Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (14 page)

Don, watching the game and his emotions simultaneously, announced, “I’m elated. I’m back to my original state of anxiety. But listen, Max, we’re lucky they decided to pitch to Freehan.”

“Yes,” Max said. “First of all, I would walk him. But then I absolutely don’t throw him any kind of up pitch like that.”

Jim Northrup, the Tiger right fielder, came up to the plate in the sixth, and Bert said, “I still don’t see why this guy doesn’t hit about .380.”

“We’ve been saying that for ten years,” Don said.

Northrup flied out, and Rodriguez stood in. Bert cried, “Au-reeli-
oh!”

“See, here’s another one,” Max said. “This guy hit nineteen homers one year, and everybody called him a home-run hitter. They’ve been waiting ever since.”

“He hit
nineteen?”
said Bert.

“Yes, for the Angels.”

“Not for us, of course.”

“Aurelio has a lazy bat,” Don said. “He doesn’t whip that bat.”

“Frank Boiling had a lazy bat, too,” Max said.

“You can’t remember Milt Boiling?” Bert said.

Rodriguez hit a two-run home run to left, and Max, waving his arms and laughing, cried, “Exactly what I said! He’s a great home-run hitter. I always knew it. Anyway, Williams should have taken out Holtzman. The man was dying out there—anybody could see it.”

In the eighth, however, the Oakland designated hitter, Deron Johnson, jumped on a pitch by a Detroit reliever named Tom Timmerman and drove it high into the left-field seats. The game was tied. There was an enormous silence, and Don Shapiro, holding his head, stood up and turned his back on the field. “I knew it,” he said. “I
knew
it!” He swayed slightly. “Oh, listen to that damned organ, will you? They’re playing funeral selections.” (Another bitter cause: In 1966, Don and Max directed a barrage of letters at the Tigers’ general manager, Jim Campbell, protesting the installation of an organ at the stadium. Max wrote, “Baseball games are baseball games, and vesper services are vesper services.” Don wrote, “Who in hell wants to hear ‘Funiculi Funicula’ in the middle of a Tiger rally?” Max wrote, “The object of a ball game for the fan is not to be entertained. It is to win.” The organ was not removed.)

Rich Reese, leading off the bottom of the eighth, was walked, and hopes revived noisily. Dick Sharon stood in, and Max said, “He should bunt, but we have the worst bunting team in history.”

“It’s an absolute must-bunt situation,” Don agreed. Last year, Don mailed a lengthy letter to Billy Martin outlining a new defense for the must-bunt, which involved sending the second baseman to charge the plate on the right side of the diamond, instead of the traditional move by the first baseman. Don’s plan quoted from his correspondence with the Michigan State baseball coach, Danny Litwhiler, who had devised the new play. No answer came from Martin, but his response, relayed later to Don, was “I don’t go for that funny stuff.”

Here, in any case, Sharon did bunt, and was safe when first baseman Tenace muffed the ball. A moment later, Northrup smacked a triple for the go-ahead runs—good enough, it turned out, for the game. The Tigers won, 8–5, and Don, on his feet and clapping, had brightened perceptibly. “I was never worried for an instant,” he said. A moment later, he added, “Well, that’s a lie. My trouble is I tend to view these games viscerally. Baseball gives me that endogenous epinephrine. I’m hooked on my own adrenaline.”

Detroit in the nineteen-thirties had few visible civic or economic virtues, but it just may have been the best baseball town in the country. The Tigers—a dangerous and contentious team built around the power hitting of the enormous Hank Greenberg, and around Charlie Gehringer and Mickey Cochrane and, later, Rudy York, and around the pitching of Schoolboy Rowe, Tommy Bridges, and, later, Bobo Newsom—did not win nearly as often as the lordly Yankees, but victory, when it came, was treasured. There was a pennant in 1934 (the first since 1909), a championship in 1935 (the first ever for Detroit), and another pennant in 1940. At his home on Tuxedo Avenue, young Don Shapiro, listening to games over Station WWJ in the afternoon, tried to work magic spells to make the Tigers win: twenty-eight baby steps across his bedroom without losing his balance could bring Gehringer a hit (not quite pure magic, since Gehringer’s batting average between 1933 and 1940 was .336). The Ernie Harwell of those Piltdown days was Ty Tyson, for Mobil Oil and “The Sign of the Flying Red … Horse!,” who called Greenberg “Hankus-Pankus” and Schoolboy Rowe “Schoolhouse” or “Schoolie.” (“For a pitcher, Schoolie is sure pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down.”) Whenever they could, Don and Bert and their friends took the Trumbull Avenue streetcar at noontime to the ball park, then called Navin Field, and stood beside an iron gate on the corner of National Street, behind home plate. In time, the gate rolled up, to a great clattering of chains, and a Tigers’ supervisor would conduct a mini-shape-up (“You and you and you and
you
over there”) for the job of assistant ushers. The designees took up their posts in the outer reaches of the upper deck, beyond the uniformed regulars, and returned batting-practice fly balls and dusted seats and, between times, eyed the Olympians on the field: not just Greenberg and Gehringer and Rowe but the others—Marv Owen and Gee Walker and Elon Hogsett and Pete Fox, and batboy Whitey Willis and trainer Denny Carroll and groundskeeper Neil Conway. A lot of the players lived in apartment houses out on Chicago and Dexter Boulevards, or Boston and Dexter, and if you walked out there and waited long enough, you could sometimes pick up an autograph. The game and the players must have seemed very near in those days. Once, in 1936, when Don Shapiro was twelve years old, he played catch with Tiger first baseman Jack Burns, who split Don’s left thumb with a throw; the wonderful stigma—a white cicatrix on the first knuckle—is still visible.

