The Soul of Baseball (7 page)

“Did he do it? Did he do it?” Buck yelled, and he stood up and clapped. “What you say? That’s what I’m talking about, Roger! You go! That’s baseball!”

Buck settled back into his seat. He offered a quiet commentary on the game.

“No need to cheer that one, folks,” he muttered when the crowd shrieked after a lazy fly ball. “That’s an easy out.”

And to a hitter who complained to an umpire after striking out against Maddux: “Sit down, young man. You’re not the first man to strike out against Greg Maddux. You’re not the
best
man to strike out against Greg Maddux. Just sit down.”

And to a young pitcher who kept throwing fastballs and kept giving up hits: “Put something on the ball. You’re not going to be able to throw the ball by them. This is the Major Leagues.”

And to another pitcher who kept walking people: “Throw some strikes, dummy.”

And when Houston outfielder Jason Lane sprinted toward the right-field found line and made a diving catch, Buck was out of his seat. He screamed, “Did you see that? Did you see that? What a game! What a great game!”

B
ASEBALL SCOUTS WATCH
players’ rumps. They study human anatomy. Scouts can talk for hours, often over pretzels and beer, about a pitcher’s arm angle or the way a batter points his toe. And they will try to unravel all of baseball’s mysteries by watching the twitches and turns of a batter’s gluteus maximus. If a hitter is confident, Buck said, his rump will stay put while he swings the bat. Playing and scouts call that “staying in there.” But when a hitter feels unsure, when he’s been expecting a fastball only to be dealt a curve, when his timing has been wrecked by a particularly nasty pitch, his butt will go flying one way or another.

A Houston player named Willy Taveras came to the plate. “Man, he looks like Willie Mays,” Buck said, and he meant that literally. He thought Taveras’s face bore a resemblance to Mays’s face. As a hitter, Taveras looked nothing at all like Mays. Taveras’s leading attribute was his speed, so his swing was built to chop the ball downward, into the ground, so he could then run hard to first base. Chicago pitcher Michael Wuertz threw his pitch, and Taveras was badly fooled. He chopped with his bat, missed, and almost fell down.

“His heart was willing” was Buck’s scouting report, “but his rump was gone.”

S
OMETHING IS ALWAYS
going on at the ballpark. Baseball marketing directors worry about baseball losing touch with the times. They worry that the pace is too slow for the kids raised on video games and the adults who check their e-mails on their phones. So the baseball people constantly invent new things to fill in the quiet spaces between innings and at-bats—trivia contests, dance-offs, beer gardens, children’s play areas the size of amusement parks, pizza promotions, and blooper videos that show baseball players colliding into each other. In Houston, there was also “the Great Hummer Race.” This was a hot baseball trend—an animated race that would be shown on the video board every night. Every stadium had one. On the Kansas City video board, for instance, animated hot dogs representing those popular condiments ketchup, mustard, and relish raced around the bases. Mustard generally drew the loudest cheers. In New York, animated subway cars raced to Yankee Stadium. In Oakland, animated dots raced. In Milwaukee, real people dressed up like sausages (one bratwurst, one Polish sausage, and one Italian sausage) sprinted from left field to home plate. In Pittsburgh, pirogues raced.

On this night in Houston, animated Hummers plowed through mud and guzzled cartoon gas. The crowd, which included the first President Bush, stood mesmerized and then, when the black Hummer crossed first, the entire stadium erupted in cheers. Houston likes black Hummers.

You might guess all of these baseball sideshows would drive Buck crazy. Truth was, he loved every bit of it. He cheered loudly for the black Hummer. He laughed happily during the bloopers video. In one promotion, a man who looked like he had recently escaped from Folsom Prison was awarded a free “Men’s Wearhouse makeover.” “I wonder how it will turn out?” Buck said two or three times. It turned out the way you might expect. After the makeover, the man wore a suit, which nicely covered his arm tattoos. He looked as if he had been paroled from Folsom Prison. Buck was impressed. “They really did a number on that guy,” he said.

