by Bill Branger
— There’s only been one player ever got killed by a pitched ball. Think about it, Ramon. Only one in all these years. Hell, that’s statistically insignificant, (Needless to say, the last two words were in English.)
— I don’t know (Suarez said).
Somehow, he got the idea. Foxgrover from the Red Sox teed off on him one second inning, and by the fifth, Suarez had learned. Foxgrover got plunked on the left wrist and trotted down to first, holding the injured appendage and shouting curses at Suarez. The ump shouted a warning and Suarez just nodded. Statistically insignificant.
After two series, we had yet to lose a game and sat atop the American League East at six and oh. Raul Guevara was hitting .489 and Sports Illustrated tried to jinx us by putting Raul on the cover.
Everyone in the locker room had his own copy of SI that week and I tried to calm the boys down by telling them it was a long season and you figured even a good team loses more than a third of its games. These guys were bullet-proof on nothing stronger every night than pizza and beer.
And they were filling the park. It was still cold in New York in April and night games take it out of you sitting in your long underwear through three hours, but the house was filling up. George was humming “My Way” night and day while he checked the receipts.
There was a lot of security at the Stadium normally, but now there was more, reinforced by a detachment of the Finest and a sprinkling of FBI guys casing the layout. The FBI also wanted metal detectors at all gates, so the Stadium began to look more like an inner-city high school The president had surreptitiously laid on a contingent of Secret Service men who are trained to look for assassins. The whole thing made me nervous as hell.
Still, baseball was baseball. When you’re into the game, it’s the only thing there is. You’re aware of the crowds, of course, and cheers are better than boos, but there is this other thing. You are on a field and your teammates are with you and this other team is over there, pros just like you are, and they are watching you. Watching. You want to be good because your salary gets paid on your pitching ERA or batting average, but you also want to be good exactly the way you wanted to be good in high school ball. You just want to stick it to the other side.
Ballplayers tend to be the least sentimental people on earth. It’s a tough haul, getting to the Bigs, and staying in the Bigs is tougher. After you retire, you’re still hanging around to catch some of the atmosphere, but mostly it’s because it took so much out of you to become a Big, you ain’t got nothing left. You sell used cars or golf a lot but, shit, that’s just waiting to die. It’s the reason old ball players have that empty look to them behind the suntan and face-lift and golf pro shirts.
We lost heavy the first away game in Cleveland’s pretty stadium. Ramon Suarez was shellacked in the second inning and he just couldn’t believe it when I pulled him out and put myself in. It was like I was sending him back to Cuba by banana boat.
— Just go on, Ramon, this is no big thing, you just ain’t got it tonight. — I have it tonight and every night, those whores, those Indians.
— No slurs, now, Ramon, just go on and siddown, will you?
Bill Donnelly came out to the mound with his mask in hand and said, “What’s the matter, Ryan? He don’t wanna go? Or you gonna have two pitchers on the mound for the next batter? It doesn’t say anything in the rule book about two pitchers at a time.” That’s umpire humor and it’s good to ignore it whenever its ugly head pops up. It just encourages them,
“Bill, just gimme a minute, willya?”
“Hurry it up,” he said.
Orestes, also on the crowded mound, just glared at him. An ump had thrown him out of the first game when all he’d been doing was protecting his pitcher from the charge of Tommy Tradup.
— Tell him, Orestes.
—- You gotta go sit down, Ramon.
— Why? What have I done?
— You allowed two runs and the bases are loaded, Ramon. Do what the man says.
— He just wants to come in and take my victory away from me.
— Oh, grow up, Ramon (I said).
Shoulders slumped, little Ramon went back to the dugout. The crowd booed him in a cheerful way and he stopped at the dugout steps and gave them the finger. That quieted the booing, of course, the way it always does.
I tried to warm up, which is practically impossible in Cleveland. April is still winter there and that breeze coming off Lake Erie would freeze a well-digger’s ass in mid-shit. But I limbered up as much as any thirty-eight-year-old man can limber up.
It did no good.
After three more runs, I took myself out of the game and appointed a reliever named Rosario to see if he could bandage up.
He did all right the rest of the way, but we didn’t. Raul hit two real long flies out and one triple, but that was pretty much it. Our first loss in the season and on top of that we were in Cleveland. Everyone felt pretty low on the bus back to the hotel and I wasn’t in a mood to cheer anyone up. Romero did his count on the bus instead of coming back to the hotel. His new leather coat was starting to split. He was putting on weight, too.
We had pizza again that night. The capacity of youngsters of any nationality to eat pizza is an amazing one. They never wanted anything else, just pizza. They ate it like they could eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I think it was the only thing they really liked about America. I tried to rack my brain for a substitute, but there was none. Until you’re thirty-five or so, pizza is the greatest food in the world and then your stomach begins to tell you different and you go on to more sophisticated things, like chili. It was a long, grim northern Ohio night. Came the dawn and there were snow flurries in the air.
