Keystone Kids (17 page)

Finally the smoke of battle cleared away. The loud-mouthed fans were rushed off by policemen and green-uniformed attendants, and the players led by Bob Russell, scarred but happy, climbed down from the boxes, over the dugout roof and back inside, bearing an assortment of abrasions, contusions, and lacerations as evidence of the conflict. Most of the crowd was unaware of the exact cause of the battle; but ball crowds love a fight, a fight in plain view on the diamond against the visitors or the umpires if possible; yet any kind of a fight is better than none. When Swanny stepped to the plate he was greeted with applause.

He responded by smacking the first pitch to the left for a single.

Red Allen immediately singled, too.

Roy Tucker came up. He looked dangerous and was passed, filling the bases.

Now the sparse, apathetic crowd was up yelling, and the Phillies’ catcher and pitcher met together in the middle of the path down to the mound. Karl Case waited for a full count and then tripled to the barriers, four hundred feet from the plate, clearing the bases.

A new hurler came rapidly across from the bullpen to stifle the Dodger rally. Harry Street promptly greeted him with a scorching double down the left field line. In the coaching box back of third, Spike felt the whole team begin to move at last, to move as a team.

Gosh, something has happened. Something has given way. Something has broken the tension. Now we’re really moving. We’re off at last!

Bob came up to the plate and worked a base on balls. Then Jocko Klein ambled forward. The whole Dodger dugout was on the step, not one or two or a few, but all of them—the subs, the players, the relief pitchers, even old Chiselbeak who had come out from the lockers with a towel over his shoulders, all yelling through their hands. All behind the boy in the batter’s box.

“Give us a hit, Jocko...”

“You can do it, you can do it, Jocko old kid...”

“Put one up in Aunt Minnie’s room...”

“All right, Klein old boy, here comes the big one... the big one coming, Jocko...”

The Philadelphia pitcher saw them shouting, looked around nervously at the men on first and second, took the signs. He felt the team backing the man at the plate, felt he was not only trying to outguess one hitter but facing the whole club, determined and united. The boy felt it, too, felt the rise of team spirit, heard above the noise of the stands the voices of men he knew. There was a ring to them, a sound he had never heard before. This was it. This was it at last. They fought for me up there in the boxes; they’re with me. I’m the catcher of the Dodgers now!

He was warm all over and not from the burning sun either. He gripped his bat, gripped it hard. Let’s see your pay pitch, big boy. I’m ready for it.

The man in the box slowed up on him. He swung hard for a strike. The shouts from behind were louder than ever. Then the pitcher tried foolishly to sneak one over. It was an outside corner fast ball, the one he wanted. He gave everything he had.

From the shade in the coaching box back of third base Spike stood on tiptoes watching the ball in the haze of the afternoon. Oh, boy, he pickled that one... I think... I hope... yessir... the kid sure pickled that one!

The Phillie right fielder was burning up the ground, tearing desperately back for the catch, running hard for the fence, getting ready to turn and jump, slowing down, standing there panting, his arms on his hips, his head in the air. The ball descended slowly over the right field wall.

H
E CAME OUT OF
the tiny dressing room adjoining the larger one, and stood in the doorway looking over the roomful of naked, half-naked, and half-dressed players. Tommy Heeney of the
Eagle
walked past and spoke.

“Well, Spike, those three games over in Philadelphia sort of set you up, hey?”

“Uhuh.” When you don’t say anything, as Grouchy often remarked, you don’t ever have to eat your own words.

“You’ve won four games straight.”

“That’s correct.”

“Your biggest winning streak of the season, isn’t it? If you grab this off today you’ll be in fifth place.”

“That’s correct.”

“Think you can win the pennant, Spike?”

It was meant, as he knew, for a joke or possibly the foundation of a wisecrack in Heeney’s column the next morning. But Spike Russell, trained in a hard school, in Grouchy’s school, merely answered, “We gotta chance.”

Not much there. The sportswriter passed along, leaving the manager leaning against the door, surveying his team as they got ready for the Cards in that critical series which might make or break them for the year. Ordinarily he would have held a meeting. Ordinarily he would have gone over their hitting, cautioned his men about their playing, about the importance of every game now. Not today. This team was keen. This team was ready to go.