Bert Gordon’s father, a rabbi, was a passionate fan who sometimes got his tickets through the Detroit Council of Churches, which provided free seats for the clergy. “I’d be sitting beside him at the park, and I’d say ‘Father—’ and the whole section would turn around,” Bert said recently. He laughed, and went on, “My father was a city man—like all our fathers, I guess. He never went fishing, or anything. It was baseball that was the bond between us. Baseball was the whole thing. I don’t think anybody can imagine the terrific importance of Hank Greenberg to the whole Jewish community then. He was a god, a true folk hero. That made baseball acceptable to our parents, so for once they didn’t mind if we took a little time off from the big process of getting into college. And then, of course, Hank Greenberg was so big and so handsome—a handsome giant. Plus he didn’t change his name. I can remember Rosh Hashanah, or some day like that, in 1938, when Hank was going after Babe Ruth’s record of sixty home runs in a season. Of course, nobody in the synagogue could go near a radio that day, but somebody came in late from the parking lot with a report about the game, and the news went through the congregation like a
wind.”

Don kept a scrapbook that summer, pasting up Greenberg’s pictures and box scores and headlines (
“HANK’S NINE DAYS AHEAD!”
). Under one photograph of Greenberg swinging a bat, he penciled “There she goes!” and under the headline
“HANK NEEDS FOUR HOMERS IN NINE GAMES TO TIE”
he wrote “Two bits he does it!” He was wrong; Hank hit fifty-eight, falling shy of the record by two. A year or two earlier, Greenberg had accepted an invitation to dinner with some friends of his who had a house in Max Lapides’ part of town, and word was sent out that he would shake hands with the neighborhood kids. The excited juniors lined up (in their sweatshirts with Greenberg’s number 5 inked on the back, and carrying, nearly all of them, first basemen’s mitts), but Max was not among them, for he had broken a leg a few days before and was forbidden to get out of bed. He cried himself to sleep that night, but he was awakened by his father turning on the light and ushering Hank Greenberg into the room. The sudden visitor was so enormous, Max recalls, that he had to duck his head to get through the door. Greenberg sat on Max’s bed and talked to him for half an hour. Before he left, he took out a pen and signed Max’s cast and then, seeing a copy of Max’s favorite baseball book—
Safe!,
by Harold Sherman—on the bedside table, he signed that, too.

“In our household, we used to talk about only three things—current events, the Jewish holidays, and baseball,” Max has said. “You have to try to remember how much easier it was to keep up with all the baseball news back then. For us, there were just the Tigers and the seven other teams in the American League, so we knew them by heart. All the games were played in the afternoon, and none of the teams was in a time zone more than an hour away from Detroit, so you got just about all the scores when the late-afternoon papers came. You could talk about that at supper, and then there were the stories in the morning papers to read and think about the next day. Why, in those days we knew more about the farms than I know about some of the West Coast teams right now. By the time a Hoot Evers or a Fred Hutchinson was ready to come up from Beaumont, we knew all about him.”

Max’s father, Jack, did not need Hank Greenberg to introduce him to baseball.
His
father, in turn, had been a butcher in Rochester, New York, and young Jack Lapides had often made the morning rounds in the family cart and then sat next to his father in a saloon and studied the pictures of the baseball players of the day—with their turtleneck uniforms and handlebar mustaches—up above the big, cool bar mirror. Jack Lapides had a laundry business in Detroit, and by the nineteen thirties he had arranged things well enough so that in the stirring seasons of 1934 and 1935 he was able to attend every single Tiger home game and many on the road. “My father used to take me to fifty or sixty games a year,” Max recalled this summer, “and I recently became aware that between us we encompassed just about the entire history of big-league ball in this century. He went to most of the games every year right up to the end of his life, in 1967. I’d met Don by then, and in those last few years he would come along with us, too.”

