The New York

by Bill Branger

  “You started it, Bailey. Not that I’m gonna sweat your balls and strikes because you never gave the Yankees a break in your life.”

  “You call these spies Yankees?”

  “You are a racist motherfucker,” I said.

  “They’re Communists, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Your mother probably fucked them,” I said,

  “You son of a bitch.”

  But what could he do? We hadn’t even had our first fight.

  Skip Patterson, manager of the Royals, sneered a little. “Well, when we get through, your boys will be on the bus back to where they came from.”

  “Beats having to make a living in Kansas City,” I said to Skip in a friendly way,

  “Okay, boys, let’s let the players duke it out,” Hugh said after he’d started all this shit in the first place. “The Cuban anthem? George must really be losing it,” he added.

  “I'll tell him you sent your best,” I said to Hugh. I turned and walked back to the dugout and descended. I had every intention of going right into the tunnel, back to the locker room, changing clothes, cab it to Fort Lee, pack my shit, and jump in the Park Avenue and not stop until I was halfway to Texas.

  Of course, I didn’t.

  Ramon Suarez is a fastballer and Billy Bacon had taught him a few things in spring training, but I didn’t know if he’d really caught on. This was a real game in a real stadium in a real big city and spring training is playing around in Florida for the senior citizens and every other loafer who doesn’t have something to do in the afternoon. I had my toes crossed.

  First Royal up smacked the first pitch into center. One bounce and caught and in. Welcome to the American League, Ramon.

  The second batter grounded into a sure double play except the second baseman dropped the ball as though he was surprised by it. The crowd was booing when it wasn’t laughing and we were only six minutes into the game. I looked at my watch. I looked out at the Cuban flag. Someone was trying to pull it down and there were security men all over the place. This was about as wonderful as I could have imagined it in my worst, wake-up-sweating, damn-that-tequila nightmare.

  Tommy Tradup swaggered to the plate and I remembered then what I had told Ramon. This was not the time or the place to knock down the hitter, not with two men on. I signaled out to the third base coach, Billy Bacon doing double duty, but he was staring at the flag incident unfolding in left field. Didn’t anybody pay attention to baseball anymore when they went to a game?

  Ramon threw right for Tommy’s head on the first pitch.

  Bam. Tommy hit the dirt in a sprawl, the pitch missing his noggin by about two inches. Orestes was standing at the plate in his catcher’s gear and shouting at the downed Tommy Tradup.

  I may have overdone it in the locker room when I told Ramon to knock Tradup down.

  Tommy got up and went for the pitcher on the mound.

  Ramon stood there, watching him like a toreador. Maybe he had some inkling of what was going to happen next, because I didn’t.

  Orestes ran out behind Tradup and tackled him and began pounding him in the face.

  This commenced what we call a “brawl.”

  Both benches emptied and the outfielders came in at a gallop and everyone collided about ten feet short of the pitcher’s mound. The object of a baseball brawl is to cram fifty players into a space the size of a phone booth so that no one can hit anyone very hard or seriously. I guess it was up to me to go out and restore order and that was my intention. Unfortunately, this time I abandoned my usual laconic stroll to a fight and it was still going on when I got there. The next thing I knew, I was in the pile of writhing humanity and someone caught me on the chin with his spikes.

  The fight lasted fifteen minutes, which is a long time as baseball brawls go. The umpires in the league are all the size of your average New York City cop on a loving diet of jelly doughnuts. They bullied their way into the meltdown at the core of the fight and began flinging ball players off the center the way you tear the leaves off an artichoke.

  Well, I was certainly ready to call it quits the minute my chin came in contact with someone’s spike. I was bleeding, and I realized that if I’d gone back to Fort Lee instead of staying in the dugout at the beginning of the game, I would not have been nicked.

  But there I was and Hugh Bailey was banishing me from the game even though I didn’t get a lick in. Bailey did the same with Skip on the other side and the same with Tomas, the second baseman, and the same with Tommy Tradup and two or three others.

  On my way down the tunnel, I grabbed Sam the equipment manager. I told him to quiet the boys down and not let anyone else get into a fight.

  He didn’t want to go in the dugout to act for me, but I made him. We were the only two that could tell the players what to do in Spanish and I was banished from the game.

  Quite a game, as it turned out. I watched it on TV in the locker room, drinking a cold beer, sitting on the training table. Something about the fight seemed to have inspired the kids and they came out playing ball.

  The Royals didn’t do much after the fight for the next four innings. Ramon, who was not thrown out of the game, held them down while Raul and the boys pounded on them.

  In the bottom of the fourth, we put two on with one out and then Raul came up to the plate. He has a funny stance, a little bit of a bend to his back leg, and he never waggles the bat, just lets it sit on his shoulder until the pitcher goes into his windup. Then he draws the bat back, nearly horizontal with the plate, as though he knows exactly where the ball will come.

  Turns out he does.

  He cracked it a good one and it went to dead center, which is located somewhere near Scarsdale. I have described Raul’s line drive ability, haven’t I? I swear the thing took off like a clothes line from his belt to the upper deck, without any loft to it at all. Just dead on.

