Keystone Kids

by John R. Tunis

  It was a pop-up, a foul fly. Klein’s mask was on the ground, his head upturned, as he twisted and then started toward the Giant bench. Close, closer, closer. So close it was dangerous. None of the Giants called or warned him.

  “Look out, Jocko, look out, Jocko!” Spike’s voice was drowned in the uproar as the catcher went on. Don’t tell me that guy isn’t a ballplayer! Boy, is he a ballplayer!

  His upturned face followed the ball, his mitt was close to his chest as it descended. Now he was on the edge of the step. He tottered, held out his mitt, caught the ball, and fell heavily into the mass of scattering players below.

  There was a moment’s delay. Then he limped slowly out of the dugout with the ball in his fist.

  So into the seventh, the eighth, the ninth. The run which had looked big earlier in the game now looked as big as a thousand. Pinch hitters came in for the Giant pitchers, relief men took the mound, runners were substituted for slow men on the bases. Still the score remained one to nothing.

  Then the end, the last of the ninth, with the crowd screaming for a score, a run, only one run to tie it up and send the game into extra innings. The Giants got a man as far as second with one out. The Giant captain then came to bat and hit a long, lazy single to center field.

  The runner on second was the Giant third baseman who had lost the ball and then made the wide throw to the plate to let Klein score. He was out for blood. Waved on by the coach at third, he set sail for home, head down, his arms swinging, determined to score if he killed someone. But he was competing against another throwing arm as good as anyone’s in the league. Roy Tucker, charging in, took the ball on the first hop and threw smoothly to the plate. It needed a better than average throw to beat that runner, and the center fielder delivered just that—a throw waist high, right on a line into Klein’s mitt.

  The Giant runner, ten feet away, heard the plop of the ball in the glove even before he could start his slide. He knew he was out, knew his team was beaten, knew a slide was futile. So angrily he hurled himself at the catcher. Klein was braced to meet the shock and protect the plate; but even so the force and fury of that charging drive was too powerful. The Giant came in, knee up. Klein tagged him and then shot away. There was a bump, a bump you could hear all over the field, a bump that would have lifted anyone but a rugged catcher clean out of the ballpark. As it was, Klein went sprawling head over heels in the dirt beside the plate.

  With agony Spike watched from the cut-off position halfway to the box. Hold it, Jocko; hold that ball, kid. Hold it and you’re the people’s choice, you can run for president in Brooklyn.

  He held it. He had it in one clenched fist. He waved it in the air and then tossed it away. He was going into the Giant player with everything he had.

  “Well... fer cryin’... out... loud!” Inside the clubhouse old Chiselbeak, his arms full of dirty towels, paused in mid-passage. In the alcove, where Doc Masters sat on his rubbing table, was a small bench with a portable radio on it. From the radio came the fantastic story of Jocko Klein. No wonder Chiselbeak stood motionless, no wonder the Doc listened with open mouth. Klein, the Jewish catcher of the Dodgers, was in a fight.

  “... Boy-oh-boy... they’re slugging it out now, all right... there’s a punch... and another... Taylor lets him have it with both barrels on the jaw... Casey, the plate umpire, jumped Klein... the catcher shook him off like a rat... now other players are rushing up... but the two men are still slugging... they’re really slugging now... they’re in close... wow!... wow!... was that a punch! Oh, what a sock... Klein gave it to him hard... and again... there goes Taylor... he’s tumbling... he’s down... he’s out... and sixteen men have jumped Jocko Klein and yanked him away...

  “Just hear that roar over the ballpark... hear that crowd howl... hear them go... wait a minute... I think... yes... there it comes... there it comes... the old heave-ho... the old heave-ho for Klein... there goes Klein... off the field for him... boy, will he get a fine slapped on him for this afternoon’s work!”

  No wonder Chiselbeak stood there motionless with the dirty towels in his arms; no wonder the Doc sat with his mouth open, as they both listened. No wonder both were speechless.

  Then the outer door opened and a figure appeared. He was dirty, he was wet, his monkey suit was torn, the strap of one shin guard had broken and flapped ridiculously at his heel, his face was strangely red. As he entered he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving it smeared with blood. His eyes were swollen, his cheeks and his jaw were raw and bruised.