Don Shapiro’s father, a tallow merchant, knew nothing about baseball, but one of Don’s uncles was a junk dealer who owned a semipro team in Lapeer, Michigan; and even as a very young boy, Don was sometimes allowed to sit on the bench with the players. That was enough—more than enough—to start it all for him. Don has a vivid and affectionate memory of Jack Lapides. “He was a very formal man, a reserved sort of man,” he said not long ago, “and I can still see him sitting up there in the stands, in his coat and collar and tie, with one hand on the railing in front of him. He kept me and Max on our toes. ‘Pay attention, boys,’ he always said. ‘This is a serious business.’”

It is another Saturday, the last day in June, and Max is back from Chicago again, to be with his family and his Tigers and his Tiger friends. This time, it has been decided, the game will be watched on television, and the three meet for lunch at Bert’s big, comfortable house in Huntington Woods. Before lunch, Max and Don throw a baseball back and forth in Bert’s backyard; according to custom, each is wearing the top half of a gray Tiger road uniform. The name on Don’s back, above the number 42, is
SZOTKIEWICZ
; Max is 21,
ZEPP
. The shirts, which are both beautifully pressed, were gifts from Ernie Harwell, who extracted them from the Tiger clubhouse after the brief, almost unnoticed careers of two Tiger foot soldiers—Kenny Szotkiewicz and Bill Zepp—had come to a close. (Harwell, who is a friend and admirer of Don Shapiro, telephoned Don from Cleveland one afternoon late in the 1966 season, and asked if he would care to work out with the Tigers before their game with the Indians that evening. Don canceled his appointments, flew to Cleveland and suited up, was introduced to Tiger manager Frank Skaff—who may have been a trifle surprised to find that the “prospect” Harwell had promised him was a slight, forty-two-year-old oral surgeon—and then warmed up with Don Wert, Ray Oyler, Willie Horton, and the rest. In photographs of the event, which hang on the wall of Don’s living room, the ballplayers look bemused, but the prospect is ecstatic.) Max begins throwing harder now, and Don, who has a catcher’s mitt and is wearing a Tiger cap on backward, goes into a crouch. Max’s motion is a little stiff, but you can see in it the evidences of a fair high-school ballplayer. Don handles his glove elegantly, coming up smoothly and in one motion after each pitch and snapping the throw back from behind his shoulder. He is smiling. He caught briefly for the University of Michigan varsity and, later, on a Sixth Service Command team in Chicago. The ball is beginning to pop in the gloves, and Bert, umpiring from behind the invisible mound, expresses concern for his wife’s borders. Max pauses for breath and reminds everyone of a similar pregame workout some years ago when a small protective sponge fell out of Don’s glove. “All he could say was ‘These hands. These golden hands.’ From catcher to surgeon in one second.”

“Throw the ball,” says the catcher-surgeon.

“Knuckler,” says Max.

“Hey!” says Don. “Not bad. Again.”

The next knuckleball sails over Don’s head and through the hedge.

“OK, that’s it,” Bert declares, calling the game. “Zena will kill me.”

“Listen,” Don says as they troop toward Bert’s sun porch. “I think my arm is coming back. I really mean that. Wouldn’t that be
something,
to get my arm back after all this time?” He notices that a lacing on his mitt has come loose, and he stops to tie it up. “Goddam dog,” he murmurs.

The Tigers, who have recently lost eight straight and have slipped to fifth place, are playing the rising Orioles, but they score two unearned runs off Mike Cuellar in the first inning, and in the second Mickey Stanley hits a home run. The Tiger pitcher is a big, strong-looking young right-hander named Mike Strahler. The friends sit in easy chairs in Bert’s study, with plates of sandwiches and salad in their laps. Zena Gordon, Bert’s wife, brings around seconds. Brian Gordon, Bert’s younger son, who is sixteen, comes in and watches for an inning or two and then wanders out again. The Gordons’ other son, Merrill, is away at his summer job. He is a Michigan State sophomore, who wants to become a forester; he does not care about baseball. “He thinks it’s a lot of men running around in funny suits,” Bert explains. Bert used to take Merrill to games, but the summer Merrill was eleven years old he finally got up the nerve to tell his father that baseball meant nothing to him. “Everything you do in life, you do so that your son will go to ball games with you, and then he doesn’t want to,” Bert says now. He makes a joke of it, but at the time the news shook him so severely that he himself hardly went to the ball park for two years. “If my family wanted to be home, I wanted to be home with them,” he says. Max Lapides has two daughters, who are seven and eleven; he says he can’t tell yet about them and baseball. Don’s son, Alan, who is fifteen, is crazy about baseball. He catches for a team called the Rangers in his suburban Colt League, and he watches the Tigers with something of his father’s unhappy intensity. Still, there are no streetcars that run from his house to the ball park, and it is almost certain that he will never discover a baseball world that is as rich and wide as his father’s. “You know what I really wish?” Alan said to Don one day last spring. “I wish I had friends like yours.”