Keystone Kids (8 page)

“... Well, seems some 12-year-old kid came up to the Giant manager last week and asked for a try-out. He was nice to the kid, told him to wait a few years and come back again later. Today the same boy shows up and asks for a try-out once more. ‘Why, looka here,’ says the manager, ‘I thought I told you last week to come back here when you was a few years older.’ ‘Well, Mister,’ says this kid, ‘I watched your Giants take that nine to nothing licking against the Dodgers yesterday, and that aged me ten years.’ ”

Guffaws broke out over the room. The team was certainly feeling good.

Spike sat down on the bench before his locker and drew on his inner socks. They came below his knees and he fastened them with rubber garters. As he leaned over, he observed Razzle drawing on two pairs, one over the other. Raz had thin legs for a big man and was notoriously vain. It was little things such as these that amazed the boys about these big leaguers; Razzle’s vanity, Swanson’s tightness with money, Jake Kennedy’s superstitions. They were a strange lot with queer contradictions in their make-up.

Meanwhile Razzle’s voice dominated the room.

“A raise? Mebbe I did get me a raise. Why shouldn’t I get a raise?” He was talking with the
New York Times
reporter who stood with his hands in his pockets watching Raz climb into his clothes. “Won twenty games last year, didn’t I, and got the Most Valuable Player Award?”

The reporter winked at Bob who was in the act of hauling his outer shirt on and fastening it up. “I thought MacEnnis of the Cards got the Most Valuable Player Award, Razzle.”

“They give it to him. They give it to him; but I should have been give it. I really won it,” said Razzle with his customary fine disdain for the niceties of the English language. “When that-there committee met, they musta gone into a transom.”

“Raz, your English is really something,” remarked Fat Stuff.

“Yeah, and my Spanish is something, too. Say, Fat Stuff, a guy I know who lived in Havana told me the Spanish have no word for shortstop. Whadd’ya think of that?”

“I wouldn’t worry if I were you, Razzle,” said the old pitcher. “Neither have the Phillies.”

More laughter. Spike pulled on his pants and buckled his elastic belt. Throwing off his shower shoes which he wore until almost the last minute, he sat down and put on his uniform socks of wool, and then leaned over for his shoes. Those shoes were expensive, made of kangaroo skin, and ballplayers pay for their own shoes. Both he and his brother were always ripping and tearing them in the scrimmages around second base, and to his dismay he had figured out that morning they would probably spend $150 and wear out five or six pairs of shoes apiece during the season.

Down the line Razzle was still talking. Finally he finished dressing, picked up his glove, and stalked out.

“There goes the All-American adenoid,” said Karl Case, scorn in his voice. A titter ran over the room. Spike looked down at Bob pulling on his inner socks and Bob looked up at Spike. Both were thinking the same thing and understood each other without talking. What a difference from Grouchy and the Volunteers! There was a real team. Those boys had no groups or factions. For a second both felt homesick for that familiar atmosphere. True, there was never a dull moment, never a day when some trick wasn’t pulled or someone given a hotfoot, never a dull moment on the Dodgers. And yet...

Yet there were times when both longed for the quieter, smoother methods of old Grouchy, unspectacular, unpretentious, always the same if you did your job and gave your best on the field. A manager sets the tone for the club, and Ginger’s team was almost as argumentative and disputatious among themselves as with other teams on the field and with the umpires.

“Spike,” said Ginger, taking him by the arm while they were having batting practice before the game, “just run out there and tell Case I want to see him a minute, will ya?”

Spike trotted out to left where the swarthy outfielder was catching flies. “Hey, Karl, Ginger wants to see you.”

Karl paused, his hands on his hips. “What’s the matter with his eyesight? Can’t he see me from there?” And to Spike’s amazement he continued chasing flies.

Old Fat Stuff was standing alone on the coaching line as Spike walked back, wondering what he should do. He told the veteran pitcher. “That guy Case, he’s a card,” said Spike, explaining what had happened.

The pitcher pulled off his cap and wiped his brow with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Then he replaced the cap on his head. “Don’t he get along with Ginger?” asked Spike. “I always thought they were old pals.”

“They were. They used to be. But not now. There’s too darned many factions on this club.”