During the seventh-inning stretch, “Deep in the Heart of Texas” played. Buck sang along—of course he sang. There was never a time when I heard people singing and Buck did not join in. In this case, Buck did not know the words, and he could not keep up with the lyrics as they flashed up on the video board. But he tried.

 

The stars at night

are la-la bright

Deep in the heart of Texas

The la-la sky la-la la-la

 

Buck’s favorite baseball promotion, as always, was the Kiss Cam. This was a ballpark staple all over America. Cameras scanned the crowd and looked for men and women (or boys and girls) sitting next to each other. Music played—always a song like Tom Jones’s version of “Kiss” or the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love.” Once the camera locked in on the couple, one of two things could happen:

1. They kissed.
   
2. They did not kiss and were booed.
   

“Mr. O’Neil, can I have your autograph?” a woman asked just as the Kiss Cam was about to begin.

“Yes, of course, dear, in just a moment,” Buck said, and then he pointed to the video board. “I want to see this first.”

This would be an archetypal Kiss Cam, with all of the usual story lines. First, the camera focused in on a couple of kids, clearly on their first or second date. Unspoken questions rushed through the crowd: Will he have the nerve? Will she? Does she want him to kiss her? Who will make the move? What will happen to them after the cameras turn away? The kids’ faces reddened, they giggled, he looked hesitantly into her eyes, she faintly shook her head no, he froze, paralyzed, and the longer they remained on the screen, the more uncomfortable it was to watch. But there’s no turning away. “She wants you to kiss her!” Buck shouted.

“How do you know that?”

“I can see it in her eyes.”

The boy, being no older than sixteen, saw nothing but clouds in her eyes, and for another two or three excruciating seconds, the boos engulfed them. Her look changed then, her eyes pleaded:
End this
. The tension punctured with a safe peck on the cheek, an uncertain ending. The camera spun away to a middle-aged couple, drunk on beer and attention, and they groped and made out until that too became uncomfortable to watch. The Kiss Cam spotted an old couple and the cheers turned up louder, but apparently not loud enough to jolt him to awareness. He stared off into the distance, and she slapped his shoulder with her purse. He woke from his daze and sprang into action, first shouting “What?” and then leaning over to kiss her. Finally the Kiss Cam found an angry young couple, still not finished with a fight. He drank his beer, she turned away, they would not even look at each other even as the boos swelled louder and louder. She kept looking away. He kept drinking his beer.

“Come on,” Buck yelled, “kiss the lady!” He did not.

“Of course, for seven dollars, maybe he should drink the beer,” he said. And he turned back to the woman next to him, kissed her gently on the cheek, and signed an autograph.

C
RACKER
J
ACK IS
utterly intertwined with baseball, of course, mostly because of the song. Every day at every ballpark in every big city and little town across America, people sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” In 1908, Jack Norworth, an old song-and-dance man in vaudeville, wrote that song in fifteen minutes while riding the New York subway. In the middle of Jack Norworth’s song is perhaps the most effective advertising line in the history of songwriting.

 

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack.

I don’t care if I never get back.

 

There were problems with Jack Norworth’s song. For instance, people who sang “I don’t care if I never get back” almost always walked out a few minutes later to beat traffic. The bigger problem involved Cracker Jack—most stadiums did not sell it. Minute Maid Ballpark did not sell it. And yet, somehow, Buck O’Neil ended up with a bag. A big bag. He munched away happily.

“Where did you get that?” a woman a few seats down asked.

“Someone gave it to me,” Buck said.

“Are you sure you’re supposed to be eating Cracker Jacks?” she asked. There was never a shortage of women who wanted to mother Buck.

“I can eat anything I want,” Buck said. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

B
UCK TOOK MEMORY
pills every single day, except for those days when he forgot. He did not know if the pills helped him remember, but when it came to memory he would not take chances. All summer, people asked him: “What’s the secret to long life?” He gave many answers, the most common being his standby: “Good black don’t crack.” But the more anyone was around Buck, the more obvious it was his memory kept him living.

“If Buck ever started to forget, I don’t think he’d last long,” our constant companion, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum marketing director Bob Kendrick, would often say. “I think that’s the only thing that scares him. Dying doesn’t scare him. Forgetting does.”