He tried to look at them objectively, men he knew, had liked, admired, loved, disliked, or hated at various times; men he had, he hoped, finally succeeded in molding into what was called a team. And what was a team? It was everything in sport and in life, yet nothing you could touch or see or feel or even explain to someone else. A team was like an individual, a character, fashioned by work and suffering and disappointment and sympathy and understanding, perhaps not least of all by defeat.

A team was made up of equal parts of Bob’s pep and fire and vinegar mixed with Roy’s quiet determination when things went wrong. It was those big flat muscles on Rats Doyle’s stomach as he pulled on his shirt. It was the warm friendly way in which Red Allen was putting surgeon’s plaster on a blister along Harry’s thumb. It was Karl Case’s drive and push in the clutch when he forgot his batting average and was trying hard to win for the club. It was Raz Nugent’s imagination which kept them laughing off the field. It was Fat Stuff’s reliability. It was the nervous power of Swanny straining for an impossible low liner that was sinking fast, a liner most men would have played safe as a hit. It was the harnessed energy of Elmer McCaffrey when he was bearing down in a difficult situation. It was the courage of Jocko Klein, sliding into the plate on his stomach, hands out to be chewed by the spikes of the catcher defending home plate above. It was all these men and all these qualities that made a team.

He knew them, knew them all, knew them even better than their parents, better than their wives and children would ever know them. He saw them when only the man showed through, when all defenses were down, when nothing counted except what they had underneath. He knew them best, yet there were things about them that even Spike Russell did not know and could never know.

He knew that in the crisis of a game, in the late afternoon when the shadows covered him, Harry Street was the most dependable third baseman in the league. He did not know that a Calvinist named Herald van Stirum fought in the religious wars at Leyden in the low countries or that his son would join a band of men who called themselves Pilgrims, and end up across an ocean in the New World. He knew Elmer McCaffrey would go out on the mound with a lame arm or a bad side and pitch his heart out until he had to be hauled away from the mound, that he would stand there stubbornly in the last innings with the bases full and a slugger at bat, suffering so he could hardly breathe yet insisting he was all right. But he didn’t know that the McCaffreys were fierce Catholics, one of whom died under Charles First fighting Cromwell at Marston Moor. Nor that his descendant still in kilts, kilts of khaki, dirty and brown, but kilts nevertheless, was overrun by the hordes of the Mahdi and fell near Gordon on the steps of the Palace at Khartoum.

Spike realized that of all the team Swanny was the most daring, but he did not realize that this was in his blood, that it came from a man with a flowing yellow mane who went into battle singing hymns with Gustavus II at Lutzen.

Nor did Spike know that in ’62 a boy named Tucker marched off from a New England farm to die with the Second Connecticut Volunteers at Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley, nor that the regiment against them was the Third North Carolina State Troops commanded by a man named Russell. Although he knew a Russell was an officer in the Confederate army, he did not know that a peppery, leather-lunged little fellow full of fire and spirit fought beside Andrew Jackson on the shell-swept rampart of the Rodriguez Canal at New Orleans. He didn’t know that a red-bearded man named Allen had piled his family and goods into a wagon after the Civil War and, with his rifle on his knees, whipped up his horses and started west. Over the Mississippi, through the frontier regions of the Middle Border, out into the desolate prairie where you had to be ready for anything, across the Rockies and into the sunbaked lands along the Pacific. Spike did not know this. He would have been surprised to learn that Red Allen came from men who were quick on the draw, that some of his courage and alertness came from men who had been used to facing danger.

Most of all, Spike would have been astonished to hear the story of Israel Klein. Long, long ago Israel Klein had been a trader in the ghettos of Marrakesh in Morocco, a man who bargained with the ship captains from the ports along the Atlantic. He had become known in the city as an established merchant, but his home, his business, and his goods were lost when Berbers sacked the town and captured it. Escaping with his family, he finally reached Paris where again he established himself as a trader, again built up a business. In the reign of Philippe the Fair he was killed when members of his race were either murdered or banished from France. But his son escaped, and later an Israel Klein was doing business in Bavaria, where he flourished and handed on a profitable industry to his children. There they lived, worked, raised families, and died, until 1550. Then they, also, were exiled. So the Israel Kleins moved along as they had been moving for centuries, from Bavaria north to the Hanseatic States on the sea; from place to place, from country to country, through a “river of blood and time,” building up trade, working, prospering, then losing their freedom again, suffering, dying. Until one day in the ghetto of Vienna, a descendant of old Israel Klein of Marrakesh heard of a new land, a land where persecutions did not exist, or banishments or pogroms, where children were not sold into slavery or families destroyed.