  I had to shake my head because Raul didn’t have a doubt. He was trotting to first, watching the ball fly out of the park, and suddenly the restless boos and scattered cheers were united. George was right. Everyone loves a winner and Raul made the Yankees a winner with that one blow in the middle of the game. Not just for the game but for what this new-style Yankees team was going to mean.

  “Hot damn!” I shouted to my TV set in the locker room and the set hollered back with a chorus of cheers. Even the announcers were excited. Raul went four for four, including the game-winning home run, and Ramon scattered five hits for no runs in a nine-inning performance I wouldn’t have expected out of anyone less than Jack McDowell

  They tumbled into the locker room after the victory exactly like the kids they were, yelling and laughing and slapping at each other and even high-fiving, something they had been learning in spring training. They even slapped me around in that good fellowship way in which men note happy occasions.

  It was infectious, I have to say. The only damper was when George came in to deliver his postgame pep talk.

  “Men! Men! Settle down! That was a great victory out there and we showed the City of New York what we were made of today!” George shouted above the din. Someone threw a wet towel at him and that provoked more laughter, but George was unstoppable. “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship!”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls,” I said.

  “Translate, translate,” he shouted at me.

  — Señor Owner wants to say the pizza and beer tonight are on him and he wishes you Merry Christmas.

  That stopped them a little. Even George, who said, “Navidad? Did you say, navidad?”

  “It means reborn, I said the spirit of the Yankees is reborn.”

  “Navidad” George said again, turning the word over his tongue.

  When the troops were bedded down with their TV sets and beer and pizza, Romero came through and did his count. He was wearing a leather coat he’d picked up from a discount house on lower Broadway and the seams hadn’t started to tear yet. Then Romero left and it was my turn. I bid them all
good night and went down in the elevator and back through the lobby of the East Side Hotel. It was a little past seven and the lobby was full of pregnant women and their babies toddling around in diapers. The place smelled of old age and fear and neglect and loss of hope, or maybe hope never found the front door. Two blind old men played checkers over a coffee table in one part of the lobby. It was terribly sad, all of it.

  I hurried to the street and went over to Second Avenue to get my car from the parking garage, George owned the parking garage and I had a deal Drove crosstown to the West Side Highway, then up the West Side to the GW Bridge and back across to Fort Lee.

  I spent twenty dollars in an Italian restaurant for a plate of tortellini and sauce and a couple of MGD beers. They had highlights of the game on the TV above the bar and everyone was watching. The first highlight was the brushback and the second was the brawl. But the rest of the highlights consisted of Raul Guevara stroking the ball all over the park.

  “That kid knows how to hit,” the barman said to no one.

  “He looks like Reggie Jackson,” said a guy at the end of the bar.

  “Yeah, but this ain’t October,” the barman said. “You think they found a real player down there in Cuba?”

  “If I had a dime for every April hotshot the Yankees ever brought up, I’d have enough to pay my bar bill,” the customer said.

  “Well, they won,” the barman said, still staring at the set.

  “One game.”

  “That’s the way they win them, pal, one game at a time.” “Tell me in September,” the customer said.

  “I dunno, maybe that guy Ryan Shawn ought to get kicked out of every game,” the barman said and laughed. It was certainly a thought.

  20

  Charlene called me around ten that night. I’d had the phone machine on and it had recorded three or four hangups. I mentioned this to her.

  “I don’t like leaving messages on machines, Ryan, It’s like being kept waiting.”

  “I would have called you as soon as I got in.”

  “Where you been?”

  “Putting the troops to bed,” I said,

  “My, my, does a manager do all that?”

  “Manager do what a manager gotta do “

  “They say on TV you got cut.”

  “Got a spike in the face. Don’t worry. I’m still handsome as I ever was.”

  “I really didn’t believe you were going to go through with this,” Charlene said. “Someone at the hospital says to me today that they wanted to know how I felt about you being on a team full of wetbacks.”

  “And you said?”

  “I said you liked it just fine.”

  “And they said?”

  “They didn’t say nothing more to me if they knew what was good for them.”

  “You don’t have to get in no fights on my account, Charlene.”

  “Oh, I don’t, do I? I suppose you never thought of the effect this was going to have on our relationship, did you?”

  “I know I didn’t want you getting all balled up by it, Charlene. You got your life and I got mine and the only thing that’s important is that we got each other.”

  “We’ve got each other. Do we, Ryan?”

  “Don’t we?”

  “Well, I know you got baseball and what I got is people feeling sorry for me that I got you “

  “Well, don’t let people’s pity get you down. It’s a game and it’s a salary and after next September, I’ll be back in Houston to stay and we can be thinking on opening up the health food place.”

  “Ryan Patrick, what if I was to say right now, ‘Just quit.’ Would you?”

  I paused for a long moment. “No, Charlene, I wouldn’t. I’ve come this far, might as well see the thing played out.”

  “I didn’t say quit, I said ‘what if,’ but you gave me your answer anyway, didn’t you?”

  “I guess I did,” I said. “I love you, Charlene Cleaver, right down to the soles of your pretty little feet.”

  “But not that much,” she said. She was getting in a mood or she was in a mood. Depended on when this all started with her.

