by Bill Branger
It was exactly like getting beat up.
First, I got beat up at the press conference. That lasted about a half-hour. Then I had to talk to this guy on the Spanish radio network. At least he didn’t try to make me out to be something that I wasn’t, which was a fancy Spanish speaker. It was just basic stuff and I could understand him good and he let me take my time with my answers. Then someone who was a producer for WFAN told me I had to go on the air and I did and they beat me up some more about this “Latino team,” as they put it.
Then I found out that Orestes was interviewed for Telemundo, which is a big Spanish television news network, and he said that I was a lousy pitcher and would probably make a lousy manager.
So I did what I had to do.
I had to get their respect and trust and that wasn’t going to be easy because they saw that I was George’s link to the team and that I was more George’s boy than theirs.
I went to Kill ‘Em Dead on Ninth Avenue and ordered an exterminator for the East Side Hotel. I rode with the exterminator in his panel van and we parked in front of the place. You’d think we were bringing the welfare checks — we were greeted like royalty. The exterminator packed on his gear, including a tank he wore on his back, and we went up to the twelfth floor where the kids were living. It was a hell of a dump, worse than I remembered it from that day I stayed there long ago.
The cockroaches were doing the Mexican hat dance all over everything. I could see how this would get people down.
“This is really shit,” the exterminator said in his best medical judgment manner. Like Marcus Welby.
“Bomb’em,” I said.
“You’re not supposed to bomb ‘em,” he said. “You bomb ‘em and they just run to other floors of the hotel.”
“I don’t give a shit about the other floors.”
“Look, we sell a service that —”
“I really want them out of here,” I said.
So we closed the windows and I told the boys what I was going to do as best I could. They got the drift, which means they put on their street clothes and went downstairs while the exterminator set off six or seven sulphur bombs in the halls and the rooms.
The roaches did what they had to do. They scattered to the floors below and above the twelfth.
“This doesn’t, do much for the rest of the building,” the exterminator said to me, as if I cared. I told him to send the bill to George Bremenhaven, care of the Yankees.
That night, I ordered up a dozen pizzas and two cases of beer and the players went back to their rooms and watched me like I was their jailer. Romero came by to do his head count. He was staying at the Essex House, a fact I noted to the assembled players. They resented it, the way I wanted them to, but they still resented me, too.
I wasn’t finished.
“Orestes,” I said.
— What do you want?
— I want to beat you up. But I don’t suppose that would suit either of us. So I’m sending you back to Papa Fidel the first flight I can arrange.
— You are? Who you going to use as a catcher? Tio? Tio can’t handle the left handers.
— I know that, but I know I need your shit a lot less than that. You got off bad-mouthing me on Telemundo even before the ink was dry on my contract. I don’t need that kind of shit.
— You can’t send me back home. I got a contract.
— I don’t give a flying fish fuck about your contract, Orestes. You been dogging me from the first day in Havana and I don’t need to put up with your shit anymore.
— You can’t do that.
— Watch.
There were four or five in the room when we were saying these things.
They were eating pizza. The place still smelled faintly of sulphur fumes.
Orestes eyed me and I did the same to him. He wanted to see the bluff in my face, but there wasn’t any. I figured it out coming over with the exterminator that I had to do something to get their attention, sort of make an example of someone. Do a nice thing like get rid of the roaches and bring them pizza and beer and then drop the hammer on one of them, the trouble-making son of a bitch.
— I don’t wanna go back.
— You been doing everything you can to go back except buy the ticket yourself. I’ll buy it for you, I don’t need someone like you on the team. There’s no / in team.
— What?
— There’s no / in team.
— What does that mean?
“There’s no I in team," I said in English.
Orestes looked around him and spread out his hands like I was a crazy person. That’s what hanging around with George gets you.
— It means your ego is too big for this team.
— And yours isn’t? What do you know about managing?
— About as much as you know about playing against real big league hitters, Orestes, which is nothing. You guys are the toast of Havana, but you want to notice no one is noticing that. They’re dogging you, the whole league is dogging you. You all got this attitude and Orestes has got it worst of ail, and if I got to put up with playing with you for the next season, then I don’t have to put up with your snotty shit. You’re all a bunch of spoiled kids and you all don’t play baseball nearly as well as George was led to believe.
I hadn’t intended the thing to turn into a speech, but it turned out that way. I stood there, looking around at them. Nobody said anything for a moment, not even the clown Tio. Maybe it was dawning on them that this was serious shit.
Raul took a step out of the circle.
— Señor, please.
I waited.
— Everything is so different to us.
His voice was soft, his eyes were soft. Was this a con? I thought it might be, but I listened. But Raul responded with silence.
— How you think it is for me? Last year I was wrapping it up. Sixteen years in the Bigs and going home when I got a chance to play another season. I took it. I even took it when I found out my teammates were going to be a bunch of kids from Cuba who’d never been out of the country before and might not be any good at this game. I took it because I like to play ball. It’s all I ever knew how to do. So maybe I regret it now, bet it’s too late for that. I got to play and you got to play.
