The Soul of Baseball (6 page)

A
shoeshine man stood outside St. Pete’s Dancing Marlin, a lunch spot in Houston. He watched people walk by. The Houston sun beat down; it was not a day for a shoeshine. He stood around anyway, as if he had a hunch something would happen. Buck crossed the street and walked up to the man. He did not want his shoes shined—Buck’s blue shoes sparkled. Buck often said that he was such a good shoeshine boy in Sarasota, they still talked about him.

“How are you doing?” Buck asked as he thrust out his hand. “My name is Buck O’Neil.”

The man said his name was Skipper, or maybe it was Skitter. Buck nodded. The two breezed into a conversation about Willie Mays.

“The thing about Willie,” Skipper or Skitter said, “was that he was so smooth.”

“No,” Buck said, “not smooth. That’s the wrong word. Joe DiMaggio, yeah, he was smooth. Duke Snider. Yeah. Ken Griffey. Yeah. Those guys were smooth. Willie was something else. Willie was exciting, you know.”

“I saw Willie Mays make a catch here at the old ballpark. Colt Stadium. You remember old Colt Stadium?”

“Shoot, remember it? Do you remember the mosquitoes there?”

“Oh, yeah. I remember outfielders used to wear towels under their hats like they were Arab sheikhs so the mosquitoes wouldn’t get them.”

“Those mosquitoes were so big we used to say that everybody should move in groups because otherwise a mosquito might carry one of us back to the nest.”

“I saw Willie Mays make a catch at Colt Stadium, man. The ball was over his head, and he just turned and ran back. He outran the ball. He caught it like it was nothing, too. Real easy.”

“Great player, Willie Mays.”

“Best I ever saw.”

“You going to the game today?” Buck asked.

“Naw. I don’t go to baseball games anymore. It’s changed.”

Buck smiled and put his arm around the man. “It hasn’t changed,” he said. “We’ve changed. We got older. You ought to go see a ballgame. You’re a baseball fan, man. Do your heart good. Help you get young.”

“You’re right, Buck. You’re right. I’ll do it.”

“You do it.”

“And hey, Buck, you stay on the sunny side of the street.”

With that Buck smiled, shook the man’s hand, and walked toward the ballpark for a game between the Chicago Cubs and the Houston Astros. He sang a tuneless song:

 

Talking to the shoeshine man

On the way to the ballpark

Hot day in early May

Like old times,

Like the world hasn’t changed much.

 

M
INUTE
M
AID
B
ALLPARK
in Houston used to be called Enron Field before the name “Enron” suggested something dark. Minute Maid meant orange juice, which was better. As we walked in, Buck talked about the news of the day. He was particularly taken with the story of a woman who was supposed to get married in Georgia, but on her wedding day she called her fiancé from a 7-Eleven in Albuquerque and said that she had been kidnapped. Evil suspicions focused on everyone, including her husband-to-be—the family put up a $100,000 reward for her return—but it turned out she had made up the whole thing and had taken a bus across the country. Buck loved this story. He always loved the mindless chatter of the latest scandal. He read newspapers front to back every morning, international news to comics, but he lingered on the sports pages and on the scandals. He had been that way all his life, going back to his playing days. Then, he read the newspaper on those long, bumpy bus rides between games.

Other players hated those bus rides. “I lost half my life on those creaky old buses,” a tall old pitcher named Connie Johnson said. “Those buses would break down three times a week. I can still feel the rattling in my bones. Sometimes I shake in the middle of the night and I think it’s from those old rides.” Other Negro Leagues players said the same. Buck rode the same buses—he was Connie Johnson’s teammate throughout the 1940s—but he did not remember a bus ever breaking down. He did remember the Monarchs bus driver, a shady character named Murphy. Nobody knew Murphy’s first name. He had a mouthful of gold teeth and a mysterious past nobody seemed too eager to uncover.

The players only knew two things for certain about Murphy. One was that he fell asleep at the wheel just about every night. A player was assigned on each trip to jab Murphy awake when his head nodded. “What, what, I’m awake, quit poking me,” Murphy would grumble, and then his head would bob again, and one of the Monarchs would say, “Murphy’s done fallen asleep again.” And the designated player would poke him once more, starting the entire cycle over.