These were some of the things Spike did not know about his team, the team that was lost and found itself. For now they were a team, all of them. Thin and not so thin, tall and short, strong and not so strong, solemn and excitable, Calvinist and Covenanter, Catholic and Lutheran, Puritan and Jew, these were the elements that, fighting, clashing and jarring at first, then slowly mixing, blending, refining, made up a team. Made up America.

“Hey, youse...”

Back in the Dodger clubhouse on Ebbets Field, the team was moving out to the diamond. Clack-clack, clackety-clack, clack-clack, clackety-clack; there was a note of confidence in the way their spikes resounded on the concrete walk.

“Hey, youse, there’s a ballgame on!”

Old Chiselbeak gave him an affectionate shove toward the door.

Gosh, yes. Spike had forgotten about Chiselbeak. Old Chisel, the man no one ever saw, who took your dirty clothes and handed out clean towels and cokes, and packed the trunks and kept the keys to the safe and did the thousand things no one ever saw. Chisel was part of the team, too; and, though Spike didn’t realize it as he followed his team along the concrete runway, part of America also. He was the millions and millions who never have their names in the line-up, who never play before the crowd, who never hit home runs and get the fans’ applause; who work all over the United States, underpaid, unknown, unrewarded. The Chiselbeaks are part of the team, too.

S
TANLEY
K
ING OF THE
Telegram
sauntered across behind the plate where half the Cardinals were gathered around the batting cage, over to their dugout on the other side of the diamond. There was a small space beside Grouchy, and Stanley squeezed into it. The Cardinal manager gave him a grunt which could have meant anything from a none too cordial greeting to a suggestion that he move along down the bench to the empty spaces at the other end. Stanley, like all good reporters, was obtuse to hints.

“Just spoke to Spike Russell. Thinks he might win the pennant.”

“He’s gotta chance,” said the old fellow, peering out with practiced eyes on his charges scattered over the sunswept field.

This was so exactly what Spike had said that Stanley had to smile. “Why? Because they won three straight from the Phils?”

“They all count in the win column.”

“So they tell me. But it isn’t hard to lick a last-place club. Besides, the Russells aren’t clicking. When the Russells don’t click, those Dodgers aren’t anything better than a seventh place team. They were muffing doubleplays last week, you know, snatching at the ball before they had it.”

“That’s bad timing. They’ll snap out of it. They’re good kids.”

“They better—and soon,” rejoined Stanley. “They certainly aren’t clicking now.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Grouchy, skeptical as always. He rose and strolled away. Whenever possible he deprived himself of the pleasure of long conversations, especially with sportswriters.

The Dodgers got away to a good start, scoring two runs in the first inning on long drives to the fence by Case and Swanny; but Rats Doyle was being hit frequently all through the early part of the game. In the third, with men on first and second and one down, the Card batter smacked a scorching grounder slightly to Bob’s right. It was beautiful to see him swoop down on the ball, to watch his right foot directly in its path, his left so placed that the instant he had it he could turn and throw underhand to his brother on second. One moment it was bouncing toward him, then it was gone, it was Spike’s, it was Red’s. And the Dodgers were tossing their gloves behind them and racing back again to the shelter of the bench.

Sometimes two runs look big; but that afternoon they were an infinitesimal edge, so small you hardly could see them. For while the Card pitcher handcuffed the hitters after that opening inning and got better as he went along, Rats Doyle was in trouble from the start. There were men on bases every inning, and only good support kept them from scoring. You could see the relief on the face of the big pitcher as the Keystone Kids got him out of one hole after another. In the fourth, however, two men singled with the top of the Cardinal batting order at the plate and only one out. So Spike signaled for Elmer McCaffrey. Elmer was a good relief pitcher with runners on base; he threw underhand and had a first-class sinker that kept the ball low. Elmer tossed in his warm-up pitches. He hoisted his belt, looked round the diamond, and went to work.