The Boys of Summer (13 page)

The fast ball intimidates. The curve—“public enemy number one,” Chuck Dressen called it—aborts careers. A curve breaks sideways, or downward or at an intervening angle, depending on how it is thrown. Branch Rickey regarded the overhand curve as the best of breaking pitches. An overhand curve, the drop of long ago, breaks straight down, and, unlike flatter curve balls, an overhand curve is equally appalling to righthanded and lefthanded batters. The pure drop, hurtling in at the eyes and snapping to the knees, carried Carl Erskine and Sandy Koufax to strikeout records (fourteen and fifteen) in World Series separated by a decade.

Finally, the technique of major league pitching requires excellent control. Home plate is seventeen inches wide; and a man does best to work the corners. A good technical pitcher throws the baseball at speeds that exceed ninety miles an hour, makes it change direction abruptly and penetrate a target area smaller than a catcher’s mitt.

Art proceeds subsequently. The artful pitcher tries never to
offer what is expected. Would the batter like a fast ball? Curve him, or, better, throw the fast ball at eye height. Eagerness leads to a wild swing.
Strike one.
Would the batter like another? Now throw that public enemy, down and dirty at the knees.
Strike two.
Now he’s on notice for the curve. Hum that jumping fast ball letter-high. That’s the pitch he wanted, but not there, not then. Sit down.
Strike three called.
Who’s next?

The pitchers are different from the others. They work less often, but when they do, they can hold nothing back. Others cry at a loafing pitcher, “Bend your back. Get naked out there.” Action suspends and nine others wait until the pitcher throws. All eyes are on the pitcher, who sighs and thinks. “Ya know,” Casey Stengel said about a quiet Arkansan named John Sain, “he don’t say much, but that don’t matter much, because when you’re out there on the mound, you got nobody to talk to.” Pitchers are individualists, brave, stubborn, cerebral, hypochondriacal and lonely.

There was so much that Rickey thought that he could do with pitchers. At Vero Beach three plates were crowned with an odd superstructure. This was the strike zone, outlined in string. Pitching through strings, Rickey said, let a man see where his fast ball went. He devised a curve-ball aptitude test.
Hold pitching arm with hand toward face. Grip ball along seams. Draw arm back fully so that ball touches point of shoulder. Now throw as far as you can.
One can throw neither far nor hard. The test humiliates most people, including good major league curve-ball pitchers.

Rickey erred, retrospect suggests, in overestimating the body and in underestimating the insecurity of pitchers. His favorite overhand curve tortures the arm. A line of strain runs from the elbow to the base of the shoulder. An extraordinary number of Rickey’s best pitching prospects rapidly destroyed their arms. In trainer’s argot, they stripped their gears.

One gentle, soft-featured Nebraskan, Rex Barney, threw
overpowering fast balls, although, as Bob Cooke said so often, he pitched as though the plate were high and outside. Rickey led Barney to the strike zone strings at Vero Beach and commanded, “Please pitch with your right eye covered.” Presently he said, “Pitch with your left eye covered.” After months of test and experiment, Barney was still wild, and now given to periods of weeping. Rickey threw up his hands and ordered Barney to a Brooklyn psychiatrist. Before he reached thirty, Barney became a bartender. Another major talent, Jack Banta, was finished at twenty-five. Ralph Branca won twenty-one games when he was twenty-one years old. He retired to sell insurance at thirty.

Can each failure be laid at Rickey’s grave? No more than one can credit Rickey with Duke Snider’s 418 home runs. A model Rickey team played magnificently. A model Rickey pitching staff writhed with aching arms and nervous stomachs.

The first flaw laid bare another. Rickey treated newspapermen with condescending flattery, as one might treat stepchildren, recognizing them as an inescapable price one pays for other delights. In Pittsburgh once he invited me to his box. He was then president of the Pirate team that would lose 101 games. “Good you could come,” the master began in a hoarse, intimate whisper, placing a hand on my arm. Bushy, graying eyebrows dominated the face. “I have a question on which I’d value your opinion. What do you think of Sid Gordon?”

“Well, he’s slowed down, but he’s a strong hitter and an intelligent hitter. His arm is fine and he can catch a fly.”

Rickey nodded in excessive gratitude. “How would Sid fare at Ebbets Field?” The gnarled hand squeezed my arm. “On an
everyday
basis?”