The umpires appeared and the two players walked back to the bench. Spike was by no means new to baseball, and he realized that with thirty men living together everyone couldn’t feel alike, that pitchers thought differently about things from anyone else, that cliques and relationships were bound to develop. Even so, he wondered, how could a ballclub in this mental condition hope to win a pennant even with high-powered hitters in the line-up?

That afternoon trouble broke out openly. The game was close and old Raz was in command all the way. In the eighth with a two-run lead, he was hit on the side of the head between innings by a ball thrown accidentally by Harry Street. The ball bounced high in the air and Raz stood ruefully rubbing his forehead, while Harry raced over solicitously, and soon the entire infield surrounded him. Only Case, in left field, maintained an attitude of neutrality about the whole affair by turning his back and calmly sitting down on the grass.

Finally Raz resumed play. A lump rose on the side of his forehead. In the eighth the Giants got a run when Harry fielded a bunt too slowly. In the last of the ninth with Brooklyn ahead 2–1, Giants were on first and second with two out. The center fielder came to bat. Spike, nervous, turned and saw Karl Case retiring deep in the field. A blooper to short left would cause trouble, and he waved the veteran in but Case paid no attention. Razzle’s first pitch was hit to left. Ordinarily it would have been an easy out, one of those hits that don’t mean a thing. But Karl, playing deep to protect himself, found it hard to handle. He came thundering in and made a desperate stab for the ball. It burned through his fingers to the fence while both runners scored and the two teams dashed for the showers.

Disconsolately the squad trooped inside. Not knowing Karl was close behind him, Raz kept grumbling half to himself. “... Any outfielder oughta be able to catch a ball coming in....”

Whereat Karl, to no one in particular, paid his respects to pitchers, remarking that “If they’d get the ball over the plate once in a while, we might win games.” On this note the team poured into the dressing room. Spike observed that the lump on Razzle’s forehead was as big as an egg. The unlucky pitcher slumped down on the bench while Doc Masters applied hot towels soaked in witch hazel to reduce the swelling, and Raz kept muttering something over and over which sounded like “Clumsy butterfingers.” Everyone knew Karl had played too far back in order to protect himself.

However, the Slugger was far from upset by his error. He kept talking in the showers in loud tones for the benefit of his friends and anyone who happened to be listening, amid loud guffaws. “Yeah, they rushed the ball to the Miami General Hospital, and the docs operated. That’s right, they had to take two stitches in the darn thing.”

His voice could be heard pretty much all over the lockers, despite the noise and roar of the showerbaths. When he emerged, Raz kept muttering to himself as Case went past to his locker, a bath towel around his waist.

Just beyond Razzle he stopped, turned, and came back. “What’s that? What was that you said just now? What was that you called me, Raz?”

Poor Razzle’s head was throbbing and he was in misery.

“I said you was a clumsy, butterfingered clown,” he remarked, rising to go to the showers.

As he did so, Case reddened and lunged. He struck Raz on the undamaged part of his face and staggered him. But Raz came right back, both fists thrashing the air, whacking and pounding at Case’s body. They grappled. Benches shot across the room; clothes, shoes, the whole dressing room went round and round in a cyclone of noise as the two men wrestled, tripped, tumbled, and sprawled to the floor. While Ginger, the Doc, the coaches, and old Chiselbeak, the locker room attendant, jumped to pull them apart.

Sometimes a fight in which both men shake hands afterwards clears the atmosphere. But Spike and Bob knew there would be no handshaking after this one. They sat there transfixed to the bench, eyes popping. Seldom had they seen this kind of a row before. Soberly they dressed and soberly returned to the hotel, saying little, both thinking the same thing. Gosh, how on earth can we hope to catch the Pirates when we scrap like that among ourselves?

They were more sober after reading the evening paper. Spike went to the hotel lobby where Swanson was standing as usual by the newsstand.

He glanced over Spike’s shoulder. “Well, whadd’ya think of that! Say, what do you think...” He pointed to a column halfway down the front page.

It was a dispatch from St. Petersburg where the Cards were in training. Their manager had left and Grouchy Devine, the veteran pilot of the Nashville Vols, had been appointed to take over. Spike read the headlines and read them again. He turned toward his brother.

