The Soul of Baseball (9 page)

“It’s a nicer name for it,” Buck said.

Tony laughed. Buck laughed. Others sitting at the table did not get the joke because they were not old ballplayers. Buck and Tony believed that the split-fingered fastball was, in reality, nothing but an old-fashioned spitball. They even sounded alike. The spitter, unlike the splitter, had been around since the earliest days of baseball. Pitchers back in the nineteenth century had figured out that by spitting on the ball (or cutting the ball, or rubbing the ball with some other foreign substance like Vaseline), they could make it drop at the last instant. The spitball was officially outlawed in 1920, though pitchers often found a way around the rules.

Oliva: “There is no way—I’m telling you, there’s
no way
—that you can make a ball drop that much [he held his hands about a foot apart] by putting your fingers on either side. What, do they think I am some kind of fool? There’s no way.”

Buck: “That’s what I been trying to say. The other day, I was sitting behind home plate, and I saw a pitcher throw that big sink. All these young scouts started talking about how that was a great split-fingered fastball. I said, ‘Well, that was the wettest split-fingered fastball I ever saw.’”

They each remembered how the pitchers used to get around the rules and throw spitballs back in their day. Buck remembered that on his team, the third baseman was the one responsible for soaking the ball. Oliva remembered facing a pitcher once—even now he was too much of a gentleman to say his name—who loaded up the ball with so much spit that Oliva would get drenched every time he connected with the ball.

“Split-fingered fastball,” Oliva said, shaking his head. “People are so gullible now.”

T
IME FOR
B
UCK
to go down to the field. He hugged Oliva and said, “I love you, Tony.” Oliva said, “Buck, you know what I regret? I’ve forgotten. I wish I could remember like you remember. If I could do it all over again, I would write down every little story. There were so many funny stories, but now that I’m old, I’ve forgotten.”

Buck shook his head.

 

You haven’t forgotten.

You just think you have.

Memory is like baseball.

You might oh-for-four today.

But you’ll get three hits tomorrow.

Right? Good days and bad days.

You’ll remember.

Those stories aren’t gone.

They’re just behind a few cobwebs.

 

Buck winked and walked to the field. Tony Oliva nodded, asked for a pad, and wrote something.

K
IDS IN THE
stands tossed baseballs to Buck O’Neil for him to sign, and he caught them one-handed. For an instant you could see the athlete he was sixty years before. Buck could always catch the ball. When he was a child at his father’s semipro baseball games in Sarasota, he would stand in foul ground between innings. People in the stands would throw pennies and nickels at him. He remembered catching every coin. Later, when he played first base for the Monarchs, he loved being in the field. He remembered a game in Chicago where a player lashed a line drive to his left and he dove and caught it. The next batter lashed one to his right, and he dove and caught it again.

“Hit it to someone else!” someone yelled from the depths of the crowd.

While Buck signed baseballs, a woman threw out the first pitch. She had confessed to Buck that she was so nervous she had been practicing for days. He told her not to worry, it would turn out fine. He was wrong. The ball squirted out of her hand sideways and rolled mockingly toward the Minnesota Twins dugout. She buried her face in her hands as people booed. There were not many people in the stands to boo. Twins coach Al Newman walked on the field, stepped behind a microphone stand, and told the crowd about what Buck O’Neil meant to baseball. “He is living history,” Newman said. Buck shouted, “Well, I am living!” Buck walked out to the mound to throw out his first pitch. He looked over at the woman and winked.

He stepped on the mound and wound up as if he were going to throw the ball as hard as he could. Then he stopped and jogged forward a few steps.

He wound up again. Stopped. Jogged forward a few steps.

Wound up once more. Stopped. Jogged forward. He gently placed the baseball in the glove of Twins outfielder Jacque Jones, and they hugged as the crowd cheered. The woman said, “I should have done it that way.”

“No,” a Twins official said, “only one person could pull that off.”

Buck walked off with his hands in the air. The Twins manager, Ron Gardenhire, stepped out of the dugout and shouted, “You look good, Buck!”

“I know it,” Buck O’Neil said.

B
UCK CLIMBED THE
stairs and walked around to a table set up for him to sign autographs. The line of people stretched almost all the way around the concourse. He was on his fifteenth hour of Buck O’Neil Day, and he was finally showing signs of wearing down. He signed autographs quietly. He posed for pictures without his usual playfulness. A few people tried to ask him questions. He answered quickly. One woman said, “You can’t know what this means to me just to be near you.” She did not want an autograph. She just wanted to touch his hands. Buck held her hands and looked like he wanted to say something, but no words came out.

A man from Seattle had tears in his eyes. “You mean everything to me,” he said. Buck nodded and signed the next autograph.

