Strike Three You're Dead (2 page)

“Normally you don’t have such good judgment.”

“Thanks, roomie,” Rudy said, pulling on his ear a few times. He was always moving, pulling his ear, snapping his fingers, thrusting out his lower lip. Harvey kidded him about belonging to the Tic-of-the-Month Club.

Harvey bobbed his head in the direction of a paperback book poking out of Rudy’s back pocket. “I see you picked up the novel finally.” In the Kansas City airport on their last road trip, Harvey had bought him the book with the intention of improving a mind whose severest tests came in the form of
Sporting News
and
People
magazine.

Rudy patted his pocket and jiggled his hand. “Well, it’s kind of rough going for a farmboy like me. No pictures.” He grinned boyishly. “But I like this guy Gatsby. Had a damned nice life-style, didn’t he?”

“I can see you haven’t read very far.”

Rudy rotated his head a couple of times, like someone with a stiff neck. “If Wagner doesn’t need any help from me on the mound tonight, I’ll promise to get some reading done in the bull pen. That is, if the other guys don’t mind me moving my lips.”

Harvey returned Rudy’s smirk. “Believe it or not, Rude, when you’re through with baseball and out there in the big bad world, you’re going to have to know how to read and write.” Harvey wondered who the hell he was to pontificate about the big bad world out there.

“Yessir, Professor.” Rudy flipped him a military salute.

“Yo-yos,” Harvey said. “Nothing but yo-yos on this club.”

“You worry too much.” He tugged down on the bill of Harvey’s cap and jogged out toward right field.

At the batting cage, Steve Wilton, the Jewels’ right fielder, and Roger Kokis of the White Sox were discussing a woman who was sitting in the boxes behind third base.

“I’m telling you,” Wilton was saying, “it’s a law of nature. The bigger their tits, the closer they sit to the field.”

Harvey stepped into the cage against Stan Crop, who was pitching batting practice. He popped up the first two pitches, cursing the little hitch that had lately developed in his swing.

“Hum babe, Harv babe, come to the pitch, you’re the one,” chanted Campy Strulowitz, who was leaning against the cage. Campy was the Jewels’ bowlegged, sixty-year-old first base coach who did double duty as the team’s batting instructor. A weak hitter in his own distant playing days, Campy had devoted long hours on the bench to studying his superiors at the plate. Harvey credited Campy with at least 20 points of his .309 batting average.

“You’re the hum babe, Harv,” he said. “Glide it and ride it, bring those wrists, babe, bring ’em and fling ’em, settle down, hum-a-now, you’re the kid.” He hunkered down in an imitation of Harvey’s batting stance, his fists raised to grasp an imaginary bat.

Steve Wilton stood next to Campy, peeling off a batting glove. “Shut up already, will you, Campy?” he said. “The Professor’s already hitting three-something. Stop hum-babing him.”

Campy fired a thick brown stream of tobacco juice close to Steve’s left spike. “I don’t see you hitting top ten, Steve kid, don’t see you ripping off the big hits.”

“Whyn’t you just choke on your chaw and die,” Steve said, stalking off.

“Hum kid, hum kid, hum-a-now,” Campy said.

Harvey sent Stan Crop’s next pitch through the humid dusk of August into Rankle Park’s utterly empty left field upper deck.

By game time, there were only six thousand people in the park, and the Jewels ran out on the field to thin applause. In center, Harvey adjusted the bill of his cap with a tailor’s curt flourish and winged the warm-up ball back and forth with John Rapp, in left field. He snapped off his throws with a deliberate motion, glancing down to make sure his stirrup socks were pulled tightly over his calves. Being alone with all that grass calmed him. Even as a kid, when other Little Leaguers wanted to play only shortstop, or pitch, Harvey had played center field. Green, spacious, removed from the crowded, dusty infield, center had all the virtues of a desirable suburb.

When Chicago’s Scott Dykes sent Bobby Wagner’s first pitch high over Harvey’s head toward the 447 FT sign in right center, Harvey surrendered to familiar instinct. He registered the trajectory of the ball, then turned and put his head down and sprinted toward the wall. Thirty feet from the dirt warning track, he looked up to see that he had beaten the ball to its destination by a split second, allowing him to catch it with an effortless twitch of his glove. Over his head, Rankle Park’s new electronic scoreboard commended the play by flashing “A G
EM
” in rapidly increasing sizes.