  “Well, I just wanted to see if you were all right and it appears you are.”

  “I miss you, Charlene. We play the Texas Rangers beginning of May on the West Coast trip.”

  “I know when you’re next in Texas, Ryan, I can read a schedule.”

  “I know that, Charlene. I just want to say how much I miss you,” I said in my quiet, gentle way.

  “Oh, Ryan,” she said.

  Well, there it was. She was doing Scarlett O’Hara and I was doing Bronco Billy. Different themes.

  “I do want to be happy,” Scarlett said.

  “I want you to be happy.”

  “I really hate what you’re doing.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Everything wrong,” she said.

  Well, that doesn’t lead to a whole lot of discussion. So I kept quiet and waited for her.

  “Well, Ryan. I got to go now “

  “Stay and talk a while.”

  “You miss me?”

  “I told you that.”

  “Well, you can say it again “

  “I miss you, Charlene.”

  “All right. Well, I got to go now.”

  “Charlene —”

  Click.

  I could call her back, but what would be the point of that? She was in a mood and I suppose someone had said something to her that was worse than she’d told me and it had made her mad — angry — and the next thing had led to the next thing and now I was about two thousand miles too far away from her.

  I knew how she felt.

  ! could even have sympathy for her point of view. It’s a terrible thing when a man gets all involved in something as basically silly as baseball. I used to look at baseball uniforms from a different perspective, and they looked dumb to me. That bothered me because I was wearing a uniform, too, so I put the thought out of my mind. Baseball is full of things like that. Take a catcher’s gear — the mask, the mitt, the crotch pad, and the chest pads — the whole getup is as basically silly as a woman wearing a corset with little clips holding up her stockings. On the other hand, you don’t think of things like that when you’re seeing them the way they’re supposed to be seen, sort of in context.

  My head was full of this kind of thinking. Always is, when I’m trying to figure out what it is exactly that Charlene wants. She wants me to quit the game but she wouldn’t have any use for me if I did — I know that — so what was it that she wants?

  Hell with it. I opened a can of beer and turned on the TV and started watching my old friend Clint Eastwood. He would have been as puzzled by Charlene as I was, I knew that much.

  21

  The players got their first death threat of the season delivered by messenger to their rooms in the East Side Hotel. It was Day Two of the season, as the more pretentious sports writers like to put it.

  The threat was wrapped in a box of candy that, when Orestes read the threat, no one ate. (Later turned out the candy wasn’t poisoned and the cops in the crime lab ate the evidence.) The threat was in Spanish, which was good thinking because I’m not sure the boys would have understood it in English. It said they would all die very soon and die most painfully if they did not go back to Cuba where they came from. Something like that.

  Of course, the boys didn’t tell me about it for a couple of days because they were still trying to decide if they trusted me. But when Tío was almost run over by a cab when he decided to take a midnight stroll around the East Side after a game, they spilled it. (Turned out the cab driver was just a regular guy showing a regular cabbie’s contempt for any and all pedestrians, not just Cubans.)

  This is a wonderful country because we have a lot of experience dealing with death threats. George took it very seriously and so did the cops. So did the FBI, which was called in on the matter. Everyone had a good time, particularly the tabloids, which went to the sleaziest of extremes
, speculating this was a plot by Castro to embarrass the United States. As if he needed any help.

  The death threat made me sick to my stomach and I thought it would do the same to the kids, but I was wrong. Maybe, being an American, I take death threats more seriously than they do. Maybe it was their Cuban macho.

  Whatever it was, they greeted the Boston Red Sox visiting town in the next series like the poultry man greeting a crate full of chickens,

  George, in his cynical way, had been right about filling the ballpark when you have a winner. The old loyalty days are over, for players as well as fans. Give them a winner and they’ll show up, George started getting celebrity requests for tickets and “Larry King Live” had him on to talk about his breakthrough in Latin American relations.

  It was cold in the Stadium for the Boston series, which consisted, naturally, of night games. But still the people came out and cheered and applauded and drank George’s four-dollar beers. I did tell George to lose the Cuban lag and anthem and he had the good sense to do it after the New York Times ran an editorial saying the lag was “inappropriate.”

  We banged Boston the way we banged Kansas City. Suarez was learning. He was a fastballer and I was trying to teach him a slider the way Deke had taught me. And I was teaching him about the plate as the plate is in the Bigs.

  The batter don’t own the plate. He knows it, which is why he blusters so much. It’s a hard thing to hit that little ball coming at you at 95 miles an hour in the best of times. It comes down to instinct, and when you’re a little light on instinct, which most hitters are, you bring in other tools. Like intimidation.

  The rubber is 60 feet 6 inches from the crown of the plate. That works both ways. The hitter, after all, does have this big stick, and when he takes his practice swings, he is showing the top end to the pitcher and threatening him with it. So the pitcher has got to see the ball as a threat, too. Show the hitter who really owns the plate and the boxes around it.

  — I could hurt someone (Suarez told me when we were practicing one afternoon in the bullpen).

  — Hurt him or he’s gonna hurt you.

  — I don’t want to hurt anyone.