by Philip Roth
“Kleptomaniac’s what the coach there called him,” said the Deacon.
“Same thing,” said Cholly. “Why, we had a fella down in Class D when I was just startin’ out, fella name a’ Mayet. Nothin’ got by that boy. Why, Mayet at short wasn’t much different than a big pot of glue out there. Fact that’s what they called him for short: Glue. Only trouble is, he threw like a girl, and when it come to hittin’, well, my pussycat probably do better, if I had one. Well, the same exact thing here, only worse.”
“Okay,” said Kid Heket, “I see that, sorta. Only how come he run over to field a pop-up and stoled the pencil right off your ear, Cholly? How come he took our towel away, right in the middle of the gosh darn game?”
“Heck, that ain’t so hard to figure out. We been havin’ such rotten luck this year, you probably forgot just who we all are, anyway. What boy wouldn’t want a towel from a big league ball club to hang up and frame on the wall? Why, he wanted that thing so bad that when the game was over, I went up to the doc there and I said, ‘Doc, no hard feelin’s. You did the best you could and six to zip ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed of against big leaguers.’ And then I give him the towel to pass on to that there kleptomaniac boy when he seen him again. So as he didn’t feel too bad, bein’ the last out. And know what else I told him? I give him some advice. I said, ‘Doc, if I had a shortstop like that, I’d bat him ninth and play him at first where he don’t have to make the throw.”
“What’d he say?”
“Oh, he laughed at me. He said, ‘Ha ha, Jolly Cholly, you haf a good sense of humor. Who efer heard of a first-baseman batting ninth?’ So I said, ‘Doc, who ever heard of a fifty-year-old preacher hurlin’ a shutout with only three days’ rest—but he done it, maybe with the help of interference on the last play, but still he done it.’”
“Them’s the breaks of the game anyway!” cried Nickname. “About time the breaks started goin’ our way. Did you tell him that, Cholly?”
“I told him that, Nickname. I told him more. I said, ‘Doc, there is two kinds of baseball played in this country, and maybe somebody ought to tell you, bein’ a foreigner and all—there is by the book, the way you do it, the way the Tycoons do it—and I grant, those fellers win their share of pennants doin’ it that way. But then there is by hook and crook, by raw guts and all the heart you got, and that is just the way the Mundys done here today.’”
Here the team began whooping and shouting and singing with joy, though Jolly Cholly had momentarily to turn away, to struggle against the tears that were forming in his eyes. In a husky voice he went on—“And then I told him the name for that. I told him the name for wanderin’ your ass off all season long, and takin’ all the jokes and all the misery they can heap on your head day after day, and then comin’ on out for a exhibition game like this one, where another team would just go through the motions and not give two hoots in hell how they played—and instead, instead givin’ it everything you got. I told the doe the name for that, fellers. It’s called courage.”
Only Roland Agni, who had gone down twice, looking, against Lunatic pitching, appeared to be unmoved by Cholly’s tribute to the team. Nickname, in fact, touched Jolly Cholly’s arm at the conclusion of his speech, and whispered, “Somebody better say somethin’ to Rollie. He ain’t takin’ strikin’ out too good, it don’t look.”
So Cholly the peacemaker made his way past the boisterous players and down the aisle to where Roland still sat huddled in a rear corner of the bus by himself.
“What’s eatin’ ya, boy?”
“Nothin’,” mumbled Roland.
“Why don’tcha come up front an’—”
“Leave me alone, Tuminikar!”
“Aw, Rollie, come on now,” said the sympathetic coach, “even the best of them get caught lookin’ once in a while.”
“Caught lookin’?” cried Agni.
“Hey, Rollie,” Hothead shouted, “it’s okay, slugger—we won anyway!” And grinning, he waved Big John’s liniment bottle in the air to prove it.
“Sure, Rollie,” Nickname yelled. “With the Deke on the mound, we didn’t need but one run anyway! So what’s the difference? Everybody’s gotta whiff sometimes! It’s the law a’ averages!”
But Agni was now standing in the aisle, screaming, “You think I got caught lookin’?”
Wayne Heket, whose day had been a puzzle from beginning to end, who just could not really take any more confusion on top of going sleepless all these hours, asked, “Well, wasn’t ya?”
