Keystone Kids (18 page)

Then the fans were on their feet yelling, the diamond became a meaningless jig-saw puzzle, and men were running in every direction, because the ball was going through. It was past, it would go through, when suddenly Spike made a running dive, his glove on the end of that long arm stabbing for the ball and holding it. For just a tiny moment he was off balance, legs apart as he tried to pivot and make the throw. The toss came to his brother waiting on the bag; next the throw burning into first. Once more they were running toward the bench instead of standing on the field with a run across and first and third occupied by enemy players.

In the sixth the Card lead-off man singled. Elmer walked the following batter; two on and nobody down. Nervously Spike glanced toward the bullpen, watching the activity there with relief. The third man flied out to Roy in center, but the next man rapped a long single to Swanny. The blond fielder came charging in, played the ball cleanly on the first hop, and made a perfect throw to Bob on second base.

And the Cardinal runner from first was halfway down the path toward third.

Bob snapped a quick one to his brother who ran over and tagged the hesitating runner. Then he threw back again to Bob. The little second baseman turned, saw the runner coming into the base from first and nailed him on the slide. One run was across, but again the side was retired. Grouchy, sitting on the bench and watching St. Louis players cut down and rallies snuffed out, began to lose patience. He shook his head. “When they’re hitting on all four, those Russell boys can’t be beat,” he remarked to a player beside him.

Meanwhile Elmer held the Cardinals hitless in the seventh, was saved in the eighth by two marvelous catches by Roy Tucker, one in deep center against the bleacher wall. Those blows had the ring of authority, and with each one Spike’s gaze turned toward the bullpen, watching Fat Stuff starting his throws close up to old Kenny, the bullpen catcher, then moving back, further back. The manager could almost hear Kenny’s voice, almost hear him thumping his mitt, urging the pitcher on in his warm-up. “C’mon now, c’mon, Fat Stuff... get hot, boy...” Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

“C’mon, get hot, boy... get hot...”

Two to one in the ninth. The first batter slashed a wicked bounder at Red behind first. He fielded the ball perfectly and gave Elmer a reassuring wave with his glove, a kind of pat in the air to let him know he had the putout and to save him from running over to cover the bag.

“O.K., gang, le’s go... le’s go, gang, le’s get this one.” Bob tossed the ball to Spike and Spike shot it over to Red and Red burned it across to Harry Street, who rubbed it carefully and walked to the mound where he handed it to Elmer. One down.

Two outs and we’ve won five straight. C’mon, gang, le’s go...

But the next man singled ominously. Only Karl Case’s good fielding kept him on first.

Now what? Shall I yank Elmer or shan’t I? We want this game, we need this game the worst way. To beat the league leaders right now would give this crowd just the confidence they need. This is where being manager is no fun.

Spike walked over to the mound. “How about it, Elmer? How you feel, boy?”

“Lemme get this one, Spike, Jes lemme throw to this one.” So he threw, and the batter nearly decapitated him with a liner past his right ear. Men on first and second. Fat Stuff came shuffling over from the bullpen at last. He took the mound. Now everyone in the park was standing up.

“O.K., Fat Stuff...”

“O.K., O.K., Fat Stuff...”

“Alla time, Fat Stuff, alla time...”

“This is the easy one, Fat Stuff. Let him hit it, old-timer; we’ll nail him for you.”

Out there at short and second is where you have to talk things up in the tight moments of a game. But the chatter came also from Karl and Harry, from Roy and Jocko Klein. Everyone was on edge, the fans, the teams, even old Grouchy on the bench.

The ball was to Spike’s right, the hardest ball the shortstop has to handle, the test of a great infielder. It all had to be done fast, too, the stop, the recovery, the throw. He got down to it and stayed down the way older men never could; he went down and nailed the ball. Picking it from the ground and throwing it was one continuous motion, a quick underhand snap which Bob from years of experience timed perfectly. He understood Spike, he expected Spike to give it to him where he wanted it, and Spike did, high enough and not too high. Bob expected it there because Spike was on the throwing end.

