by Chris Lynch
“I must be,” he answered, and I believed I could see the first evidence of bashfulness out of Napoleon Charlie Ellis. He was always kind of reserved, but it was never the same as shyness or anything like that.
I liked it.
“Didn’t know you could be bashful,” I said.
“I am not,” he said, to his feet again.
“Leave him alone,” Beverly said, laughing a bit. She shoved me off the curb. “I bet you’d be bashful too, if anybody ever had a reason to compliment you.”
I got back up to the curb. “I’m full of a lot of things, but bash ain’t one of ’em,” I said, and shoved her this time, into Napoleon.
He barely reacted, even though Redheaded Beverly knocked him off his straight and narrow and he had to have noticed since he was watching his feet so closely. He did manage a smile, though, even if he did try not to share it.
“My bus is coming,” Beverly said. “But also, I wanted to ask, are we on for this Saturday?”
Napoleon Charlie Ellis and Richard Riley Moncreif answered simultaneously.
“On what?” said I.
“Certainly,” said he.
He and I looked at each other while Beverly enlightened us. “The youth symphony. It’s this Saturday morning, and you said you would go. Remember the bet?”
Rats, I thought. But I had to do better than that.
“Can’t. Napoleon and I have the batting cage booked for then.”
“We can cancel that,” he said. “The symphony would be grand.”
“Grand?”
“Cool,” Beverly said. “It’s at ten.”
The bus was almost there. She stepped off the curb.
“Beverlyyy,” I whined.
“You gave your word,” she said.
“So give it back,” I said.
She waved me off, disgusted. “If you really don’t want to go, Richard, I’m not going to force you. That would be pointless.”
“Dynamite,” I said. “Thanks, you’re a sport, Bev. Tell us all about it on Monday.”
“We will,” Napoleon said slyly.
“Dynamite!” Beverly said as she jumped on the bus.
I was so dumbfounded all I could do was stutter and splutter at him. “Wha... baseball, Nappp... we were suppp... you can’t just...”
Napoleon’s mood had gone up several notches, and it was his turn to try and pull me through a rough spot. He did a bad job of it, though.
“There will be other days, Richard,” he said with his hand on my shoulder. “It is only baseball, after all.”
“Only... baseball? Only baseball? Man, have you been listening to anything I’ve been trying to teach you?”
His seriousness came back. At least the appearance of seriousness. “Yes, Richard, I have been listening. But a lot of it... a lot of it is nonsense.”
For somebody so polite, he was getting pretty free with knocking me around.
We were just about to go our own ways, but I had to make the point. “So, symphony with Beverly on Saturday morning and dinner with me on Saturday night. See? Who says you’re hopeless? Just imagine how many friends you’d have if you made a little effort to get along with people?”
He shook his head. “Get along,” he said, brushing me off.
WINTER HAVEN
SATURDAY MORNING. I WAS up, as planned, bright and early to get my cuts in. They had the nets strung up all over the humongous Northeastern University gym, for their ballplayers to get in their first work of the season. I was already weeks ahead of them, so it was only right that I should have the place to myself first.
The custodian was good about it as long as you didn’t crank up the machine. His idea of cranking up the machine was getting it to throw pitches hard enough to bruise a banana.
But I didn’t mind. A slow groove was fine enough with me. It was, after all, mighty cold outside, even for me, and my hands would hold up longer over the season if I didn’t freeze them into splinters in spring training.
And there was another reason the slower pace suited me. Fred Lynn.
Fred Lynn.
He was almost here. I could just about smell him.
I had heard about him as far back as his college days at USC. Followed him to the minor leagues, even caught a few glimpses of him on the sportcenter end of the six o’clock news, which will tell you something right there since almost nobody in this town cares enough to look at some kid who might come to the Sox two years from now. Not with the Bruins and the Celtics and once in a while even the Patriots playing big-time major league sports right now.
So I’d been patiently paying my dues, waiting, hearing about him coming around the corner for a while now like he was the bingling music of the ice-cream man a block away on the hottest day of the year. I even went and joined the Boy Scouts for a week in the spring of 1974 because I heard they were making a trip to Pawtucket to see the triple-A farm team with Fred Lynn on it. I went on that trip, and it didn’t matter whether Fred Lynn was hitting or roaming around center field or drinking lemonade in the home dugout of McCoy Stadium, I could not take my eyes off him.
Because he did it all so well. Every stride, every stretch, every gesture, every stroke, he did like nobody I had ever seen before. He did it like he was supposed to be doing it, like he was never supposed to leave the field because he was built purely for baseball and baseball was built purely for him. We had been waiting for Fred Lynn forever. At least I had been. I know a lot of people felt that way, and I know a lot of people thought he was special, but I refuse to believe anyone felt it like I felt it and there is one more thing I was sure of that day at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, at the end of my one and only week as a Boy Scout of America.
I was sure that, while I could not take my eyes off of Fred Lynn, he was watching me as well.
That is true. Time, after time, after time, when I stared down on Fred Lynn so hard you’d think he would have felt the heat of my vision burning holes in his Pawsox cap, it turned out he felt it indeed. For no apparent reason he would stop looking at the batter from center field, stop sizing up the pitcher from the batter’s box, and he would look right at me.