“You bunch of morons! You bunch of idiots! Why, you are bigger lunatics even than they are! Those fellers are at least locked up!”
Jolly Cholly, signaling his meaning to the other players with a wink, said, “Seems Roland got somethin’ in his eye, boys—seems he couldn’t see too good today.”
“You’re the ones that can’t see!” Agni screamed. “They were madmen! They were low as low can be!”
“Oh, I don’t know, Rollie,” said Mike Rama, who’d had his share of scurrying around to do that morning, “they wasn’t that bad.”
“They was worse! And you all acted like you was takin’ on the Cardinals in the seventh game of the Series!”
“How else you supposed to play, youngster?” asked the Deacon, who was beginning to get a little hot under the collar.
“And you! You’re the worst of all! Hangin’ in there, like a regular hero! Havin’ conferences on the mound about how to pitch to a bunch of hopeless maniacs!”
“Look, son,” said Jolly Cholly, “just on account you got caught lookin’—”
“But who got caught lookin’? How could you get caught lookin’ against pitchers that had absolutely nothin’ on the ball!”
“You mean,” said Jolly Cholly, incredulous, “you took a dive? You mean you throwed it, Roland? Why?”
“Why? Oh, please, let me off! Let me off this bus!” he screamed, charging down the aisle toward the door. “I can’t take bein’ one of you no more!”
As they were all, with the exception of the Deacon, somewhat pie-eyed, it required virtually the entire Mundy team to subdue the boy wonder. Fortunately the driver of the bus, who was an employee of the asylum, carried a straitjacket and a gag under the seat with him at all times, and knew how to use it. “It’s from bein’ around them nuts all mornin’,” he told the Mundys. “Sometimes I ain’t always myself either, when I get home at night.”
“Oh,” said the Mundys, shaking their heads at one another, and though at first it was a relief having a professional explanation for Roland’s bizarre behavior, they found that with Roland riding along in the rear seat all bound and gagged, they really could not seem to revive the jubilant mood that had followed upon their first shutout win of the year. In fact, by the time they reached Keeper Park for their regularly scheduled afternoon game, one or two of them were even starting to feel more disheartened about that victory than they had about any of those beatings they had been taking all season long.
4
EVERY INCH A MAN
4
A chapter containing as much as has ever been written anywhere on the subject of midgets in baseball. In which all who take pride in the nation’s charity will be heartened by an account of the affection bestowed by the American public upon such unusual creatures. Being the full story of the midget pinch-hitter Bob Yamm, his tiny wife, and their nemesis O.K. Ockatur. How the Yamms captured the country’s heart. What the newspapers did in behalf of midgets. The radio interview between Judy Yamm and Martita McGaff. A description of O.K. Ockatur, who believed the world owed him something because he was small and misshapen. What happened when the midgets collided in the Kakoola dugout. The complete text of Bob Yamm’s “Farewell Address.” Exception taken to the Yamms by Angela Trust. In which the Mundys arrive in Kakoola to defeat the demoralized Reapers. A Chinese home run by Bud Parusha travels all the way to the White House; a telegram (purportedly) from Eleanor Roosevelt; wherein a trade is arranged, the one-armed outfielder for the despised
dwarf. A conversation between Jolly Cholly Tuminikar and the aging members of the Mundy bench, surprising in its own way. An account of “Welcome Bud Parusha Day,” with the difficulties and discouragements that may attend those who would exchange one uniform for another. The disastrous conclusion to the foregoing adventures.
IN SEPTEMBER of that wartime season, with the Keepers and the Reapers battling for sixth, Kakoola owner Frank Mazuma signed on a midget to help his club as a pinch-hitter in the stretch. The midget, named Yamm, was the real thing; he stood forty inches high, weighed sixty-five pounds, and when he came to the plate and assumed the crouch that Mazuma had taught him, he presented the pitcher with a strike zone not much larger than a matchbox. At the press conference called to introduce the midget to the world, the twenty-two-year-old Yamm, fresh from the University of Wisconsin, where he’d been the first midget ever in Sigma Chi, praised Mazuma for his courage in defying “the gentleman’s agreement” that had previously excluded people of his stature from big league ball. He said he realized that as baseball’s first midget he was going to be subjected to a good deal of ridicule; however, he had every hope that in time even those who had started out as his enemies would come to judge him by the only thing that really mattered in this game, his value to the Kakoola Reapers. In the final analysis, Yamm asked rhetorically, what difference was there between a midget such as himself and an ordinary player, provided he contributed to the success of his team?
