoyed with myself for feeling so beholden to him.

  On October 9th—the day before the Yankees and Braves would play the seventh game of the World Series, the Dodgers held a press conference. Arthur Patterson, one of O’Malley’s front office minions, read a curt, generic statement to the press: “The stockholders and directors of the Brooklyn baseball club have today met and unanimously agreed that the necessary steps be taken to draft the Los Angeles territory.”

  I knew it was coming, but I was stunned by the presentation. It was all double-speak. No apologies, no farewells, no concessions of any kind. No acknowledgment of the allegiance of an entire borough. No statement of gratitude to the millions who’d supported this team since the turn of the century. Only a bland, businesslike memo.

  The next day, the Braves beat the Yankees in the seventh game. It was an all too abrupt ending to the city’s ten-year period of entitlement, a remarkable decade during which a New York team had won the World Series eight times, and two of the city’s three teams had played one another for the world championship seven times.

  The move to LA would turn out to be the precursor to major league expansion, as well as to the eventual commodification of the game itself. It would also foreshadow a radical shift in the culture’s values. But at the moment I was too caught up in my own personal drama to comprehend any of it.

  My main preoccupation that fall was my evolving relationship with Julie. At the time of the Dodgers’ move we were still in that goofy, euphoric, puppy love stage. From the minute school began, we were sending silly love notes to one another, exchanging cutesy gifts, and talking incessantly on the phone. We even adopted Johnny Mathis’s mushy ballad, “Chances Are” as “our song.” On Friday nights I’d go to the Hewlett High football games and watch Julie cheer. Saturdays we’d go bowling with friends or see a movie. At the end of the evening we’d either park at the yacht basin or sneak into Julie’s den after her parents had gone to bed.

  Now that summer was over it was much harder for us to see each other. On top of her parents’ objections, there was another obstacle—how to get from Belle Harbor to Woodsburg and back each weekend. I still couldn’t drive at night without an adult in the car. And even if I could, my father would never have considered loaning me his ‘56 Olds, our family’s only vehicle. Julie had a license, but she could only drive inside the Nassau County line.

  So I started bumming weekend rides with Harris Bookbinder and Danny Alpert, two classmates I’d never socialized with before. Harris was reputed to be one of the richest kids in Neponsit, and Danny was an ambitious social mover who still aspired to be part of the clique. Harris had a steady girlfriend who lived in Cedarhurst, just a few miles from Julie’s house. And, on an impulse born of guilt and self-interest, I’d fixed Danny up with Joanne, never dreaming that in less than a month they’d be going steady. Uncharitable as it was, I felt a tinge of envy that they’d taken to one another so quickly.

  Both Harris and Danny were driving illegally, but with their parents’ permission. Those weekend excursions often qualified as a form of low comedy. Whoever drove, Harris or Danny, he would always wear the same costume: sunglasses, a brown fedora, and a dark trench coat with the collar turned up. They both believed that the disguises made them look older. I thought they were a dead giveaway; yet we were never stopped by the police. The rumor was that Harris’s father, a big-shot in the importing business, had made an “arrangement” with the local cops.

  When we were still within the city limits, neither of those guys ever exceeded the speed limit. But the minute we crossed the border into Nassau County, they’d punch it up to 75 on the back roads. It was partly because they were so giddy from their outlaw triumph, and partly because they knew it scared the hell out of me.

  My dependence on them created oth
er hardships. Some nights they’d pick me up at Julie’s after midnight. Other times they’d show up at two or three in the morning. Once in a while Julie would have to drive me to the station or to the county line so I could catch the last train and bus home. Once I even had to sleep on her living room sofa—a maneuver that didn’t go over very well with her parents, both of whom continued to make me feel as welcome as a gate crasher.

  It was not in Julie’s nature to be willfully rebellious. Like me, she went out of her way to try and make people like her. I know she tried her best to convince her parents that they had a mistaken impression of me. But the more strenuously they resisted, the more Julie continued to subvert them.