How many people can say that? If anybody else says it was them he was looking at, they are imagining it.
And then, finally, there he was. February 1975, there he was with the rest of the Sox in Winter Haven. He was doing his thing and doing it on the major league diamond, not with all the kids who were going to play maybe next year or the year after. Fred Lynn was with us, and was never going to be leaving us again.
And I had to be him. There was nothing else to be. Everyone was going to want to be Fred Lynn eventually, I was certain of that. Of course they were. Who wouldn’t? But he was mine. I had believed before anyone. So when there was the big rush to be Fred Lynn, it was only right that I would be Fred Lynn first. Well, second anyway.
His instincts were perfect. When he ran, he did not blow you away with his speed, but at the same time he appeared to reach every ball hit catchably to center field. He could not have covered more ground in less time if he had somebody driving him, and he didn’t run to greet the ball so much as he glided. He never ran the wrong way when he heard the pop of the ball off the bat, and if the hit reached the warning track or was going over the wall into the bull pen, he would time his leap perfectly and never, ever, lose a ball once he got a glove on it.
Even more than saving home runs, though, I loved to watch him come in on a short ball. As if he was somehow doing the calculations of time and distance and trajectory and drop in his head while at the same time running just like a kid who was doing it for plain fun instead of for his profession, Fred Lynn was always arriving to the spot where the ball was trying to get to the ground just in time to stop it from getting there. Flopping and sliding and tumbling all over the place, he still never seemed like he was out of control or one inch off the mark. I swore if he closed his eyes and ran straight ahead he would still wind up with the ball in his glove. And
the perfect grass of the Fenway outfield would cradle him like a baby. The finest field in baseball, groundskeeper Joe Mooney’s Fenway lawn. Finest field in the world.
That world now belonged to Fred Lynn. He controlled it totally.
But the stroke was the thing. It was the most perfect and beautiful thing I had ever seen. I know that other people, like Beverly, can hear it in music. I can’t hear music. Some people see what I’m talking about in ballet, or in the shapes of sculpture.
But I don’t see that. I see it, and believe that I see somehow everything that is good and right and important, in a flawless, speedy and powerful swing of a baseball bat in pursuit of a ball.
And I never saw it perfect until I saw Fred Lynn. God gave it all to Fred Lynn.
And he gave Fred Lynn to me.
And I was going to repay him by learning to be great myself. Which was going to require some work. Beginning with the small job of turning myself from a right-handed hitter into a left-handed hitter. I was only half kidding about that. I would in time go back to the right side because I was already too far along. But I felt like I could understand what Lynn did better, I could get him down, if I did it by the numbers. By his numbers. I wanted to be over there, in his shoes, and feel it.
It felt funny. Strange at first, but not entirely foreign. I had taken a few cuts from the left side before because if you truly want to be the best hitter you can be you have to at least briefly toy with the idea of being a switch hitter. I toyed with it very briefly. Because I ran out of patience quickly when I realized it wasn’t nearly as fun working from the other side. I did okay as a lefty, but I couldn’t smack the ball the way I was used to and if I couldn’t smack it then I got frustrated, and if I got frustrated I pressed too hard and if I pressed too hard I lost control and hit worse and worse little squibbly nothings. Then I would jump over to the right side, crank a few shots, sigh and smile and never want to leave that box again because the right box was the right box, and I was right when I was in it, and Jeez, why should you have to work twice as hard for something if you don’t have to.
I was younger then. That was before I could see very far into the future. That was before Fred Lynn was sent to me to show me.
So the slow pitch machine was fine for the time being. I dug in my feet, rubbed my right hand all the way up to the end of the bat like Fred did, and calmly sat back waiting for what came.
Pop, not bad. Smack, better. I could do this. Smack again, I was going with the pitches, just the way Fred was doing in Winter Haven as he prepared to use Fenway’s Green Monster left field wall. I couldn’t muscle anything yet, but I could use what the machine gave me, take what I could get, take advantage. Control I would learn first, and power would follow, as I was certain Fred himself had learned.
But what I did not like. What I did not like was the way, for the first time in a long time, I did not feel right with a baseball bat in my hands. I did not feel, instinctively, that I was where I belonged. I did not know without question that I was doing what god and the world and Fred Lynn wanted me to do and it made me weirdly, dizzily, and scarily, nervous. Like I was in the wrong body, in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. Like I did not now understand the world, where I could have sworn I completely understood it a few minutes before.
This could not be allowed. I took a step off the plate and rested the head of the bat on the ground. I closed my eyes and remembered what I wanted. I remembered that baseball would only get better if I learned it better from all angles. I wanted that. Of course I wanted that. I would master this, I would control it. And I would love it even more.
It was going to take a hard head, though.
I stepped back in.
There were a lot of awful swings to get out of my system, and there was nobody there to take it out on when the whole deal made me angry. All there was to do was to keep on doing. Steady. Steady. I could do this.
I took pitch after pitch after pitch, as if to show the pitching machine that it was going to break down before I would. When it ran out of balls I ran to refill it.