“The difference? About two and a half feet,” said Frank Mazuma, taking the mike from the midget. “And let me tell you something else about little Mr. Yamm here, gentlemen. Every time he comes to bat, I am going to be perched up on top of the grandstand with a high-powered rifle aimed at home plate. And if this little son of a buck so much as raises the bat off his shoulder, I’ll plug him! Hear that, Pee Wee?”
Chuckling, the reporters rushed off to the phones (supplied by Mazuma) to get the story to their papers in time for the evening edition.
Sure enough, the first time the midget was announced over the public address system—“Your attention, ladies and gentlemen, pinch-hitting for the Reapers, No. ¼, Bob Yamm”—a man wearing a black eyepatch, an Army camouflage uniform, a steel helmet, and carrying a rifle, was seen to climb out through a trapdoor atop the stadium at Reaper Field and take up a firing position on the roof. Needless to say, he did not find it necessary to pull the trigger; in Yamm’s first ten pinch-hitting assignments, not only did he draw ten walks, but he was not even thrown a strike. Even the sinking stuff sailed by the bill of his cap, and of course when the opposing pitchers began to press, invariably they threw the ball into the dirt, bouncing it past the midget, as though he were the batsman in cricket.
In the interest of league harmony, the other P. League owners had been willing to indulge the maverick Mazuma for a game or two, expecting that either the fans would quickly tire of the ridiculous gimmick, or that General Oakhart would make Mazuma see the light; but as it turned out, Kakoolians couldn’t have been more delighted to see Yamm drawing balls in the batter’s box (and Mazuma taking aim at him from the stadium roof), and General Oakhart was as powerless as ever against Mazuma’s contempt for the time-honored ways. When the General telephoned to remind Mazuma of the dignity of the game and the integrity of the league (and vice versa), Mazuma responded by calling a second press conference for the articulate Bob Yamm.
“I have it on very good authority,” said Yamm, impeccably dressed in a neat pin-striped business suit and a boy’s clip-on necktie, “that the powers-that-be have threatened to pass a law at the next annual winter meeting of the owners of the Patriot Baseball League of America that will bar forever from any team in the league anyone under forty-eight inches in height. This, may I add, even as our country is engaged in a brutal and costly war in behalf of freedom and justice for all. To be sure, such a law, if passed, would only be the outright codification of that very same ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that has operated since the inception of the eight-team Patriot League in 1898 to prevent people of my stature and proportions from competing as professional baseball players.
“It is my understanding that these people now intend to launch a systematic campaign of slander against me, suggesting that I, Bob Yamm, am not entitled to the rights and privileges such as our Constitution guarantees to every American, but rather that I am—and I quote—‘a gimmick,’ ‘a joke,’ ‘a farce’—and what is more, that my presence on a major league diamond constitutes a ‘disgrace’ to the game that calls itself our national pastime. Gentlemen of the press, I am sure I speak not only for myself, but for all midgets everywhere, when I say that I will not for a single moment permit these self-styled protectors of the game to deny me my rights as an American and a human being, and that I will oppose this conspiracy against myself and my fellow midgets with every fiber of my being.”