  At first I had kind of enjoyed playing the role of the boy from across the tracks. Sneaking around behind her parents’ backs was a heady adventure. But now that Julie and I had become so close, it bothered me that her parents saw me as a disruptive influence. I tried being overly polite, I tried to engage them in conversation, I even suggested that they meet my parents. But nothing I did seemed to change their perceptions.

  Naturally, my parents were apprehensive about my dating a rich Five Towns girl. Julie’s background made them suspicious, even a bit defensive. But, over time, she managed to win them over—just as I knew she would. Julie was like a lightening rod that way.

  It amused me how she could always flatter and disarm my father—who under most circumstances was a hard sell. And my mother treated her as if she was the daughter she never had. They shopped, gossiped, and went to lunch together. My parents virtually adopted her as a member of the family. And she took to them just as readily—which of course created even more friction for her at home.

  I was surprised to find that in the exclusive Woodsburg circle Julie was something of an outcast. Compared to her friends, she wasn’t particularly sophisticated or artistically inclined. She wasn’t a high-powered student in high school, and she had no designs on a finishing school education. Joanne, in fact, once told me that Julie had “no intellectual curiosity.” The cruel remark, I’m sure, was supposed to make me feel as if I’d made a big mistake.

  Still, Joanne wasn’t alone in her assessment. The word on Julie was that her interests and goals were limited to being the cheerleading captain and having a series of steady boyfriends. But none of the malicious gossip made me change my mind or second-guess myself. Given my own history with the popular crowd, I admired Julie all the more for being so unaffected, and so willing to risk her friends’ disapproval.

  There were times, however, that her lack of curiosity bothered me. When Kerouac, Ginsburg, and the Beats were all the rage, I tried to coax her to go to the Village with me. She indulged me a few times, but I could tell that the Beat scene didn’t interest her. She also didn’t share my curiosity for literature, theater, or jazz. Whenever Harris and Danny boasted about what play or jazz concert they took their girlfriends to, I always felt a little peeved that rather than accompany me to a jazz club or a play, Julie preferred to watch TV, see a movie, or go to a neighborhood party.

  On the other hand, we were both interested in ordinary teenage things like rock and roll. After school we’d watch American Bandstand from our separate homes. Then at night, like two groupies, we’d gossip by phone about Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell, and Connie Francis. We talked about them as if they were classmates we knew intimately.

  Like me, Julie was a sports maven. She’d listen to my stories about the “good old days” when the Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees dominated major league baseball, and she made no attempt to hide the fact that she liked having a jock for a boyfriend. I know that she was disappointed I didn’t have a letter sweater for her to parade in around school and she hinted more than once that it might be a good idea for me to reconsider my decision not to play baseball. To remind me, she’d sometimes wear my satin baseball warm-up jacket to the movies or out on a bowling date.

  I admit I was proud of the fact that she was a cheerleader and a “head turner.” But what I remember most is that Julie was uncommonly affectionate and kind. She had a way of making me feel special and important—which made me grateful—thankful even, to have finally found someone who accepted me—even desired me—for who I was, and not for who she wanted me to be.

  That fall I noticed a marked change in Mr. K’s attitude, not only toward me, but toward the whole football team as well. Whether it was tactical or genuine, I couldn’t tell. He still threw temper tantrums when we lost games that we should have won, and he still inflicted cruel punishments on players who screwed up—though the penalties didn’t seem as severe somehow. With so many of his veterans gone, Kerchman had resigned himself to rebuilding the team. Several times that season Mr. K even asked me to counsel some of the more troubled players. I wondered what this was leading up to?

  At the banquet in November he gave me the customary “See you in a few months” line and handed me my third useless varsity letter. But this time I wasn’t going to get my hopes up. I’d wait and see how I felt when baseball tryouts rolled around.

  One blustery afternoon in late January, I was working at The Chat when I came across a three-day-old press clipping. Someone on my staff had left it for me with an unsigned note that read, “Thought you’d want to see this.”