The second thing: Whenever a police car came into view, Murphy would panic and stomp his foot on the gas. He would drive the bus like he was transporting moonshine through the Appalachian Mountains—he almost tipped over the bus a hundred times. Of course, this was a bus filled with bored, edgy ballplayers, so five or six times a night someone would yell, “Murphy, I just saw a policeman!” And no matter how many times they pulled this trick, Murphy would hit the gas and drive like a crazy man until the coast was clear. “I looked for Murphy’s face on a poster every single day when I went to work at the post office,” Buck would say.

Between Murphy’s naps and mad dashes from the cops, Buck read newspapers. Sometimes he read the black papers—the
Chicago Defender,
the
Kansas City Call,
the
Pittsburgh Courier
—but more often he read the white papers. He scoured the box scores of the Major League players (“Look, Hilton,” he would say to his roommate Hilton Smith, “Ted Williams got three more hits yesterday. And you say you could get him out?”). He read about wars and elections, deaths and celebrity marriages, medical breakthroughs, mergers, murders, movies. He loved Walter Winchell’s gossip column. “How you going to know what to talk about,” he asked his players, “if you don’t know what’s going on?”

“Do you think the law should do something to that woman who pretended to be kidnapped?” Buck asked the man sitting next to him. We were in our seats in Minute Maid Ballpark before the game.

“What can the law do?” the man asked. “She’s crazy.”

“I don’t know about crazy,” Buck said. “But she sure didn’t want to get married.”

B
UCK SAT IN
his seat before the first pitch, and he watched the players warm up. It was an old scout’s habit. Buck watched everything—warm-ups, batting practice, pitchers throwing in bullpens, on-field conversations. Buck liked watching players jog in the outfield and he liked to see which player retrieved the most baseballs at the end of batting practice. In baseball, Buck said, anyone can spot the star. But the best scouts looked for the future star, the starlet in a drugstore. And to find those, Buck said, a scout had to look for small moments of grace. Buck looked around the field and took in the easy tempo of infielders tossing the ball around just before the start of the game, and he offered a running commentary.

“Look at that third baseman. He’s got a strong arm. The shortstop has soft hands—the ball sticks to his glove, like Velcro…. The second baseman has bad feet. He looks like he’s stomping grapes…. The first baseman just scooped a bad throw out of the dirt, but it was luck. He didn’t show that natural ease. He stabbed at the ball and it was like,
Look what I found
.”

Buck loved watching first basemen—that was his position when he played for the Monarchs. “I used to love when my infielders threw the ball in the dirt,” he said. “I knew how to pick it.” Buck believed that he could watch any first baseman for only a few seconds and know how he learned the game.

“This guy learned the game from his father,” Buck said as he pointed at the first baseman.

“How do you know that?”

“I just know.”

The pitcher snapped off a curve, and Buck watched to see how the catcher’s hand moved. Did he stab for the ball or did he let it tumble into his glove? Outfielders threw. Buck glanced out there to see if the right fielder had that Major League arm. Did the ball jump out of his hands as if yanked by long string? It was a scout’s symphony out there, and even though Buck stopped being a scout some time ago, he could not help but listen to the music.

“You see today, but I see history,” he said. “That could be Babe Ruth out there, or Josh Gibson, or Willie Mays, or Cool Papa Bell. I see this game a little bit differently. I see a skinny kid swinging with an upper cut, I might say, ‘He looks like Ted Williams.’ I see a big man pitching, like this big man on the mound, and to me it might be another Nolan Ryan or Hilton Smith. I see little things that remind me. It’s beautiful.”

A man tapped Buck on the shoulder. “Well, Buck,” the man said, “we might have to put you in there today.” It was Drayton McLane, the owner of the Houston Astros.

“Well, Mr. McLane,” Buck said, “you do need some hitting.”