Gradually, it came. I’d swing, I’d make contact, I’d recoil into my well-practiced mini-Lynn stance, and I’d snap out at it again. The ball came, I sent it back. The ball came, I sent it back. I was every bit as oiled as the machine that was pitching to me, and after a while just as unconscious of it. The groove I slipped into must have been the thing I had heard long-distance runners talk about, a kind of trance thing that feels like a whole nother kind of life.
Because by the time the machine had emptied once more and sat there just humming at me, wanting to throw something at me but having nothing left, the college guys were already gathering around at the sides, and I never even noticed them coming in. I didn’t even stop hovering over the plate waiting on the next pitch that wasn’t coming, until several of them started clapping for me.
They must have been watching for a while. I felt flushed, embarrassed and proud, but most of all, exposed. I never think of anybody watching me when I’m hitting, because I’m thinking about... hitting. Especially when I had to work so hard at it.
These were baseball guys, though. Not just players, but players. Felt kind of nice, the few splashes of applause. From people who appreciated.
I have always sort of assumed nobody properly could. Appreciate it.
I gave them a short little wave, scooped up my jacket and gloves. I pulled my Bruins ski cap down low, put my Adirondack on my shoulder and hurried on out.
I was standing there on Huntington Avenue, crusted snow under my sneakers, and fresh stuff dropping out of the sky in fat wet flakes that were going to put off real out door spring ball just a little bit longer. That only meant that it would be harder to get other guys to play with me, not that I wouldn’t do it myself. But once I taught Napoleon, once I showed him baseball the way I loved baseball I was starting to feel like he might be the one. The one hardheaded enough to go the route with me. The one guy who, when I turned around on a bitter November afternoon, would possibly be standing there, ready to throw.
You can be better, probably, if somebody pushes you, and that was Napoleon Charlie Ellis. He was a lot of things I had never met before.
I could see us in February, and March, and next February and March, taking turns throwing live batting practice to each other while the other guys sat rusting and getting fat before the season. And that with each season we would leave them all further and further behind on our way to being better, and better, and best.
Like Fred Lynn and Jim Rice. The Gold Dust Twins. We could do that. We could outdo that.
My heart was pounding.
Except my twin was wasting away over in Symphony Hall, which... was only a block away. I felt I had a duty.
When I got there, the snow was falling heavily, and I took shelter under the big awning in front of the main entrance. “How long before the concert gets out?” I asked the white-haired doorman.
He looked at his watch. “I don’t know,” he said.
There were several doors, each with its own one of those guys in their red coats, sitting on little wooden stools. I tried the next one. “What time does it let out?” I asked.
He looked at my bat. “What do you plan to do with that, kid?”
I looked at my bat. I had forgotten it was there, up on my shoulder. I shrugged, and watched it move while I shrugged. “Play baseball?”
“Get outta here, ya loon, and stop pullin’ my chain.”
Door number three. This guy didn’t have white hair, because he had no hair. And he had a thin white wire running from the inside breast pocket of that red jacket to his ear. He had a look of concentration fixed on his face as he stared off into what looked like nowhere, except I know better. Enough teachers have caught me doing the same thing.
With a start he caught sight of me coming up beside him and after catching his breath and a look at the Adirondack half frosted in snow, he smiled and tugged the earpiece out of his large fleshy pink ear.
He took my bat, gripping it, weighing it, checking the balance. He pulled the wire out of my ear. “February hitter, huh?”
I shrugged. It felt a little like confession.
He was still balancing the bat, looking at it as he talked.
“That kid Lynn, huh. ...” he said, rubbing a thumb up and down over the grain.
“Ya,” I said.
The man handed me back my bat. “You know, you don’t have to turn the label around toward the back when you’re hittin’. That’s just a myth.”
“Really?”
“Ya, the bat won’t break. Unless you hit it wrong to begin with. Then it don’t matter if you got the label in your back pocket, the thing’ll break. But you’ll be all right, huh? You studyin’?”
I nodded again.
He nodded back. “I was gonna be Ted Williams. Teddy Ballgame. You know Ted, o’course.”
I knew Ted, like everybody who knew anything around here knew Ted. He was a legendary figure, still made the news when he showed up as a roving instructor at Winter Haven. Set a lot of records, took off the best four years of his career to be a pilot in World War Two, then came back and did great again. Hit a home run in his very last at-bat. I knew Ted Williams. But he was no Fred Lynn.
I whispered. I felt stupid saying it out loud, about telling the world, but not about telling this man. “I’m gonna be Fred Lynn.”
“I know,” he said. “You waiting on somebody? Get on in here, and wait in the lobby. Get them hands out of the February.”
So I did. I got to kind of wander around in the warm, red-carpeted lobby, and off in the distance, I could hear the big sound of the orchestra playing something I actually thought I recognized. Why? I had no business recognizing anything in there.
Except. Right, the Esplanade on the Fourth of July. Every Fourth, after watching the Sox beat somebody in the afternoon, practically the whole city listens to the Pops orchestra play this very tune as the fireworks blast off. The 1812 Overture. It’s good, it has cannons. But there was no way the rest of the show could have matched it.