“You okay, Buck?” a Twins official asked. He did not answer her. He kept signing autographs mechanically, again and again, a fourteen-second chore kicked off with the rounding of the
B
. The big swooping letters gave him the most trouble. He could run through the next three letters with relative ease, but the last name brought trouble. The
O
in “O’Neil” was the toughest for him—his hand shook and it simply would not let him complete the circle. Sometimes the
O
did come out somewhat rounded, though most of the time it looked like a deflated a beach ball. He struggled with the
N,
labored through the
e
and
i,
and he no longer could put away the
l
with the flourish he had as a younger man.

The line kept growing until finally the Twins cut it off. Unfortunately, they cut it off right in front of a man who wanted to be heard. He shouted that he had brought his wife and child to meet Buck O’Neil—and sure enough, a woman and child stood behind the screaming man, though they did not seem too eager to be connected to him. The man’s face blushed crimson. The Twins official said she would try to arrange something, but the man just kept stomping and cursing and shouting that he had brought his family to meet Buck O’Neil, and they would by God meet Buck O’Neil. A few steps away, Buck signed more autographs. He did not seem to hear.

“He’s tired,” the woman tried to tell the red-faced man.

“I brought my wife and son….”

“He’s ninety-four years old.”

“And we waited in line….”

“He’s been up since five this morning.”

“I just can’t believe the nerve….”

After a few more minutes of rounding out his
B
’s and
O
’s, Buck signed his last autograph. With that, the woman brought over the red-faced man and his family. Buck looked up and smiled. “It’s good to see you,” he said weakly. He signed one more autograph.

“Buck,” the man said, “I’m your biggest fan.”

B
UCK HAD ONE
more chore. He was to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” with his old friend Mudcat Grant. Mudcat had been a good pitcher in Minnesota. He was the first African-American to win twenty games in the American League. He was a hero in the 1965 World Series. Mudcat was also a lounge singer. He used to sing with a group called Mudcat and His Kittens.

Buck sat up in a luxury suite. He looked as if he was going to collapse. His eyes closed. Suddenly he perked up and said, “Hey, look at this pitcher.”

He pointed at Andrew Sisco, a very tall pitcher for the Kansas City Royals. Sisco stood six foot ten, making him one of the tallest pitchers in baseball history. But Buck, in his daze, was not pointing because of Sisco’s size.

“This guy does a little dance after every pitch,” Buck said.

Buck was right. After throwing each pitch, Sisco did a little two-step, a sort of hop-skip. It was not something any of us had noticed, but once Buck pointed it out, it was mesmerizing. Sisco would throw his pitch, stop, and hop. Throw, stop, and hop. Buck said, “One thing about baseball, you never stop seeing stuff.”

“Is there anything you miss about the old days of baseball, Buck?”

“No. Not a thing. Baseball is better now than it’s ever been. Although…Wait, there is one thing I miss. I miss the way everyone used to get dressed up for a ballgame. Yeah. Men used to come to our games right after church, and they looked sharp. The women wore their best dresses and the newest hats, looking pretty, it was something to see. I wish people still dressed up. But you know, times change. The whole world’s gone casual.”

Buck stepped out of the suite and, in front of a camera, hugged Mudcat Grant, and together they sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Then Buck whispered in Mudcat’s ear: “I’ve gotta go back to the hotel before I faint.” Fans stopped him and hugged him on the way out. Buck looked as if he was sleepwalking. The Twins woman pushed him through the crowd. Finally, with the help of a security guard, they broke through and made it outside.

“Wait a minute,” Buck said. “I forgot something.”

He walked back inside, leaving the Twins woman open-mouthed. “He went back inside,” she said. “After all that, he went back inside. What could he have forgotten?” A couple of minutes later, the door opened again. It was Buck. He was eating a vanilla ice cream cone.

“I’ve got to have an ice cream,” he said. “It’s my day.”

T
hey called him Sonny on account of the weather. Sonny Brown played beautiful baseball in the sunshine. He loved sunny days. Willard Brown, his Christian name, never did play worth a damn on gray days, and he had many gray days in the Negro Leagues. During the week, the Monarchs team bus jolted and bumped over dirt roads and finally pulled into tiny Midwestern towns with names like Liberty and Independence. The bus would jerk to a stop at rock-hard diamonds with scorched grass in the outfield. The Monarchs piled out of the bus. The players already wore their sweat-drenched uniforms. They played a baseball game in a mosquito haze. They faced town teams with factory workers and farmers and coal miners—hard men who long ago may have hoped for something more. Then dust settled, mortgages came due, babies were born, and these men played baseball with sharpened spikes against gifted black men. Busted dreams and moths choked the summer air.