And that’s the way it went through the first road trip. Life on the road is like a sort of dream you’re walking your way through. I’ve talked to salesmen I’ve met in hotel bars who tell me the same thing. Life on the road is like always playing hooky and the rules of living are all different. You’ve got no real responsibility after you do your business so you act irresponsible and it takes a lot of willpower to keep that under control. On the one hand, you can go around and feel sorry for yourself or you can go around and party your brains out. It takes willpower to know when to stop partying and willpower to know when it’s no good moping in your motel room watching “The Equalizer” reruns.
I saw the kids were mostly in the self-pity mode and I kept trying to think of some way out of it for them.
Pizza was good for them and easy to get anywhere in America. Then we swung by Comiskey Park in Chicago and the White Sox were just the tonic we needed. We beat the shit out of them, three straight.
Deke Williams came to the games and came by after. He was down in the locker room and he was palavering with the kids in Spanish.
“Where’d you pick up Spanish?”
“Sheet, hillbilly, you can’t own a chain of restaurants and not pick up Spanish. Who the hell you gonna get to work for you except Mexicans?”
Deke threw a party for the team on the third night and it was a good one and the boys got laid, those that wanted to get laid, that is. Myself, I didn’t party around because I was thinking of Charlene, And Raul. Poor old Raul, mooning about his Maria, he went home early and I think he didn’t even get drunk.
Like I said, aside from Deke in Chicago, the rest of the road trip was a cold and lonely affair. I had to do something, I thought, because the kids were moping all the time when they weren’t playing baseball. America was big and scary and, in spring, mostly cold. I had to do something. Actually, I had to do it for myself because they’d depressed me, seeing them mope their-afternoons away before a night game, sitting in the lobby, writing letters to their mystic, mythical homeland. Homeland.
It got me to thinking along a different set of tracks.
22
We came home to New York on the last week of April with a decent 8 and 4 road record, which meant we were still leading the East with a 14 and 4 record. Raul was hitting .461, wh
ich seemed to disappoint him because it wasn’t perfect.
One other thing.
I was the one who told the boys to write home at least once a week and made sure that their mail got through. As sere as I could. I arranged it to be sent by Federal Express to Havana in big envelopes and what happened to it from there, I don’t know.
On the other hand, I didn’t expect they would take to writing letters home with such eagerness. It was making them all indrawn. Most of all, Raul.
Well, Raul wrote home every night.
They were letters to Maria Elena Velasquez.
He would sit by himself at the desk in his motel room and just write and write and write, long and loopy, his sentiments paraded out on a page word by word and then page by page.
I knew a little how he felt, but I couldn’t tell him that. I was in love once or twice when I was his age and it hurt bad, being away from home on the road with the team. After a while, I just cauterized the hurt and it healed up. That’s why when Charlene makes me crazy trying to figure out what she wants, I settle myself down with a can of MGD and a stiff dose of a Clint Eastwood movie. Bet Raul was into pain and making himself hurt night after night, alone in his room, writing to his Maria from all the strange places we went to on the road.
I think the road must have been nicer in the old days when they played day games and the teams rode in a private railroad car. Nowadays it’s a jet plane waiting on the runway after midnight and flying halfway to dawn to another city where another bus takes you into another hotel in time to crawl into bed as the sun comes up. It would make a well-adjusted man lonely and most ball players, as far as I can see, are not well-adjusted to begin with.
Back home in New York the team bus took all of us over to the grim old East Side Hotel I went with the troops up to the twelfth floor. Romero came by and did his dreary counting of heads and then disappeared. I wasn’t seeing Romero around that much anymore. I figured he’d found out there was social life in the Big Apple.
The first thing the players did, even before using the bathrooms, was turn on all the TV sets to the Spanish station.
The airwaves were suddenly humming with Spanish voices. Kids are the same the world over, they can’t see a silent TV without turning it on and they can’t wait to ruin their perfect hearing with car speakers or a Sony Walkman turned up to “DEAFEN.”
I looked at the set in Raul’s room. It was Clint Eastwood, but he was talking in Spanish the way he never sounded in English. It was strange and fascinating, like contemplating baseball uniforms. To top it off, it was The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which was an Italian western to start with.
The day was bright and cheerful and cold outside the unwashed windows of the East Side Hotel. We had a day off before the night game tomorrow. I knew the kids would just laze around in their rooms all day, drinking beer and ordering up pizza. I had something else in mind.
— Raul, go down and get the others and tell them to meet me downstairs in front of the hotel in five minutes, will you?
— Why, Señor Shawn?
— We’re going on a little excursion.
— Nobody wants to go on an excursion. We’re tired of traveling. We just want to rest.
— You can rest later.
— I don’t want to go anywhere.
— Look, Raul. It’s more than just going somewhere. It’s spending George’s money.
That awoke his interest. He sat up in bed where he had been lounging and stared at me.
—- Does he know we’re spending his money?
— No. That’s the beauty part of it.
— Is it a lot of money?
— A little here and a little there and pretty soon, we’re talking mucho dollars.
The troops assembled with Latin alacrity, which means they were only twenty minutes later than my five-minute deadline. Hell, I ain’t much of a clock-watcher either, the way the New Yorkers are.