The opposite rang true too. Remembering thrilled him. You could see joy flush his face when he recalled a story or a detail he thought lost. An autograph seeker asked Buck if he remembered a ballplayer named Leon Wagner.

“Daddy Wags, of course, of course,” Buck said. “He died just last year.”

Daddy Wags was a baseball slugger in the 1960s. He was also an actor and a showman. For a while, Leon Wagner owned a clothing store in Los Angeles and its slogan was “Buy your rags at Daddy Wags.” Wagner also had a reputation as a man who enjoyed a drink in his time.

“Yes, sir,” the autograph seeker said, “I grew up in Los Angeles. He was my favorite player. Did he play in the Negro Leagues?”

“No, no, no, he came later than that,” Buck said. “He played at Tuskegee University—I saw him play there many times. Big man. Strong. Hey, listen, I just remembered a story.”

That’s when Buck’s face lit up. The story was about a day game played in Los Angeles. This day game happened after a particularly rowdy night for Daddy Wags. He had a hangover, Buck said, that could stop a charging mule. Wags staggered around the dugout throughout the game while his teammates laughed. Daddy Wags liked the laughter. For some reason, Los Angeles Angels manager Bill Rigney thought it would be a good idea to send Daddy Wags into the game as a pinch hitter. Maybe he wanted to teach Wags a lesson. Maybe he simply did not appreciate Wags’s condition. Daddy Wags staggered to the plate. His breath beat him there by three or four steps.

“Daddy,” the opposing catcher asked, “how you going to hit with that hangover?”

“Don’t worry about that none,” Wags said. “One will get between me and my whiskey.”

“And,” Buck said, “sure enough he hit a ball out of the stadium onto the street nearby. Wags said the toughest part of all was making it around the bases without falling down.”

C
LEMENS AND
M
ADDUX
both pitched well. I asked Buck which pitcher was better. He seemed offended, as if I had asked him to pick his favorite child.

“There is no better, man,” he says. “Those are two great pitchers. There is no better. That’s just sportswriter talk. They do it different ways. You’ve got one guy, Clemens, he’s all power. You got the other guy, Maddux, and he just knows how to pitch, throw a strike on the corner, throw another one on the corner, yeah, just knows how to pitch. What are you talking about better? They’re both great, outstanding, Hall of Fame pitchers.”

I rephrased the question. “Buck,” I said, “if you were the manager, which of them would you pitch in the seventh game in the World Series?”

“Well,” Buck said, “when you put it that way, I’d have to go with Roger.”

O
NE OF THE
Chicago Cubs players, Jerry Hairston Jr., came from a long family line of baseball players. Buck had been around the Hairston family for more than sixty years, going back to Sam Hairston, who was a terrific player in the Negro Leagues. Sam was one of those players who shined in that time just before baseball integrated in 1947. Sam was twenty-seven when Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers, and he was thirty years old when he signed with the Chicago White Sox. His best days were gone. He managed to make it to the Major Leagues for five at-bats in 1951, and then he went back to the Minor Leagues for good. Sam Hairston, like Buck, became a scout in Chicago.

Sam signed his son Jerry Hairston to play for the White Sox. Jerry Hairston played fourteen seasons in the Major Leagues, almost all of them for the Chicago White Sox. He was a pinch hitter mostly. Nine years after he retired,
his
son, Jerry Hairston Jr., made it to the Major Leagues.

“Fathers and sons,” Buck said. “That is what this game is all about. You know what I mean? How many fathers and sons are there in baseball now?”

We thought of a few famous ones: Bobby Bonds and Barry Bonds. Ken Griffey Sr. and Jr. There were other three-generation families too, like the Bells (David Bell; his father, Buddy Bell; and his grandfather, Gus) and the Boones (Aaron and Bret Boone; their father, Bob; and his father, Ray). There were the Alous and Cruzes and Alomars and Fielders and Javiers and Swishers and Wrights and so on. Buck was right. There were more fathers and sons in baseball than in other sports. Buck said it has always been that way. He remembered that a son of Josh Gibson played in the Negro Leagues for a while.