— Señor, please. (Raul held out his hand in an expressive way.)
— We are afraid.
— Afraid of what?
— Afraid of everything.
— Well, that’s a lot.
— The players from the other teams call us names, we are clinging to each other because there is no one else to hold on to. We have been picked by El Supremo, we did not choose ourselves. We have families in Cuba, we have kin who have gone to Miami, yet the people — Cuban people — in Miami hate us because we are Communists. I am just a baseball player, Señor Ryan, like you are. Just a baseball player. My fiancee waits for me in Havana. My heart is heavy, I cannot even sleep at night. And what is this place we are in? New York. It is large and frightening and there is no one but ourselves to depend on, so we become …
Here he used both hands to squeeze an imaginary thing between them.
— Tight. Together. Us. Orestes is afraid as we all are. We are like soldiers when the president sent them to Angola. One was my uncle. He did not want to go to Angola. We had to look at a map to see where this place was. And he was so frightened. Until he was killed.
— Nobody’s gonna get killed.
— But you see, Señor? Don’t send Orestes back, don’t send any of us back, we can play this game. There is just so much to … get used to.
Yeah, shit, yeah. I saw it. I was running around getting the red ass about Orestes and I saw it the way they saw it. Now, I was fairly sophisticated when I came up to the Bigs — I mean, I didn’t spit on the floor or get sexually aroused by hogs or nothing. But I was just another shitkicker kid from Texas and the city dazzled me fairly good. So, yeah, I saw what it was they were facing, first down in Lauderdale and now up here in the city.
&nb
sp; — All right (I said).
What a tower of Jell-O I’d turned out to be in my first big managerial confrontation. “But you guys gotta learn a little English, just work on it some.”
“I can speak English a little,” Tio said then. This surprised the shit out of me, it was like your dog turning to you all of a sudden and telling you he wanted to go out and wee-wee.
“Shit, Tio, you been fucking with me all this time?”
“English I speak like you speak Spanish,” Tio said.
“Anybody else speak English?”
“No,” Orestes said.
“No?”
“Not really,” he said.
“You son of a bitch, you speak English, too?”
“Not really,” he said again.
“You fucking around with me, Orestes?”
“Que?"
“All right, let’s have a show of hands here. Who speaks English?”
One or two hands. But Raul said:
— They speak English a little, but not too much, and they are ashamed to speak English badly.
— As badly as I speak Spanish.
— Exactly. (Raul smiled brightly.)
— If I got to make a fool of myself trying, it’s up to you to make fools of yourselves.
— We can try (Raul said).
— All right. Orestes, I’ll hang on to the plane ticket for now but don’t go bad-mouthing me or the team anymore. In fact, try to stay away from reporters because they just want you to say the wrong thing. And you don’t want Castro reading a bunch of shit that appears up here in the paper. I just want us to be able to field a half-ass decent team and not make us ashamed of ourselves.
“Half-ass?” Orestes said.
— That means one buttock short but at least still in the ball park. “Half ass?” Orestes said again in English.
— Nothing. Forget it.
— Thank you (Raul said then).
—- For what? George is going to end up paying for the pizza.
— For the cockroaches, to make them disappear.
— They come back, you let me know.
— Thank you (Raul said again).
And then there they were all of a sudden, thanking me.
Even Orestes stuck out his hand and smiled for the first time that I could recall. It was all getting so warm and runny that I had to get out of there or I might have bawled. I’m a bawler at heart and it always shows up when I watch old movies, which is why I try never to be in the same room with anyone else when James Stewart comes on the small screen.
That might have made the end of the bad day sweet, but the bad day wasn’t over. When I got back to my studio apartment in Fort Lee around nine at night, there was a message on the recorder from Tommy Tradup.
“Well, hoss, you managed to get old Sparky deep-sixed, you scab-loving son of a bitch,” Tommy said. He was using his six-stinger tone of voice. “But wait’ll we get in New York next week, you son of a bitch, you’re gonna find out you traded your bowl of grits for a sack of shit, you Commie son of a bitch. Just remember.”
Damn, that was a downer. Man hates to get cursed out by ex-teammates on his own damned answering machine. And I knew that no matter how drank Tommy was when he cussed me, he’d remember it the next day. And the next. And the next. The Yankees had a little personality problem with the rest of the league, it seemed to me.
I contemplated this while I made myself a can of chili labeled Texas-style. It wasn’t, it even had beans in it, but I settled in to scarf it down and drink a couple of cold ones while I watched Three Godfathers with John Wayne.
That’s one movie I cry all the way through.
It was better than crying for myself.
19
We opened in Yankee Stadium against the Kansas City Royals and Tommy Tradup.
Only about 41,000 folks decided to come out to see the new style Yankees and about 10,000 reporters from just about every newspaper and radio and TV network in the country.