“He’d belt a few to left.”

“And right,” Rickey said. “And right. Don’t you think he could clear the scoreboard with regularity?”

“Why, yes. I suppose he could.”

Rickey winked. “I appreciate your sharing your views. I don’t mind telling you I’m concerned about the Dodgers. So many are my ball players. I’m afraid they may not win it, in which case many will blame bad luck, which would not be the entire case. Luck is the residue of design.”

As I left, Rickey remarked, “You know, of course, Gordon was born in Brooklyn.” His putative design was altruistic. His real intention was to have me urge the Dodgers to buy Gordon in the pages of the
Herald Tribune.
Publicity is the paradigm of salesmanship.

Balancing this deviousness, which hindered reporting, Rickey offered utter mastery of the phrase. His rolling Ohio-Oxonian dialect was a delightful instrument. Were the Pirates going to win the pennant? I asked once. “Ah, a rosebush blooms on the twelfth of May and does it pretty nearly every year. And one day it’s all green and the next it’s all in flower. I don’t control a ball club’s development the way nature controls a rosebush.” Was his star home run hitter, Ralph Kiner, for sale? “I don’t want to sell Ralph, but if something overwhelming comes along, I am willing to be overwhelmed.” To what did he attribute the Pirates’ poor record? “We are last on merit.” Was he himself discouraged? “My father died at eighty-three, planting fruit trees in unpromising soil.”

Once away from the days of this year, Rickey could be quite direct, but in the running of current business he was wed to intrigue. By the late 1940s his relationship with Dick Young and the
Daily News
had become catastrophic.

Where Rickey was rotund, classical and Bible Belt, Young was spiky, self-educated and New York. Rickey was shocked by alcoholism, extramarital sex and the word “shit.” Young was shocked by Rickey’s refusal to attend Sunday games after a week of misleading reporters. A war was inevitable. Its Sarajevo was bad pitching.

Young began baseball writing in 1943, at twenty-five, and
very quickly stretched the accepted limits of the beat. He wrote not only about the games but about the athletes, giving each of the players a personality. It was traditional to present athletes as heroes. Newspaper readers learned that Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Grover Cleveland Alexander were grand gentlemen and a credit to the games of baseball and life. Young had heroes—Reese and Campanella—but he fleshed out his cast with heavies. He called Gene Hermanski “a stumbling clown in the outfield.” Hermanski responded by shoving Young, a compact five feet seven. But Young would not cower. He loved his job, which “a lot of very rich guys would give an arm to have,” and relished the power it provided, and worked at it in original ways. He cultivated some players, argued with others, writing hard stories and soft ones, but always defending his printed words in person. If Young knocked a man on Tuesday, he sought him out on Wednesday. “I wrote what I wrote because I believe it. If you got complaints, let me hear ‘em. If you want better stories, win some games.”

In time Young came to know the Dodgers better than any other newspaperman and better, too, than many Dodger officials. He sensed when to flatter, when to cajole, when to threaten. As far as any lay reader of instincts can say, Young possessed a preternatural sense of the rhythms and balances of human relations.

Conversations with several Dodgers strengthened Young’s harsh conclusion that a number of pitchers lacked heart and, after one losing game in 1948, he composed a polemical lead:

“The tree that grows in Brooklyn is an apple tree and the apples are in the throats of the Dodgers.”

There is a nice implicit pun here on Adam’s apple, but the first thrust is Young’s thought. Some Dodgers cannot swallow. They are choking.

Branch Rickey had been schooled on a tame sporting press, easy to manipulate. He could not or would not recognize Young
as the centurion of a new journalism. He would not even discuss choking frankly. Instead, he expressed private loathing “for
everything
about that man and what he stands for.” In public he patronized Young, who above all things would not be patronized. By the time Rickey left Brooklyn in 1950, he was battling Young, Young’s boss, and consequently the most widely read newspaper in the United States. In the
Daily News,
Jimmy Powers, the sports editor, identified Rickey as “El Cheapo.” Young ghosted Powers’ column ten times a year. The
News
would not mention Rickey’s manager, Burt Shotton, by name. Instead, Young lanced the bubble of Shotton as genial paterfamilias by giving him the acronym “KOBS.” The letters, forged in sarcasm, stood for Kindly Old Burt Shotton. The Dodgers lost because of, won despite, KOBS.