On the mound, Bobby Wagner, who had been struggling for most of the season, heaved a sigh. The flamethrower from Virginia had been one of the American League’s premier right-handers when the Baltimore Orioles left him for dead in the off-season because of alleged calcium deposits in his arm. The Jewels, who needed a big name on their pitching staff, had traded four players for him even though he was now playing out the last year of his old Baltimore contract and would be eligible to become a free agent in the fall. His record stood at 8 and 14, the worst showing of an otherwise brilliant career.

Harvey’s catch seemed to have settled him down, and the White Sox were scoreless after seven innings. Providence picked up two runs along the way, one of them on Harvey’s fifth inning double. But in the top of the eighth, Chicago’s right fielder, Dave Shingle, lined a home run off the auxiliary scoreboard on the facing of the right field pavilion, cutting Bobby’s lead to 2-1. When Bobby proceeded to walk Abbler, and Dykes followed with a single to left, Felix Shalhoub, the Providence manager, walked slowly to the mound, his body bent forward slightly at the waist. He lifted his left arm desultorily to signal the bull pen for Rudy Furth. Bobby Wagner slapped the ball into Felix’s extended right hand and headed for the showers.

In deep center, the bull pen gate opened in the fence, and a compact figure with long, blond hair emerged, sliding his emerald green nylon warm-up jacket over his left arm. He walked across center field toward the mound, pulling abreast of Harvey, who accompanied him part of the way.

“How’s the arm?” Harvey said.

Rudy jutted out his lower lip. “It’s been better. I can’t get my fastball to lay down where I want it tonight.” He stroked his sheathed left arm nervously with his glove, as if to encourage it.

“Then go with the slider. It’s been looking pretty good to me.”

“You think so?” Rudy said with his way of giving too much credit to obvious comments. “But this guy creamed the slider last time I showed it to him.”

“That one was up in his wheelhouse, Rude. Keep this one down.”

“Yeah, okay,” Rudy said, a little glumly.

“Now you’re the one who’s worrying too much. Just go out there and get ’em.”

“Sure,” Rudy said, and they walked a few more yards before he squinted up at the press box and asked, “Seen Slavin tonight?”

“I don’t think she’s here. I think she’s out covering women’s soccer or something.”

Rudy spat. “When’re the three of us going to get together again? I have fun with you guys.”

Harvey looked straight ahead.

“I tried to call you last night,” Rudy said. “Were you at Mickey’s?”

“Could be.”

“She’s pretty good in bed, huh, Professor?”

Harvey turned to look his roommate in the eye. “You tell me.”

Rudy pulled twice on his ear. “Did I say something wrong or something?”

They walked a few more yards without speaking. Then Harvey said, “Go get ’em, and keep the goddamn slider down, will ya?”

Rudy warmed up on the mound. Dean Levine of Chicago promptly stroked his first pitch deep in the hole at second. Rodney Salta couldn’t make a play on it, and the bases were loaded for Mac Bodish, who swung and missed on a slider, then picked on a fastball at the knees. From Harvey’s perspective in center, the pitch didn’t tail, it didn’t rise, it didn’t sink; all it did was jump off Bodish’s bat and rattle off the wall in left. By the time Rapp chased it down on the warning track, three runs had scored and Bodish was standing on third. The White Sox now led 4-2, and it stayed that way.

In the clubhouse, the Jewels stripped off their white double-knit uniforms with the depressing black and green trim. Chuck Manomaitis, the shortstop, was once again trying to sell Steve Wilton his digital alarm clocks at a small margin over what he had paid to get them from Ronnie Mateo. Wilton once again suggested to Chuck an unsavory use for the clocks that quickly ended the negotiations.

Half a dozen reporters trying to corner a few quotes scurried underfoot. The dean of the local baseball writers, Bob Lassiter, of the
Providence Journal-Bulletin,
accosted Les Byers, the Jewels’ third baseman.

“Les,” Lassiter said, wagging his pencil. “I make twenty-nine thousand a year. You make one forty-five, and I’m not even going to mention the bonus on signing and deferred annuity. Now, if you ask me, you’re getting paid enough to swing at that called third strike in the ninth.”