  The towels were slipping from old Chiselbeak’s arms. “Well, fer cryin’... out... loud, Jocko! Fer cryin’ out... loud!”

  21

  THE TEAM STEPPED from the express at North Philadelphia the next morning into an oven. The heat reached out and slapped them in their faces as they left the air-conditioned train. Taxis were fireless cookers. The dressing room at Shibe Park was a steam bath. Someone with a newspaper remarked that it was the hottest July twenty-seventh in Philadelphia for eighteen years.

  The heat destroyed you, beat you down. Even under the roof of the dugout you sat gratefully on a towel, wondering how the bullpen pitchers could stand it out there in the sun in deep right field. As usual there was a sparse crowd scattered through the big double-decked stadium; you expected sparse crowds playing the Phils. But the torment of the weather was bad, and for the Dodgers it was accentuated by three rabid fans who sat just above the dugout.

  This trio, huge fellows in their shirtsleeves, spent the afternoon amusing themselves by pounding on the roof of the Dodger dugout with empty pop bottles and needling the Brooklyn players as they went up to and returned from the plate.

  The strain had begun to tell. After that hard-fought victory over the Giants of the previous afternoon there was a let-down, and the Phillies were making the most of it. They scored once in the third, knocked McCaffrey out of the box in the fourth by scoring two more runs, and hit Rog Stinson for a couple more in the sixth.

  Losing to a team in first or second place is one thing; but you hardly figure to drop games to the Phils so easily. To make things worse, toward the closing innings that pound-pound-pound above their heads became as agonizing to the tired nerves of the Dodgers as the tom-tom of savages in the African jungle. In the field reliable players like Harry Street let grounders go through or mis-timed pop flies. While at the plate the whole batting order was tied up in knots.

  Especially annoying was the hammering of the fans at Jocko Klein. A week before, perhaps even a few days before, the shouting of the fans would have been taken philosophically as part of the game. But a few days had passed, and the feeling of the team had changed. They felt differently; they had to feel differently since he had licked the Giants almost single-handed the day before and had become a fighting, scrapping ballplayer. As the Dodgers returned to the bench after the end of the seventh, the three fans became more raucous than before. Spike moved over to Paul Roth, telling him to be ready to take his raps for the pitcher if a rally should start. In front of the dugout Klein, on one knee, was unbuckling his shin-guards. The fans in the box above saw him and burst into a frenzy of abuse.

  “Aw... yer Jew-boy, you’re yeller, ya big bum.”

  “Yer yeller kike, look out there or he’ll pare yer beak offa ya.”

  It was too much. Half the team were instantly on the step of the dugout, holding on to the roof, looking up toward the leather-lunged lunatics in the box above. The catcher, his back turned, his neck crimson, stood up to unfasten the straps of his chest protector.

  “Yer yeller, Klein, ya know ya are.”

  Bob Russell, standing beside Swanny, felt himself getting warmer than the weather. It was too much.

  “Hey there, you guys,” he shouted. “Lay off! Cut that out!”

  It was exactly what the fans wanted, the first sign all afternoon that their needling of the team had any effect. In unison the three thumped the dugout roof with their empty pop bottles, and one large shirt-sleeved figure r
ose from his chair.

  “Come up and make us, ya bum, ya.”

  “Lissen, mug,” yelled another, “if you don’t like it ya know whatcha can do, don’t ya?”

  “Hey there, Klein,” shrieked a third. ‘You’re yeller, you know you are; you can’t take it, you Jew-boy.”

  That settled it. They were a team and one of the team was under fire. It was time to act.

  “Come on, boys,” said the second baseman of the Dodgers. Grasping the edge of the dugout he hauled himself up with one motion and scrambled over the roof toward the box and those shrieking fans.

  Now Bob Russell was a favorite with everyone on the club. A manager can’t have favorites or be a favorite either. But the whole team loved their peppery little second baseman, and they didn’t intend to watch him go into battle alone. Right on his heels were big Swanson and Harry Street. And Raz Nugent. And Roy Tucker, death in his eyes, armed with a formidable looking fungo stick.

