As forlorn as I felt, I couldn’t really blame her. I was the one, after all, who was leaving. For the final few weeks of the summer, I didn’t let on that I knew, and Julie didn’t say anything that would make me suspect her. Whatever might happen when I was gone, she was determined that we’d enjoy the time we had left together.
On the day she drove me to La Guardia, Julie orchestrated a dramatic and touching farewell scene. She wore all black—black raincoat, tight black Bermuda shorts, and a black form-fitting sweater. And her bobbing ponytail was tied in a bow with a black ribbon. It’s an image that would linger in my imagination for a long time afterward.
On the long plane ride to L.A., I had a lot of time to think. A whole phase of my life was over, and a new one was about to begin. The reality of it had begun to sink in when I was packing to leave. I was rummaging through my stash, looking for my old baseball memorabilia—the Topps and Bowman baseball cards, the Dodger yearbooks and Ebbets Field programs, my collection of Sports Illustrated magazines. I couldn’t find any of it. When I called my mother to ask where it was, she confessed that she’d thrown everything out before the move.
I felt bereaved, of course, and for a while, inconsolable. During the entire plane ride, I brooded about my losses. Yet just as we were descending, my stomach hollow with fear, I felt a tiny flicker of hope.
It hit me for the first time that I was following the Dodgers again. In the past, their ability to come back from failure and loss had helped me to persevere. I knew, of course, that the Dodgers were only a baseball team. But as the plane touched down, it was momentarily reassuring to think that perhaps I wouldn’t be the only New Yorker out here who was starting over again.
Epilogue
In April of 1959, Mike Mandell, a UCLA fraternity brother, invited me to the Dodgers’ opening-day game. Mike’s father, Harry, a minor studio exec, had managed to score three field boxes behind the Dodger dugout. Initially, I’d turned the offer down. That piece of my life was over, I told myself. But three days later, my curiosity got the best of me.
The Coliseum is a one-hundred-thousand seat football palace that in the ‘50s and ‘60s housed three teams; UCLA, USC, and the LA Rams. The Dodgers had temporarily moved there because their new park at Chavez Ravine was still under construction. At the local taxpayers’ expense.
As a baseball stadium, the place is a spectator’s nightmare. The inner structure is a round, dirty white concrete slab with no tiers, no upper deck, and no backs on the bleacher style seats. Like most football stadiums, the interior is a widening band of concentric circles. The higher you sit on the circle, the farther away you are from the game.
And what about these oddities?: there’s more room in foul territory behind the plate than on the entire left side of the field; and the left field wall is only two hundred and fifty feet away from home plate. A windblown fly ball to left stood a chance of drifting over the outfield screen. And because the right side of the field angles out away from the plate, a four-hundred-foot fly ball to left or right center is a routine out.
The ceremonial speeches by city officials, turncoat Dodger brass, and a few Hollywood celebs were pompous and self-serving. Except for Duke Snider, Johnny Padres, and Gil Hodges, whose best years were behind them, most of the players I remember either had been traded or had retired.
None of this seemed to bother the fans, though. Once the game began, they acted as if they were mildly charmed by what was happening on the field. Every time a player hit a high pop fly, they cheered like it was a home run. But by the third inning, most of the conversation I overheard was about movie agents, lunch meetings, and script deals. Nobody spoke the old Ebbets Field lingo. Only a handful of people even took the trouble to score the game. Some of the Hollywood types, in fact, couldn’t seem to figure out what the numbers in the scorebook mean.
“How come the first baseman is wearing number 14, and the program says he’s number 3?” asked a peroxide blonde in pedal pushers and spike heels.
I wasn’t even tempted to explain it to her.
I also noticed that there were only a handful of fathers and sons in the stadium. At eighteen, I was one of the youngest males in attendance.
Most of the crowd looked like they’d been shipped over from Central Casting. Many of the older men wore garish, flowered shirts and monogrammed sun visors. Some of the younger ones even brought their surfboards. Several women dressed in gauzy see-through blouses, form-fitting short shorts, and flip flops. And I saw a few in halter tops and bikinis as well. Every two innings, the celebrity wanna-bes would preen for the TV cameras; and all throughout the game there was an unbroken flow of traffic to and from the concession stands. By the seventh inning of a one-run game, the Coliseum was less than half full. When I left that afternoon, I knew I would not return.
In the fall of ‘59 I went back to New York and enrolled at Hofstra College. At nineteen, I was a typical college kid; I went to fraternity parties, slept in, and chased girls. I pitched middleinning relief on the baseball team, majored in English and wrote sports for The Chronicle, the school weekly. My vague hope was to someday become a writer and teacher.
That year I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Major League baseball. When I went to Yankee Stadium, I joked to friends that I was only there as a tourist. But in the winter of 1960 I stumbled across a Newsday article announcing the upcoming demolition of Ebbets Field.