These assaults did not hurt Dodger attendance, but they murdered egos. When Rickey left, and Walter O’Malley became president, his first order of business was to replace KOBS with Dressen. Then O’Malley appointed Emil J. Bavasi, a warm and worldly Roman, as general manager
de facto
(at $17,500), and vice president in charge of Dick Young.

With time, one comes to regret that two such talented men as Rickey and Young fought so bitterly. Neither, I suppose, was faultless, although Rickey, being older, more secure and less tractable, probably warrants more blame. He went to his grave as a babe in public relations.

On the jacket of his ghosted memoir,
The American Diamond,
Rickey is quoted as summing up: “The game of baseball has given me a life of joy. I would not have exchanged it for any other.” That’s it. That’s the old man exactly, still musing on the game and joy at eighty. But the introduction sounds like Rickey, too. Here, seeking a quotation from a man universally appealing, admired and beloved, Rickey began with five maundering lines from Herbert Hoover.

By the time Harold Rosenthal commended me to Dick Young’s tutorship, Young and Bavasi had become friends. In addition, Young respected Dressen and enjoyed the attention and machinations of Walter Francis O’Malley. Coincidentally, he had stopped attacking management. “It is not hard to write scoops like Young does,” one of the other writers remarked, “after Bavasi feeds the stuff to you.” When Young found a few hours for an orientation lecture in Miami on my third day with the team, he angrily mentioned the accusation.

“You do a good job, some guy who can’t do a good job says you’re cheating. Have you heard that shit? You heard they feed me stuff?” Young was sipping bourbon, which Roscoe McGowen of the
Times,
who at seventy still paid dutiful visits to his mother, suggested did more for longevity than Scotch.

“I heard that, yes.”

Young looked into his glass and began cursing. “I know who told you,” he said, “and you’re just goddamn dumb enough to believe him.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m not so dumb that I’d say who told me.”

Young shook his head. “How the hell did
you
ever get this club anyway? You got pull? What the
fuck
are you doing here? Chrissake. They sent a boy.”

“Look. You worry about you and the fucking
News.
I’ll worry about the
Tribune.”

“I’ll kill you, kid.” Young’s face went blank. I wanted to escape his scorn, but sat there without words. “First, though,” Young said, “I gotta tell you rules. You know baseball? You ever cover a club? You know what to do or did you go to fucking Yale? Doan matter. I’m gonna take another bourbon. Hey. Another Old Crow. You’re a good Jewish boy. Your mother read the
Times.
Well, you can forget that fucking paper. Rocco’s a helluva man, but that don’t mean a fuck. They wouldn’t let him write it the right way if he fucking wanted. I’m not so sure he wants. The old
Times
way is no good any more, if it ever was
any good. You following me? I’m only gonna do this once.”

“The
Times
is a pretty successful paper.” I winced as I heard my words. The
Times
is pretty successful. Jackie Robinson runs bases well. Dick Young is a hard man. I sit in this hotel bar, a half dozen thoughts about my brain. Who the hell are you, Young, illiterate bastard, to talk to me like this? You know what I think of the
Daily News?
My grandfather wouldn’t let it in our house. It was a Fascist, Jew-baiting paper. People bought the
News
when somebody got raped. They read the details on page four. And, if by mistake they forgot to throw the paper out, they said, “Hey, look. I found it on the subway.” Goddamn right Bavasi feeds you stuff. You wanna scoop me, you go ahead and try (but please, don’t make me look too bad).

“It’ll catch up to the
Times
the way they do things,” Young said. His rage was done. “You like the way the
Times
writes baseball?” The storm had ended.

“Not much. No.”

“Our paper has four times as many readers; not brokers and bank presidents, but you know what Lincoln said.
‘He made so many of them.

I quoted a
Times
lead I had been reading all my life: “The Yankees drew first blood yesterday and then had it spilled all over them as …”

“Yeah,” Young said.

The son of a bitch, I thought, doesn’t even give points for quoting.

“See, that was maybe okay a long time ago. Not now. I’m gonna tell you how it got to be now, once, like I say. You listening? Shit. You ain’t drinking, so you must be listening. There’s a lot of games in a season.”

“One hundred fifty-four.”