  Fists flew. So did bats, chairs, rolled newspapers, anything which could be used as a weapon. The three fans fell before the onslaught of the furious Dodgers. Not, however, without a struggle. It was one of the best free-for-all fights in baseball history, involving players, fans, ushers, attendants, policemen, and various customers from the vicinity who couldn’t bear to see a fight without mixing in. In three minutes the boxes above the Brooklyn dugout resembled a tank battlefield. All the while the cause of the encounter was sitting quietly on the bench underneath, waiting for the game to continue and his turn at bat to come round.

  Finally the smoke of battle cleared away. The loud-mouthed fans were rushed off by policemen and green-uniformed attendants, and the players led by Bob Russell, scarred but happy, climbed down from the boxes, over the dugout roof and back inside, bearing an assortment of abrasions, contusions, and lacerations as evidence of the conflict. Most of the crowd was unaware of the exact cause of the battle; but ball crowds love a fight, a fight in plain view on the diamond against the visitors or the umpires if possible; yet any kind of a fight is better than none. When Swanny stepped to the plate he was greeted with applause.

  He responded by smacking the first pitch to the left for a single.

  Red Allen immediately singled, too.

  Roy Tucker came up. He looked dangerous and was passed, filling the bases.

  Now the sparse, apathetic crowd was up yelling, and the Phillies’ catcher and pitcher met together in the middle of the path down to the mound. Karl Case waited for a full count and then tripled to the barriers, four hundred feet from the plate, clearing the bases.

  A new hurler came rapidly across from the bullpen to stifle the Dodger rally. Harry Street promptly greeted him with a scorching double down the left field line. In the coaching box back of third, Spike felt the whole team begin to move at last, to move as a team.

  Gosh, something has happened. Something has given way. Something has broken the tension. Now we’re really moving. We’re off at last!

  Bob came up to the plate and worked a base on balls. Then Jocko Klein ambled forward. The whole Dodger dugout was on the step, not one or two or a few, but all of them—the subs, the players, the relief pitchers, even old Chiselbeak who had come out from the lockers with a towel over his shoulders, all yelling through their hands. All behind the boy in the batter’s box.

  “Give us a hit, Jocko...”

  “You can do it, you can do it, Jocko old kid...”

  “Put one up in Aunt Minnie’s room...”

  “All right, Klein old boy, here comes the big one... the big one coming, Jocko...”

  The Philadelphia pitcher saw them shouting, looked around nervously at the men on first and second, took the signs. He felt the team backing the man at the plate, felt he was not only trying to outguess one hitter but facing the whole club, determined and united. The boy felt it, too, felt the rise of team spirit, heard above the noise of the stands the voices of men he knew. There was a ring to them, a sound he had never heard before. This was it. This was it at last. They fought for me up there in the boxes; they’re with me. I’m the catcher of the Dodgers now!

  He was warm all over and not from the burning sun either. He gripped his bat, gripped it hard. Let’s see your pay pitch, big boy. I’m ready for it.

  The man in the box slowed up on him. He swung hard for a strike. The shouts from behind were louder than ever. Then the pitcher tried foolishly to sneak one over. It was an outside corner fast ball, the one he wanted. He gave everything he had.

  From the shade in the coaching box back of third base Spike stood on tiptoes watching the ball in the haze of the afternoon. Oh, boy, he pickled that one... I think... I hope... yessir... the kid sure pickled that one!

  The Phillie right fielder was burning up the ground, tearing desperately back for the catch, running hard for the fence, getting ready to turn and jump, slowing down, standing there panting, his arms on his hips, his head in the air. The ball descended slowly over the right field wall.

  22

  HE CAME OUT OF the tiny dressing room adjoining the larger one, and stood in the doorway looking over the roomful of naked, half-naked, and half-dressed players. Tommy Heeney of the Eagle walked past and spoke.

  “Well, Spike, those three games over in Philadelphia sort of set you up, hey?”

  “Uhuh.” When you don’t say anything, as Grouchy often remarked, you don’t ever have to eat your own words.

  “You’ve won four games straight.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Your biggest winning streak of the season, isn’t it? If you grab this off today you’ll be in fifth place.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Think you can win the pennant, Spike?”