How could I not attend? Perhaps, I’d find some closure here.
A bone-chilling, late February morning. For the first time in years, I took the Green Bus Line and Flatbush Avenue IRT to the Eastern Parkway stop. Alone. I walked down Franklin Avenue and saw the light towers of Ebbets in the grey distance. When I reached Empire Boulevard, I instinctively turned left and walked through the marble rotunda, past the boarded up ticket windows, before heading up the third base grandstand ramp.
The first thing I saw when I reached the portal was the huge, black scoreboard in right field. I gazed around the outfield for a last look at the old Abe Stark, “Hit This Sign and Win a Suit” billboard, and the fire engine red Tydol Flying A sign.
I closed my eyes, and for a moment I was twelve years old again. But the reverie faded when I looked out at the brown outfield grass and saw jagged ruts and bare patches, the residue from two years of stock car races and neglect. Then, below me, I noticed the shabby looking blue box seats, surrounded by faded, chipped red railings.
A sparse crowd, maybe a few hundred men and three or four women, huddled behind the third base dugout. But they weren’t waiting for autographs. We’d all gathered here to witness the demolition of Ebbets Field. In the crowd, I recognized two of the old players; Carl Erskine, always a winner, always a classy guy. Standing next to him was the unfortunate Ralph Branca. Who’d have expected that kind of loyalty from Branca, a man who was so unfairly maligned by the fans and press? Was it penance he was seeking here?
Lucy Monroe sang the National Anthem just as she’d done at countless Dodger games. But the speeches were canned eulogies. Some phony Brooklyn politico with bad teeth droned on, informing us—without any sense of irony—that Ebbets Field was now forty-six years old. But I was thinking about Walter O’Malley, the owner who sold out millions of naive, loyal, baseball fans like me. I recalled the scene in The Great Gatsby where Jay Gatsby introduces Nick Carraway to Meyer Wolfsheim, the character who was based on Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who allegedly conspired to fix the 1919 World Series. As Nick shakes Wolfsheim’s hand he thinks: “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”
The demolition crew were fittingly outfitted in Dodger-blue windbreakers; and as the giant white-washed, red-lined “headache ball” crunched into the third base dugout, chunks of concrete and splintered wood flew in all directions. I felt a terrible ache in the pit of my stomach. Then I caught my breath and closed my eyes again. I could see myself sitting in the centerfield ble
achers watching Duke Snider camp under a lazy fly ball. The Duke is casually patting the pocket of his mitt, waiting to gather in what Red Barber used to call “an easy can of corn. “In another flashback, I imagined Jackie Robinson crouched between second and first base, hands on knees, waiting for Newk, Ersk, Padres, or “the Preach” to deliver the next pitch.
I was jolted back to the present when the “headache ball” smashed into the right field scoreboard. The concrete beneath me started to quiver. It felt like a minor earthquake.
As I walked slowly back to the subway that morning, I made a promise not to attend another Major League ball game.
After the Coliseum charade and the demolition of Ebetts, it was easy to stick to my promise. That is, until 1962 when the newly formed Mets moved into the Polo Grounds. I had a brief flirtation with the Mets, but it was mainly because going to the Polo Grounds reminded me of the days when I was still on fire for the game, back when my father used to take us to watch the Giants play here. Once Shea Stadium was built, though, I lost interest again.
Though I no longer followed Major League baseball, I continued to pitch and play fast pitch softball throughout graduate school and for a good piece of my early teaching career. I finally quit playing at age forty-five.
Kerchman, too, would figure in my life for a long time after high school. When I was in college I’d sometimes stop by to watch the team scrimmage. Occasionally I’d pitch batting practice. Each time I went back, Kerchman made certain to praise me to his players. Sometimes I wondered if that’s why I did go back.
After college, I moved to Michigan to attend graduate school. I didn’t see Coach K again until the 25th-year class reunion. He seemed mellower, more fragile looking—even somewhat wistful. Kerchman was a year or two away from retirement, and yet it still amazed me how he could recall so many specific games and situations from the years when I’d played for him.
He was as complimentary toward me as he’d been ever since my senior year. He was proud, he said, that I’d become a teacher. Because that’s the way he thought of himself, as a coach who tried to set an example for his players. We all have our own myths, I guess.
Ten years ago, I was rummaging through an old trunk when I found the Kelly award. I cradled the medal in the palm of my hand and read the inscription: “Courage, Character, Loyalty.” Next to the small white box was a copy of a short memoir my brother had written about his own high school baseball days. Mr. K, it seems, had treated Alan the same way as he’d handled me. He made him sit on the bench for three seasons before playing him only sporadically in his senior year. When he finally got his chance, Alan made the most of it. That season, 1963, Far Rockaway won its only city championship—thanks in good part to my brother’s contributions. So at the season ending banquet, Alan was naturally disappointed that he didn’t win the Kelly award. It would have been a most fitting ending.