Of course, being about 16,000 empty on opening day did not at all improve George’s temper, but he had to expect some losses. The tabloids were pounding him every day, and the White House, which had engineered this whole thing to start with, was very quiet, letting George twist out there on his own. You’d think George would have figured it out, but that was pure George, charging through no matter what once he got an idea in his head about something. He wanted to give another pep talk in the locker room before the game, but I told him it would upset the troops, better to give a pep talk after the game.
He was none too happy with me, either, and I hadn’t even managed a single game. It seems the city building inspectors were now all over him about a swarm of roaches infesting the lower floors of his building and he’d found out about the sulphur bombs and threatened to sue the exterminating company for stirring the critters up. And he was withholding money from me for all the pizzas I’d sent up to the team, as though pizza was going to break his piggybank. It’s bad enough to wet-nurse kids, but when you throw in an emotionally retarded owner, it’s even worse.
I closed the locker room door after we’d taken our practice stabs and told the troops what to expect.
— There is resentment out there, boys. Comes from the crowd and from the other team. Now, Stotko is pitching today and he’s about half-man and half-pit bull, which means he’s totally insane. I expect what he’s gonna do is try to scare you.
“Pit bull?” asked Orestes because I had rendered that term in English. It was the way I spoke Spanish. When my lingo didn’t keep up with my thoughts, I just changed horses and blurted out English in the middle of the Spanish stream,
I made a face and a barking sound and Orestes was amused.
— So, boys. Just remember this. This is just baseball and we all play it the same way. But this is no game. Those boys over there on the Royals are mean and mad and they’ll do anything to win. So we got to do the same thing.
— I hate royalty (Tio said).
— That’s it, Tio. Think of them as kings and queens and grand dukes and such. Just knock their crowns off. And Ramon Suarez, when you go out there to pitch, I want you to knock the third son of a bitch on his ass. Number three. Aim for his head. His name is Tommy Tradup and he says that your mothers are all whores.
Tomas just blinked at me a moment. Raul said:
— He said that?
— To me personally one night in the Palm Aire Hotel bar in Fort Lauderdale.
— He doesn’t even know us, nor we him.
— I told you, Raul, that’s the way they are. They think they’re royalty, that’s why they call themselves the Royals. They think you’re all a bunch of ignorant peasant scum.
— That’s not right.
“Fucking A, it’s not right.”
—- I will knock his head off (Suarez said).
— Pitch right for his head, Suarez. Don’t take no shit. That puzzled them a moment.
Then Tío said, in English: “Don’t take no shit.”
“We don’t take shit from anyone,” I said.
Yeah. “No shit from anyone!” Tio said.
“No shit!” they shouted in ragged chorus.
No shit. No shit. It was a mantra they repeated all the way down the tunnel to the dugout. No shit, indeed.
With those inspiring words to fire them, we waited through the opening ceremonies.
George screwed those up royally. Royals and royally. I don’t know how these thoughts crawl into his little brain. They’re like tapeworms or something.
The teams lined up on the foul lines and we were introduced over the loudspeakers and every time a Yankee name was mispronounced, half the crowd booed and half laughed. I didn’t like that at all. But it got worse.
George played the fucking Cuban national anthem.
I didn’t even know what it was at first, but I saw the players standing very stiff and I figured out what it was. The idiot was playing the Cuban anthem! What had he been thinking of? This was the worst thing
since they’d hung the Canadian flag upside down when the Blue Jays got in the World Series that first time. But at least Canada was a friendly country.
The boos were roaring along now. But that wasn’t all. It was more than just the music.
George had posted a Cuban flag in left field, I swear to God. I wanted to run right out there and tear it down, but I couldn’t move. I decided I would never move again, in fact.
When the Cuban music ended, you could have cut through the boos with a butter knife, it was that thick.
A couple of guys — turned out they were from the Cuban community in Miami —- ran out on the field from the third base boxes carrying a Cuban flag as it used to be before Castro. This meant nothing to no one until it was explained the next day in the Times but when the security guards caught up with the guys, the crowd was now more pleasantly restless. After all, they had paid good money to see a ball game, not a political disturbance.
Finally, they played our anthem and the crowd let out a cheer. You would’ve thought it was a bunch of American Legionnaires cheering the troops as they headed off to Desert Storm. I am not a creature of excesses, and excess anything makes me on edge. Ditto for excesses of patriotism. The crowd was telling the boys that they weren’t wanted here. I had a team full of Jackie Robinsons, and it was bad enough for Jackie Robinson when he was one guy out there, but a whole team. I stood with my hand over my heart just the way I was taught to say the Pledge of Allegiance in second grade. The rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. The thing is, I kept thinking- about the old joke about “Jose, Can You See?”
When it was over, I handed the lineup card to the other manager and the umpire at home plate while the kids went out on the field. The ump was Hugh Bailey, and he said, “You got-yourself a real handful, huh, Ry?”
“Semi,” I admitted.
“Man, I’m glad I’m not you,” Hugh said.
“My eyesight’s too good,” I said.
“Starting off, is that it, Ryan?” Bailey said.