  It was meant, as he knew, for a joke or possibly the foundation of a wisecrack in Heeney’s column the next morning. But Spike Russell, trained in a hard school, in Grouchy’s school, merely answered, “We gotta chance.”

  Not much there. The sportswriter passed along, leaving the manager leaning against the door, surveying his team as they got ready for the Cards in that critical series which might make or break them for the year. Ordinarily he would have held a meeting. Ordinarily he would have gone over their hitting, cautioned his men about their playing, about the importance of every game now. Not today. This team was keen. This team was ready to go.

  He tried to look at them objectively, men he knew, had liked, admired, loved, disliked, or hated at various times; men he had, he hoped, finally succeeded in molding into what was called a team. And what was a team? It was everything in sport and in life, yet nothing you could touch or see or feel or even explain to someone else. A team was like an individual, a character, fashioned by work and suffering and disappointment and sympathy and understanding, perhaps not least of all by defeat.

  A team was made up of equal parts of Bob’s pep and fire and vinegar mixed with Roy’s quiet determination when things went wrong. It was those big flat muscles on Rats Doyle’s stomach as he pulled on his shirt. It was the warm friendly way in which Red Allen was putting surgeon’s plaster on a blister along Harry’s thumb. It was Karl Case’s drive and push in the clutch when he forgot his batting average and was trying hard to win for the club. It was Raz Nugent’s imagination which kept them laughing off the field. It was Fat Stuff’s reliability. It was the nervous power of Swanny straining for an impossible low liner that was sinking fast, a liner most men would have played safe as a hit. It was the harnessed energy of Elmer McCaffrey when he was bearing down in a difficult situation. It was the courage of Jocko Klein, sliding into the plate on his stomach, hands out to be chewed by the spikes of the catcher defending home plate above. It was all these men and all these qualities that made a team.

  He knew them, knew them all, knew them even better than their parents, better than their wives and children would ever know them. He saw them when only the man showed through, when all defenses were down, when nothing counted except what they had underneath. He knew them best, yet there we
re things about them that even Spike Russell did not know and could never know.

  He knew that in the crisis of a game, in the late afternoon when the shadows covered him, Harry Street was the most dependable third baseman in the league. He did not know that a Calvinist named Herald van Stirum fought in the religious wars at Leyden in the low countries or that his son would join a band of men who called themselves Pilgrims, and end up across an ocean in the New World. He knew Elmer McCaffrey would go out on the mound with a lame arm or a bad side and pitch his heart out until he had to be hauled away from the mound, that he would stand there stubbornly in the last innings with the bases full and a slugger at bat, suffering so he could hardly breathe yet insisting he was all right. But he didn’t know that the McCaffreys were fierce Catholics, one of whom died under Charles First fighting Cromwell at Marston Moor. Nor that his descendant still in kilts, kilts of khaki, dirty and brown, but kilts nevertheless, was overrun by the hordes of the Mahdi and fell near Gordon on the steps of the Palace at Khartoum.

  Spike realized that of all the team Swanny was the most daring, but he did not realize that this was in his blood, that it came from a man with a flowing yellow mane who went into battle singing hymns with Gustavus II at Lutzen.

  Nor did Spike know that in ’62 a boy named Tucker marched off from a New England farm to die with the Second Connecticut Volunteers at Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley, nor that the regiment against them was the Third North Carolina State Troops commanded by a man named Russell. Although he knew a Russell was an officer in the Confederate army, he did not know that a peppery, leather-lunged little fellow full of fire and spirit fought beside Andrew Jackson on the shell-swept rampart of the Rodriguez Canal at New Orleans. He didn’t know that a red-bearded man named Allen had piled his family and goods into a wagon after the Civil War and, with his rifle on his knees, whipped up his horses and started west. Over the Mississippi, through the frontier regions of the Middle Border, out into the desolate prairie where you had to be ready for anything, across the Rockies and into the sunbaked lands along the Pacific. Spike did not know this. He would have been surprised to learn that Red Allen came from men who were quick on the draw, that some of his courage and alertness came from men who had been used to facing danger.