As I thumbed through the memoir, I stopped when I came across the following passage:
In his locker room speeches, Mr. K talked about this little Jewish relief pitcher whose uniform didn’t fit and who didn’t have a whole lot of talent. But the boy, he sa id, always seemed to be at his best under extreme pressure. In fact he’d bring this kid into impossible situations—tie game, bases loaded no outs, that kind of thing—and he’d say to him, “Son, I want you to get me two ground balls and a pop fly. “And that pitcher, my brother Mike, would somehow figure out a way to get the other team to hit two ground balls and a pop fly.
As I scanned the passage, my first response was: a typical Kerchman ploy—the old rah-rah psych job for the benefit of the rookies. But I was moved by what I’d read. Some part of me understood—maybe for the first time—that in his own perverse way Mr. K had given me what I had been asking for all along: a nod of acceptance from one kind of Jew to another.
Acknowledgments
My special gratitude to Martha Bates, my editor, who knows a lot more about baseball than I do. Her ongoing support and honest, unflinching critiques made this a much better book. A special thanks as well to Maureen Stanton, who read every word of every draft and offered pointed suggestions and guidance each step of the way.
Thanks also to Jack Driscoll whose friendship, encouragement, and critiques were invaluable.
To Edward Chalfant, Don Murray, Steve Tchudi, Jaimy Gordon, David Bradley, and Robert Shekter—my mentors and teachers.
To Robert Root, Skip Renker, Tim Jeffrey, John Boe, Marc Sheehan, Tom Ray, and Anne Marie Oomen—all of whom read early drafts and offered much needed direction.
To Lev Raphael, Gersh Kaufman, Pauline Adams, Jim Heaven-rich, Dr. Mary Berman, Mimi Schwartz, Lee Hope, Jaimee Wriston Colbert, Marcus Cafagna, Sue Silverman, Lynda Reichert, Phyllis Barber, Philip Cioffari, David Cooper, Michelle Cacho-Negrete, Shirley Eicher, Susanne Rose, Tanya Whiton, Gloria Nixon John, Patti Aiken, Trisha Heller, and Nick Z. Monet—for their ongoing support and counsel.
To the staff at the MSU Press: Fred Bohm, Julie Loehr, Sylvia Robine, Julie Reaume, and Annette Tanner—for their enthusiasm, hard work, and dedication to books and literature. My gratitude as well to Kristine Blakeslee for her precise copy edits and knowing advice.
To Philip Spitzer who suggested I write this memoir in the first place.
Finally, to Carole, my partner and kindred spirit who believed in this project and in this writer from the very beginning.
The Dzanc Books eBook Club
Join the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1st of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints, Other Voices Books, Black Lawrence Press, Keyhole, Disquiet, and Starcherone. For more information, including how to join today, please visit http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Author’s Note: This memoir is in part a work of imagination and memory. The persons, places, and situations are real, and the dialogue is reconstructed as best I can remember it occurring. The names and other identifying characteristics of some of the people have been changed.
Parts of this memoir have been published as stand-alone pieces. The author would like to thank the editors of the following literary magazine’s and anthologies: The Missouri Review; New Letters; The F1orida Review; Sport Literate; The MacGuffin; The American Examiner; Baseball, I Gave You the Best Years of My Life; Baseball Diamonds: Tales, Traces, Visions, and Voodoo from a Native American Rite; The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction
Two stand-alone memoirs, Trading Off and Chin Music, were cited as Notable Essays in Best American Essays, 1995 and 1999 respectively. Trading Off was cited as Notable Sports Writing in Best American Sports Writing, 1995.
Copyright © 2003 by Michael Steinberg
Cover Design by Awarding Book Covers
Cover photo, Ebbets Field Exterior, used by permission of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, N.Y.
Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org
This 2013 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Dzanc Books was created in 2006 to advance great writing and to impact communities nationally by building and supporting literary readerships, creative writing workshops, and events offered across the country. As a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, Dzanc publishes innovative fiction and supports several editorially i
ndependent imprints and literary journals. It provides low-costing writing instruction to beginning and emerging writers by connecting them with accomplished authors through the Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions, and runs a writers-in-residence program that puts published authors in public schools. Dzanc also awards an annual prize to support a writer whose work shows literary excellence and who is engaged in community service. Through its International Literary Program, Dzanc organizes an annual writing conference held in Portugal.
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.DZANCBOOKS.ORG
FOLLOW US:
@DzancBooks and Facebook.com/DzancBooks
Dzanc Books is one of a select group of
publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
Still Pitching Page 25