  It was a story that had appeared in the Long Island Daily Press sports section—a pretty big feature article about this year’s Far Rockaway baseball team. It quoted Kerchman as saying that “in this rebuilding season, the mainstays of my pitching staff will be my two seniors, Mark Silverstone and Mike Steinberg.”

  I had to read the line again just to be certain it wasn’t my imagination playing tricks.

  “Silverstone is my number one starter, and juniors, Andy Makrides and Steve Coan, will be two and three,” the article read. “About Mike Steinberg,” Kerchman went on to say, “the senior right-hander will be my late-inning relief specialist, as well as an occasional starter. He has excellent control and an effective sinker, both important weapons for a closer.”

  I read the interview over again before it sunk in. A closer? Me? I’d pitched some relief in the past, but I’d mainly been a starter since I was thirteen. Had Kerchman all the while been grooming me for this role?

  Two more articles spotlighting Silverstone and me soon appeared, one of them in The Chat, written—unbeknownst to me—by my own staff reporter. Add Julie’s urgings to the mix, and how could I pass this up? I had to at least call Kerchman’s bluff on this one, didn’t I? Besides, whatever else I might be, I was, goddamn it, a pitcher. If I went back it would be because I needed to play ball and because I wanted to be part of this team. Of course, in the back of my mind there was this tiny voice reminding me that I still needed to prove myself to Kerchman, this hard-bitten coach whose determination and tenacity were more akin to my own obsessions than I wanted to admit.

  It struck me, then, that I’d been preparing for this moment since seventh grade. Six long years of auditioning for coaches, waiting my turn, kissing ass, and taking whatever garbage and humiliation I had to put up with. Now it would finally be my turn.

  Right from the start, Kerchman made certain to let everyone know just how important I was to this team. During tryouts I stood next to him and the other vets up on the running track. I was also assigned Jack Gartner’s old locker. But most satisfying of all was when Mr. K personally escorted me to the equipment cage and ordered Lenny Stromeyer, our pissant student manager, to issue me a vintage Dodger uniform—one with the little red numbers on the front. I was so giddy, so elated, that I wore the jersey to bed for a week.

  Taking their cues from the coach, all the new players deferred to me; classmates—and even some of my teachers—treated me with a respect I’d never experienced before. On Friday nights I sat with the varsity at the State Diner jock table while the freshman and sophomore girls fawned all over us.

  It was gratifying to have finally gotten here. Still, I wasn’t about to throw any parties. Not just yet. Sure, I’d earned all o
f it. That much I could acknowledge. But I still had to back it up on the ball field. Until I accomplished that, I wouldn’t fully believe that I’d arrived.

  In the preseason Mr. K made sure I got to throw the last two innings of every game, no matter what the score was. I pitched my way out of most every jam, but the exhibition game that mattered most was the one against Long Beach High.

  To everyone else it was just another preseason game. But for me it had a special meaning. The Long Beach shortstop was Larry Brown, the all-Nassau County basketball star, and Julie’s former boyfriend. Baseball, I’m sure, was just a sideline to him. He was already headed to North Carolina on a full ride—the first leg of what would become a most successful basketball career—a career that would eventually put him in the Hall of Fame.

  I started dreaming about the game weeks beforehand. I imagined myself striking Brown out with the ball game on the line, and Julie sitting in the bleachers cheering. In reality, it didn’t quite come down to that. It was close, though. Julie was at cheerleading practice that day, but I did get to pitch to Brown in the last inning. When he came up to bat, we had a 5-4 lead and the tying run was on second.

  Ever since the first inning I’d been scrutinizing him carefully. Initially, it surprised me that Brown was only a few inches taller than I was, and that he had a pretty average build. But what impressed me most was his tenacity and determination. He dove for ground balls that were just out of his reach; he slid spikes high, into every base; he chastised his teammates when they screwed up; he shouted taunts and epithets at us from the bench, trying to get into our heads. And at bat, no matter what the situation was, he battled on every count.