Frank Mazuma, whose motto was “Always leave ’em laughin’,” immediately quipped, “Every fiber of his being—that’s sixty-five pounds worth, fellas!”—and so the reporters departed once again in high spirits; but that Yamm had made a strong claim upon their feelings was more than obvious in the evening’s papers. “A midget to be proud of,” one writer called him. “A credit to his size,” wrote another. “A little guy with a lot on his mind.” “Only forty inches high, but every inch a man.” One columnist, in as solemn (and complex) a sentence as he had ever written, asked, “Why are our brave boys fighting and dying in far-off lands, if not so that the Bob Yamms of this world can hold high their heads, midgets though they may be?” And the following week a famous illustrator of the era penned a tribute to Yamm on the cover of Liberty magazine that was subsequently reprinted by the thousands and came to take its place on the walls of just about every barber shop in America in those war years—the meticulously realistic drawing entitled “The Midgets’ Midget,” showing Bob in his baseball togs, his famous fraction on his back, waving his little bat toward an immense cornucopia decorated with forty-eight stars; marching out of the cornucopia are an endless stream of what appear to be leprechauns and elves from all walks of life: tiny little doctors with stethoscopes, little nurses, little factory workers in overalls, little tiny professors wearing glasses and carrying little books under their arms, little policemen and firemen, and so on, each a perfect miniature of his or her fully grown counterpart.
All at once—to the astonishment even of Frank Mazuma—the entire nation took not only brave Bob Yamm to its heart, but all American midgets with him, a group previously unknown to the vast majority of their countrymen. Until Bob Yamm’s entrance into baseball, how many Americans had even taken a good long look at a midget, let alone heard one speak? How many Americans had ever been in a midget’s house? How many Americans had ever taken a meal with a midget, or exchanged ideas with one? What did midgets eat anyway? And how much? Where did they live? Did midgets marry, and if so, whom? Other midgets? Where did they go to find other midgets? What did midgets do for entertainment? Religion? Clothes? To all of these questions the ordinary, full-grown man in the street had to confess his ignorance; either he knew nothing whatsoever about the American midget, or what was worse, shared the general misconception that they were people of dubious morality and low intelligence, belonging to no religious order, befriended only by the sleaziest types, and constitutionally unable to rise in life above the station of bellhop, if that.
Following the publication of that cover drawing of Bob Yamm, photo stories began to appear with almost weekly regularity in Sunday papers around the country, reporting on the valuable work that local midgets were doing, particularly in behalf of the war effort: photos of midgets with blowtorches crawling down into sections of airplane fuselage far too small for an ordinary aircraft worker to enter; photos of midgets in munitions plants, their feet sticking up out of heavy artillery pieces—according to the caption, spot-checking the weapons against sabotage prior to shipment to the front. There was even a contingent of midgets, recruited from all around the country, shown
in training for a highly secret intelligence mission; for security reasons their faces were blacked out in the photo, but there they sat, in what appeared to be a kindergarten classroom, taking instruction from a full-grown Army colonel.
On the lighter side, there were photos of midgets having fun, the men dressed in tuxedos, the women in floor-length gowns, celebrating New Year’s Eve at a party complete with champagne, streamers, noisemakers, false noses, and paper hats. There was a photo story one week in the nation’s largest Sunday supplement showing a pair of married midgets at home eating a spaghetti dinner (“Doris does the cooking usually, hut spaghetti ’n meatballs is Bill’s own specialty. From the looks of that big smile—and even bigger portion!—it sure seems like somebody enjoys his own cooking in the Peterson household”) and another of a midget standing in the Victory Garden out back of his house, pointing up at the corn. (“‘Just growin’ like Topsy!’ says Tom Tucker, of his prize-winning vegetable patch. Tom, known throughout his neighborhood for his green thumb, modestly chalks his outstanding harvest up to ‘dumb luck.’”)
What one photo story after another revealed, and what was at first so difficult for their fellow Americans to believe, was that midgets were exactly like ordinary people, only smaller. Indeed, after Mrs. Bob Yamm had appeared on Martita McGaff’s daytime radio show, the network received letters from over fifteen thousand women, congratulating them for their courage in having as a guest the utterly charming wife of the controversial little baseball player. Only a very small handful found the program distasteful, and wrote to complain that hearing a midget on the radio had frightened their young children and given them nightmares.
* * *
“I only wish all of you out there in radioland,” Martita began, “could be here in the studio to see my guest today. She is Mrs. Bob Yamm, her husband is the pinch-hitter who has major league pitchers going round in circles, and she herself is cute as a button. Welcome to the show, Mrs. Yamm—and just what is that darling little outfit you’re wearing? I’ve been admiring it since I laid eyes on you. And the little matching shoes and handbag! I’ve never seen anything so darling!”