Les stepped gingerly out of his jockstrap, held it for a moment in front of Lassiter’s nose, and let it fall to the floor like a coquette releasing her handkerchief. “Man,” he bellowed, “you expect me to do ever l’il thing? The game’s hard work. Shucks, sometimes we put in six, seven hours a day.”

Lassiter, who did not excel at getting jokes, stammered, “Well—well, that’s not exactly slave labor.” But Les was already showing him his back.

“Hey, Furth,” Steve Wilton yelled across the locker room. “Way to handle Bodish. Next time, why don’t you throw it to him underhanded?”

It was one thing to ride a teammate like that when reporters were
not
around. “Shove it, A-hole,” Rudy yelled back.

Harvey caught up with him at the long table in the middle of the locker room where the post-game meal was laid out—hamburgers, fried chicken, french fries, and tossed salad provided by the owner’s, Marshall Levy’s, sister, who operated a catering outfit in nearby Attleboro, Massachusetts.

“I hear the fried chicken’s good here,” Harvey said.

Rudy was wearing nothing but shower clogs. He picked up a hamburger, tossed his hair off his face, and said, almost carelessly, “He’s right, you know. I couldn’t have done any worse throwing underhanded.” He took a bite out of the hamburger, handed the rest to Harvey, and shuffled toward the showers.

Harvey pushed a few french fries into his mouth and followed Rudy, passing the open door to Felix’s tiled office on the way.

“Gentlemen,” the manager was explaining to a trio of reporters, “we stopped hitting after the fifth inning, the bull pen was not in a positive posture tonight, and at the end of nine we were behind by two runs. And that’s the whole six flavors.”

O
F THE FIVE MOST
popular topics of locker room conversation among ball players—hunting, fishing, cars, real estate, and women—only the last interested Harvey, and even then he found there was little to be gained by subjecting his views to clubhouse scrutiny. Yet clubhouses were the closest thing he had known to an office in his life, and he felt protected by their walls. It was with a feeling of returning to his natural habitat that the next morning, on Wednesday, August 29, after dropping off his Chevy Citation for a tune-up, he had a taxi leave him in the players’ parking lot at Rankle Park. Nine-thirty was early to show up for the afternoon game against Chicago that would close out the series, but Harvey felt he needed some extra work against the pitching machine under the left field stands. He liked the ball park early in the morning. Only Dunc would be in the clubhouse. When Harvey swung open the door, Dunc was standing just inside.

Contrary to the unwritten law that all major league clubhouse managers had to be seriously lacking in human qualities, Dunc was better-natured than twenty years of catering to the whims of young athletes would seem to warrant. He was short, amiable, and had a taste for apricot brandy. Harvey, who occasionally supplied him with a pint, found that in exchange Dunc was more than willing to load baseballs into the pitching machine.

At the moment, however, Dunc was wearing the distorted expression of someone who had inadvertently swallowed his chewing tobacco. His jaw hung open—revealing that in fact his tobacco was still there, in a mouth full of brownish kernels that had once been his teeth. He stood there in his white duck uniform staring somewhere to the right of Harvey’s face.

“What gives, Dunc?”

Dunc said nothing, but raised a stubby arm and pointed behind him toward the center of the locker room.

“Well, what is it?”

Dunc didn’t speak, or wasn’t able to, and Harvey went past him into the empty clubhouse.

The Providence Jewels’ clubhouse was a collection of unattractive rooms beneath the stands along the right field line. Nauseating green indoor-outdoor carpeting had been laid down over the original cement floors; given a choice, however, Harvey would much rather get dressed on an artificial surface than play on one. The lockers, open cubicles, took up three of the locker room’s four walls, and in front of each was an orange or powder blue molded plastic chair like the ones found in Greyhound bus stations; given the team’s operating budget, there was no reason to believe the management hadn’t found them in an abandoned Greyhound bus station. The fourth wall, a stretch of gray plaster, featured various calendars, schedules, bulletin boards, equipment lockers, and a large blackboard for personal messages such as “Stan—call your wife” and “You suck, Rodney,” as well as for inspirational memoranda like “Winners Are People Who Never Learned How to Lose,” usually scrawled by Felix Shalhoub in palsied capital letters.