Bob gathered it in, and in his turn sent it off. Stretching out with all the reach of his large frame, Red Allen received the ball. The arm of the umpire beside second and then the arm of the man back of first rose in the air. The first baseman straightened up. With all his strength, with a kind of release and joy and something of a gesture of including all the team on the last play of the game, he twisted and shot the ball to Jocko Klein standing bareheaded at the plate.

Jocko let it slap into his mitt. Then he tossed it twenty feet high in the air before him. The ball fell to the ground between home and the pitcher’s mound, unheeded as everyone dashed for the clubhouse.

Players poured off the field and fans poured on. Grouchy, meanwhile, picked his way through the mass outside his dugout and at the entrance to the stands joined his coach from third.

“Them Keystone Kids,” he growled, “them Keystone Kids! Who told me them boys weren’t clicking? What I say is, you can’t never trust what you hear from sports writers. Who said they’d lost it?” A long speech for Grouchy Devine.

When newspapermen desert a first-place ballclub to mob the dressing room of a fifth-place club, something is doing. Something had suddenly made the Dodgers news. It wasn’t merely the victory; it was the way they won it and something more; something in their manner at bat and in the field, a confidence in the way they played that they hadn’t had before. The sportswriters recognized the difference as they watched the game that afternoon, and that was why they all left Grouchy and his first-place Cards to crowd the lockers of the victorious team: the team that had slumped and degenerated into a sullen collection of ballplayers, that had pulled itself together and become a fighting unit again.

Though they didn’t realize it, that’s what the Dodgers were celebrating in the lockers—the re-birth of their team. The sportswriters knew it well enough, and wandered around, watching, listening, asking questions. Tommy Heeney and Stanley King and Ed Morgan and the rest were everywhere, talking now to this player now to another. So were those cagey, eagle-eyed men, the photographers. Wherever cameramen are, there is news. They came piling in after the team, adjusting their machines, setting bulbs in place, unscrewing them and putting them in their pockets, shoving and pushing through the crowd of hot, weary, happy ballplayers.

Over the room and above the noise of the showers and the opening and shutting of steel lockers came the voices of the victorious team.

“Nice chucking there, Fat Stuff...”

“Nice chucking yerself, Elmer...”

“Hey, what’s that man Tucker eat for breakfast?”

“I’ll say! You don’t realize how darn good Roy is until you ask yourself how many balls get over his head in a season. He makes it all seem easy.”

“Nice catching, Jocko...”

‘You sure handled those pitchers, Jocko...”

“Nice work, Jock...”

“Nice work yourself, Swanny. Boy, are you fast getting in for those liners!”

“Yessir, great work, Swanny...”

“Great work yourself, Bob. You and Spike pulled this one out for us...”

Surrounded by a semi-circle of sportswriters, Spike heard his name and looked up. He was finishing a sentence. “Why, sure they been playing better baseball lately; that’s not the reason; we’re all pulling together, that’s why we started to roll.”

On the bench opposite was his brother, the best pivot man in the league, the best guy who ever lived.

“Right, Bobby?” He leaned over.

“That’s correct, Spike.” He leaned over, too, and held out his hand. The Keystone Kids shook on it.

There was a quick outburst from every photographer in the room and a sudden rush of cameramen toward them.

“Hold it!”

“Hold it there, Spike...”

“Just like that, Bob... just like that.”

“Hold it, like that, Spike, jes’ hold it a second, please...”

Flash! Flash! Flash! The bulbs exploded in a circle, sending little puffs of smoke into the room, while the cameramen snapped the Russell brothers, the keystone combination of the Dodgers.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1943, renewed 1970 by Lucy R. Tunis

cover design by Milan Bozic

978-1-4532-2115-0

This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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New York, NY 10014

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