They take time very seriously in New York City, which is why their watches cost so much. I’ve been making do with a Timex for fifteen years and, aside from replacing the battery every two or three years, it works fine and I will compare my time with your time any day of the week.
But I don’t count on clocks, and there are times in Texas when minutes are hours and days just last forever. Those are the good days.
I had chartered this bus in George’s name. I could have used the team bus but that would have gotten back to George through the usual front office grapevine, but this way, he wouldn’t know he’d even hired a charter bus until he got the bill. The troops boarded it with groans and complaints that ceased when they saw it was stacked high with pizza and beer. The driver was a cheerful Puerto Rican named Julio who fancied himself in show business, or at least the dispatcher at the bus company said he was highly entertaining.
And so we took off at one minute before one in the afternoon.
The first stop was the Empire State Building, which Julio announced was the tallest building in the world. This has not been true for some years now, but it certainly looks like it should be the tallest building in the world.
Julio also told us that it was so tall that an airplane had crashed into it once in the 1940s. I didn’t know if that was true or not but it made a good story.
We all went up to the first observation deck, which is out in the open and can give you a dizzy spell if you’re so inclined. The city really sounds loud up there like someone in the apartment below has turned up the bass speakers and let the sound crawl up through the walls. It was also just beautiful, a toy city laid out there just to be played with.
The boys liked this a lot and they babbled together like peps in a cardboard box nuzzling up to their mom. I was even smiling because, actually, in all the years I played for the Yankees, I’d never been up in the Empire State Building myself. In fact, for the first two years, I thought it was the Umpire State Building because that’s what my road trip roomie, Doak Runyon, used to call it. What did I know then? I was just a kid.
Well, when it got good and shivery up there — the wind was whipping us pretty good and most of the kids just had light jackets — we all went back to the elevator bank and waited on a car.
Back in the bus, the mood was a helluva lot more cheerful and I thought this tour thing I had dreamed up was a good idea, Julio the driver started up his spiel again like a demented disc jockey as we cruised along down Broadway toward the tip of Manhattan.
Julio said we were near the Bowery now and that it was filled with bums wearing bowler hats who were dead drunk every morning by eight A.M. Julio and I must have read the same history books, which were slightly out of date. But we didn’t see no bowler hats. The kids didn’t seem particularly interested in slums. They had seen slums. Some of them doubtless lived in slums. Slums are only interesting to sociologists and city planners and the occasional slumlord. To everyone else, they’re boring and everyday enough to be not worth commenting on. I thought Julio blew it there.
When we got down on Wall Street, the traffic was ferocious the way it can be and we weren’t going very fast, but the pizza and beer were holding up and a couple of the kids were actually craning their necks to look up at the tall glass buildings. Julio picked up his beat:
— This is the financial heart of the world, this is Wall Street, which you. Communists hate so much. Take a look, this is America’s center, you might say the center of capitalism. Like the Kremlin was to you people until recently, that’s what Wall Street is to us. We even named a newspaper after it.
Julio, I should mention, was playful and I hoped the kids would respond in the same way. They didn’t seem resentful except for Orestes, who was afflicted with terminal resentfulness, I’d concluded. Tio said to me:
— Señor Shawn, I thought the center of capitalism was in Washington.
— No, no. That’s just politics. The politicians we keep there just spend the money we make here.
— I see.
Well, we made it down to the water and tha
t ship museum they got there. The kids liked that, but it was too damned cold walking around and we all got back on the nice, warm bus and went to the ferry terminal to take a boat to the Statue of Liberty.
It was a bad day for a boat ride. The wind rippled the harbor into waves big enough to make that digested pizza start thinking about an upward exit. Only one of the kids — Tomas — got sick though and I was proud of them.
As we approached the gray lady, I just got goose-bumpy all over, I’d never actually been out there before. Like a lot of New Yorkers, I guess I didn’t have time to be a tourist all those years I was playing.
The kids were quiet, sort of respectful, bet I didn’t expect any deathbed conversions to capitalism. In fact, I didn’t think I could have handled one if I’d got one. What would I have told Romero when he counted heads? Besides, what would I have told George? He had it all worked out with the Cubans to send the kids home at the end of the season and it wouldn’t have done any good to have one of them suddenly start singing “Yankee Doodle,” especially in Castilian Spanish.
When we bumped up to the island in the harbor, we went on shore and to the base of the statue and read the Emma Lazarus words. I tried to render them in Spanish, but there wasn’t much poetry in the way I said them, not the way she wrote it down.
— It says to the world to give us your poor and your hungry and all the others just so they want to be free.
— Free to be hungry? (Orestes said.)
— No, it means give us the lowest class of your society, meaning in the rest of the world, just people down on their luck who want a chance to be free. Send them over here and we’ll take care of them, it says.
— That seems very foolish (Orestes said).
— What if other countries took your offer? (asked Tío).
— They have (I said). That’s why my great-granddaddy come over from Ireland where he couldn’t make enough spit to swallow. That’s why we got all kinds of people here in all kinds of colors. See, the end of it says something like, if you’re looking for freedom, I hold up my light to show you the door — the golden door — that opens into freedom.