“Hey, Bobby,” he called, “just look at this!”

W
HEN A TEAM
picked to win the pennant starts the season badly, it’s not hard to explain to the public. But when April turns into May and the same team is dragging anchor in third place, when May dies away and June draws near and they are solidly anchored in fourth, there’s trouble ahead. The wisecracks start appearing in the newspapers, sports editors assign cub reporters to follow the team or drop out altogether on the club’s next western trip. When this happened to the Dodgers, most of the trouble seemed to fall upon the broad shoulders of that diplomat and business man combined, Bill Hanson, the club secretary.

He had plenty to do. For as the days became longer and warmer, nerves became tauter. Inside the club, cliques developed. Some players refused to speak to others, and the two Russell boys had to be more careful than ever what they said casually to men with whom they traveled or to whom they talked in the dugout. You could never tell with the club in such a situation whose feelings you might hurt, or when you might unknowingly step into a nasty situation. Hanson was busy all day and much of the night smoothing out quarrels, arranging things after Ginger had talked indiscreetly to some sportswriter, settling as best he could the daily bickerings. And meanwhile the Dodgers continued to slide slowly down in the league standing.

Things got so bad that MacManus hired and sent on from New York an Austrian psychiatrist to travel with the team and straighten them out. He was introduced all round as the team physician, this causing no small amount of disgust to Doc, the trainer, who felt he knew as much as anyone about the conditioning of athletes. The psychiatrist’s first rule, that everyone should be down for breakfast at nine-thirty in the morning, did nothing to make the stranger popular with the team. It’s a long while from nine-thirty to game time, and longer still when play is at night. Ballplayers don’t enjoy sitting around a hotel lobby doing nothing all day any more than other people do.

Game after game was dropped and Ginger Crane grew tense. His tenseness, plainly observable by everybody, communicated itself to the entire squad. The moment a pitcher showed signs of faltering he was taken out. The result was a constant procession of men from the bullpen in deep right field to the box and soon afterward to the showers. It made funny reading the next morning in the newspapers to see three, four, or five pitchers in the Dodgers’ box scores. Often a hurler would go in, throw four or five balls, and be replaced. Old Fat Stuff was in the bullpen so much of the time that, as Raz remarked, he got his mail there.

Whereas Grouchy had seldom shifted his fielders, playing them mostly straightaway, Ginger shifted them for every batter, placing them now toward right, now toward left, always trying to outguess the hitters. Sometimes he did. Almost every day the batting order was shaken up. One day you were in the clean-up position, the next in the sixth spot. He played Whitehouse, a substitute, at third for several games when Street fell into a batting slump, and only let Swanson go to bat against right-handed pitching because he hit left-handed. Against left-handers he threw in young Paul Roth, a right-handed batter. When Karl Case went into a batting slump, Ginger put in Clyde Baldwin, a rookie outfielder, to rest the veteran for a week, he said.

The result was to mix everyone up completely. Swanson complained that he hardly got his eye in before he was taken out of the game, and that when he got back it took him several days to get his eye again. No wonder he was batting .218! Red Allen became home-run conscious, and started swinging off his heels at the plate. With the sluggers striking out and hitting pop flies, the Russell boys, who had never been tremendous powerhouses at the plate, tried to assume responsibility for the hitting of the team. Naturally their batting fell off. Bones Hathaway, a promising young pitcher who had won five games, had the nail torn off the little finger of his pitching hand by a line drive. It seemed bad luck could go no further. The Russells had never played on such a team. Daily they could watch the worsening of the club’s morale.

That afternoon they managed to lose another close game to the Reds. After getting three runs in the second, the Dodgers were caught in the fourth, and when Swanson missed a hard liner in deep right center, they were passed in the eighth. To the surprise of the Russells, accustomed to Grouchy’s quieter and more subtle methods of handling players, Ginger assailed the fielder as soon as he returned to the bench, before everybody.

“Swanny, if you can’t run any more, if you feel like you can’t play right field the way it should be played, I’ll hire someone who can.”

The big fielder turned on him. “You waved me over toward the line, didn’t you? That man’s not a pull hitter. You oughta know that. If you think you can play right better than me, why don’t you?”