Those games made up the bulk of the Negro Leagues schedules. Teams often played five or six of these sorts of games a week. No one kept records. Sonny Brown never played well on those days. He never could coax out his talents when facing balding white men lashing out against their fates. Sonny kept a
Reader’s Digest
in his back pocket, and during games he stood in center field and read. If a ball headed his way, Sonny tossed the magazine to the ground and chased. Sometimes he caught the ball, and the fans laughed and cheered. Sometimes he did not catch the ball, and the fans laughed and booed. It did not matter much to him either way. He walked back to his spot in the outfield, picked up his
Reader’s Digest,
and read again.

“Willard,” his manager Buck O’Neil shouted from the dugout, “you’ve gotta be alive out there! You’ve gotta play the game with joy! Be alive!”

“I’m alive, Cap,” Sonny would say. But he wasn’t. He was everything but alive on those gray days. He moped and complained and refused to slide on close plays. He walked grudgingly to the batter’s box, dead man walking, and he swung at pitches over his head and pitches that skidded in the dirt. He swung at anything and everything, as if he wanted to make the game end. Once, in one of those small towns on one of those gray days, Sonny swung at a pitch that bounced in front of the plate. It bounced. On that day, though, the ball bounced kind of funny and Sonny hit it on the fat part of the bat. The ball sailed out of the park for a home run. The small crowd buzzed—nobody could remember seeing somebody hit a home run on a pitch that bounced. Sonny Brown jogged around the bases with a broad smile on his face, and when he reached the dugout he took off his hat and bowed. Then he winked at his manager and laughed as if the sun had come out from behind the clouds.

“Sonny,” Buck O’Neil asked calmly, “why did you swing at a pitch that bounced?”

“The ball was talking to me, Skip,” Sonny said. “It was saying,
Swing! Swing!
So I did.” Everybody cracked up. Buck too. He tried to look stern. But there was no talking to Sonny Brown on those gray days.

So why did Buck O’Neil love him so much? Why is it that even more than fifty years later, Sonny Brown stood out in Buck’s imagination and memory the way Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson and Willie Mays stood out? Easy answer. Sunny days. The biggest Negro League games were always played on Sundays. They played doubleheaders after church. In Kansas City, church normally began in the black neighborhoods at eleven o’clock, but when the Monarchs were in town for a doubleheader, church moved back to ten. Children squirmed in the pews, women fanned themselves with Bibles, and men occasionally coughed: “Speed it up, Reverend.” Preachers brought out their baseball sermons on those Sundays—hitters were like Jesus, pitchers like Moses—and when church let out, everyone paraded to the streetcars and the ballgame. The women wore new hats, the men sweated through Sunday wool, and the children ran ahead.

There were no town teams on Sundays. Negro League teams played each other, best against the best, and sportswriters sat in press boxes, statisticians kept the numbers, big crowds attended. On days like that, Sonny ignited. He could do everything under the sun. When the Monarchs played the Homestead Grays, Sonny made a bet with the great Josh Gibson: whoever hit the longest home run would get a steak dinner. In both their memories, Sonny Brown hit the longest home run most of the time. “I can’t hit them where you can,” Gibson told him.

On those days, Sonny would steal bases standing up. “I’ve never seen another man who did not have to slide when he stole a base,” Buck would say. Sonny chased down every fly ball in center field. He could do it all. In Puerto Rico, they called him “Ese Hombre”—loosely translated as “that Man”—because there was nobody quite like him. In Kansas City, on Opening Day, the Meyers Taylor Company annually gave out pants to the Monarchs player who hit the season’s first home run. Sonny Brown had a closet filled with home-run pants won on Opening Day.

Buck remembered the day in July the St. Louis Browns signed Willard Brown to play in the Major Leagues. That was 1947, the same year Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. The Browns were a terrible team playing in a town that did not care about them. In a game played one week before the Browns signed Sonny, there were 478 people in the stands. The Browns were desperate, both on the field and off, and they signed Sonny Brown and a Monarchs teammate, Hank Thompson—the first black teammates in the Major Leagues. Browns management hoped Sonny Brown might hit some home runs and, even more, bring in a few black fans. The Browns publicized him as a twenty-six-year-old slugger. Sonny was thirty-two.

“Naturally we believe these colored boys will help us at the gate, especially in our home city of St. Louis,” Browns general manager Bill DeWitt told reporters. “Yet we think of them only secondarily as a gate attraction. We are not hiring these men because they are Negroes, but because we hope they can put more power in a club that has been last in the American League club batting most of the season.”

“You know one out of eight people in St. Louis is Negro,” Bill’s brother Charlie added helpfully.

Jackie Robinson played for the Dodgers. Larry Doby played for the Cleveland Indians. Those were the only black men in Major League baseball when Sonny Brown and Hank Thompson signed to play with the St. Louis Browns, the southernmost team in the Major Leagues.