It was true—the Astros were struggling to score runs. McLane laughed. “He doesn’t miss a trick, does he?” McLane said, as if Buck could not hear him, and Buck turned back to the field and focused on that big starting pitcher. Roger Clemens, perhaps the best pitcher who ever lived. This game matched up two great pitchers, Houston’s Clemens and Chicago’s Greg Maddux. It was the first time in almost twenty years that two men who had won three hundred Major League games faced each other. They won their games so differently. Maddux had won his games with guile and cunning. He slipped pitches over hidden corners of the plate. He never threw the pitch precisely where a hitter expected it. Buck admired Maddux the way he admired classical music. But Buck had different feelings about Clemens, who won his games with power, intimidation, and brute force. Clemens threw his fastball ninety-five miles per hour and aimed for the chin if he suspected a hitter felt at ease. This was the game Buck had played in the Negro Leagues. Pitchers threw at your head. Buck liked to talk about the time he hit two home runs off an old friend named Spoon Carter. The third time up, he knew that Spoon Carter would throw the ball at his head.

“You gonna throw at your old friend?” he yelled to Carter.

“Buck, you hit the ball over the right-field fence and you hit the ball over the left-field fence. Of course I’m going to throw at you.” Spoon’s next pitch rushed at his head, and Buck ate dirt.

So Buck loved Roger Clemens the way he loved the blues and nickel cups of coffee and shoeshine men and other things time had passed by. Before the game, in a ceremony, Buck had given Clemens a special pitching award named after Buck’s friend Satchel Paige.

“It means the world to me to have my name in any way associated with Satchel Paige,” Clemens said.

“That’s good,” Buck said, “because Satchel would have liked you.”

Buck watched Clemens closely. “Do you think Clemens can still throw the fastball by people?” he asked the man sitting next to him. All through the game, Buck started conversations with the people sitting around him.

“Most definitely,” the man said.

“He’s an old man now,” Buck said. “You can’t throw those fastballs forever.”

“He can still do it,” the man said.

“We will see,” Buck said. Clemens threw the last of his warm-up pitches, and Buck’s legs bounced in anticipation of the first pitch.

“Hey,” he asked the man, “how much did you pay for that beer?”

“Seven dollars,” the man said.

“Seven dollars,” Buck said, and he shook his head. “The game never changes. But the prices do.”

C
LEMENS CAME TO
bat in the second inning, and everyone knew he would bunt. Clemens, for all his force as a pitcher, still could not hit a lick. There was a man on first base, one out—this was what baseball announcers called “an obvious bunting situation.” The third baseman stood so close to Clemens they could have shared a milk shake. It was insulting, if you think about it, to have a third baseman stand so close. This made Buck think of Earl Wilson.

Earl Wilson was a pitcher who could hit. He had other attributes as well—he could throw very hard, for instance. He pitched in the Negro Leagues briefly, and then in 1959 he became the first black player to sign with the Boston Red Sox. Later, he won twenty games in a season with the Detroit Tigers. With that, he became the second African-American pitcher in the American League to win twenty—an odd historical landmark, but one compelling enough to be listed prominently in his obituary. Earl Wilson had died just a couple of days earlier.

The obituary did not make much note of Earl Wilson’s biggest contribution to the game. No pitcher, with the exception of Babe Ruth, ever swung the bat harder. Wilson rarely connected with the ball, but when he did it flew a long way—he mashed thirty-five home runs in his career. He bunted just twenty-two times, and each of those was against his will.

“It about drives me crazy that pitchers cannot hit,” Buck said. “These guys are supposed to be your best athletes, right? When you’re a kid and you are a great athlete, what happens? You become the pitcher. So what happens to these guys? I used to say to Earl Wilson, ‘Why did you hit so many homers, Earl?’ He said, ‘I swung hard, Buck.’ That’s how you’re supposed to play this game. Swing hard!”

Clemens shifted uneasily in the batter’s box. He looked uncomfortable, as if he had been pulled from the crowd to be part of a hitting contest. “Swing hard!” Buck shouted. “Come on, Roger! Hit it out of here!” Clemens had never hit a home run in the Major Leagues.

“Forget about the strategy, swing the bat!” Buck yelled. “Come on, Roger, be a hero! Help yourself!”

Maddux pitched. Clemens turned and held his bat as if he would bunt. The third baseman rushed even closer. Then, abruptly, Clemens pulled his bat back and slashed at the ball. He hit it low and hard. The ball skimmed over the infield grass and rolled past the stunned Cubs third baseman. It was a single. Clemens stood on first base, a sheepish, thrilled look on his face.