“Good luck to you,” Buck said.

“Won’t need no luck, Cap,” Sonny Brown said. “There ain’t nothing but sunny days in the Major Leagues.”

He was wrong. The Browns had no sunny days. They had a flying circus. Two days after Brown and Thompson signed, an outfielder from Alabama named Paul Lehner did not show up for the game. He announced that it was not a protest over the signing of two black players. He just had to see a doctor about his leg. Nobody believed him, in large part because it wasn’t true. After he was fined, Lehner skipped the next game.

What a team. The Browns had a twenty-two-year-old catcher named Les Moss who hit .157 for the season, one of the worst hitting performances in the history of modern baseball. They had a former child actor named Johnny Berardino playing second base—that season he hit into the rarest kind of triple play where all three runners were caught in rundowns. Berardino many years later became Dr. Steve Hardy on
General Hospital.

They had a pitcher named Fred Sanford who became known as “the $100,000 Lemon,” because that’s how much it cost to sign him. He did earn a few seconds of fame that season by becoming the first pitcher in baseball history to turn a foul ball into a triple. He was pitching when Boston’s Jake Jones hit a soft roller that rolled foul down the third-base line. Sanford wanted to make sure the ball stayed foul, so he threw his glove at the ball. The glove hit the ball, and according to the rules of the time, that earned Jake Jones an automatic triple, one of five he would hit in his Major League career.

The Browns had another pitcher called “Old Folks” Kinder who drew that nickname because he did not make it into the Major Leagues until he was thirty-one years old. Things always seemed to happen to Kinder. Earlier that year, for instance, Kinder was pitching and a seagull dropped a three-pound smelt that just missed his head. Kinder, unruffled and apparently used to flying smelt, won the game. It was one of the few times the Browns would win that year.

And so on. Sonny Brown would say late into his life that he had walked into a freak show. In Brooklyn, Jackie Robinson had the support of most of his teammates, a relatively liberal community, and a brilliant baseball team. The Dodgers’ beloved Kentucky shortstop, Pee Wee Reese, had made a public display of putting his arm around Robinson for everyone to see. Robinson still had to endure endless taunting from opposing players and fans, and he received countless death threats. He had friends at least. Sonny Brown’s teammates openly despised him. His manager barely spoke to him. And the one-out-of-eight blacks who lived in St. Louis did not come to the ballpark.

Also, there was this: Sonny did not have the heart of a pioneer. When Sonny got blue, he played with half his heart. It was just like those days in little towns. Sonny refused to run hard, he swung at terrible pitches, he griped to reporters that the Monarchs were a better team than the Browns. His time in the Majors could not last. Yes, sometimes the sun peeked out, like the time in Yankee Stadium when Sonny rapped out four hits. Most of the time, he seemed lost. He hit .179 in his one month in the big leagues. Hank Thompson hit better, but by the end of August, the Browns management still had small crowds and their fill of racial equality. They sent both men back to the Monarchs. Hank Thompson was still young. He would return to the Major Leagues and become a good Major League player. Willard Brown would never get another chance.

Before he was sent back to Kansas City, Sonny did make a little baseball history. That’s a story Buck O’Neil told kids in classrooms across America. He said the story was as important, in its own way, as the story of Jackie Robinson turning the other cheek. Sonny did not start either game against Detroit on a doubleheader Sunday, August 13. The Browns had already given up on him. Late in the second game, though, he was sent in to pinch-hit against pitcher Hal Newhouser, who would later be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Sonny was sent in so unexpectedly, he did not have a bat to use. He borrowed the bat of Jeff Heath, the team’s best slugger.

Newhouser pitched, and Brown crushed a long drive to straightaway center field. The center-field fence at Sportsman Park was 428 feet away, and Brown’s drive smashed right off the number 4. Brown ran full speed, he ran angrily, and by the time the ball made it back into the infield, he had scored, an inside-the-park home run. It was the first home run a black man hit in the American League.

When Sonny walked back to the dugout, nobody shook his hand. Nobody said congratulations. Nobody even looked his way. He sat down and then, Buck O’Neil said, Sonny Brown watched Jeff Heath take his bat, the one Sonny had used to hit the home run. Heath looked at it for a split second and then smashed it against the wall. Sonny Brown talked with Buck about that moment a lot—the moment when he watched pure hatred crashing against a dugout wall.

“What is the lesson of that story?” Buck would ask the children in schools. “He hit a home run and the man broke his bat. What is the lesson of Willard Brown?”

The kids shrugged and had curious looks on their faces.

“The lesson, children,” Buck said, “is that it wasn’t easy.”