THE BALL PLAYER’S SON

1951

     My mother felt I was becoming too “one-dimensional” and in an effort to see if I might be interested in things other than baseball, attempted to interest me in a musical instrument. After two lessons I was kicked out of accordion school. I suffered through the Cub Scouts, wanting no part of going to the mountains where there was no baseball. Next was Hebrew school, where I was again kicked out by an outraged rabbi who informed my parents I behaved like an anti-Semite when I pummeled studious fellow Jewish kids; they decided to put off Hebrew school indefinitely.

     Mother was also alarmed at my profanity, my swaggering about, my teasing her when dad was gone on the road’; once chasing her around with a dead mouse. She slapped me for the first time and cried when I used the word ‘nigger;’ she washed my mouth out with soap, explained to me the ugly sin of using that word, and made me promise to never use it again. She related the history of our country treating black people as slaves, of humiliating them, stealing their pride and spirit.

     Mother worried that I wouldn’t be well-rounded. Already a teacher had recommended I see a child psychiatrist because I disrupted class and craved attention. I was too aggressively competitive. She took me to a lady shrink who had me draw whatever came into my mind. So I drew two baseball players, one a giant of a man, the other a small child.

     My mother and father quarreled over his influence on me. She tried to convince him to keep me out of the clubhouse and away from the crude ball players. But dad insisted I was just like him when he was a kid and he’d turned out okay, and besides, dad insisted, taking me away from the ballpark would break my heart.

     I got my way. I’d sort of become the Hollywood Stars mascot. Over the winter dad hired Handley, a carpenter, Maltzburger, an electrician, and Sandlock, a roofer, to build a den connecting the garage to the master bedroom of our house in Compton. All three of those men had their individual trades but could do anything when it came to building a home and, since dad was starting a small shoe findings supply business in the garage, they were all occupied, though dad was not allowed to help build the den because he was so inept they referred to him as ‘Six Fingers McFiddick’ and sent him on runs to the hardware store and lumber yard with a prepared list so he wouldn’t come back with the wrong supplies.

     Dad claimed no team he’d ever played for was as close as the Stars. They held team parties. (Though most of the players had kids, I seemed to be the only one obsessed with baseball and adapted to the clubhouse.) Big John Lindell had the biggest, best parties. And the one dad had in the newly built den during spring training was a rousing success, with me swirling about like a fondly petted dog..

     Lindell was the size of a coke machine and as irresistibly engaging as he was big. “Hey, Little Meat, come on over here and say hello to Big John.” It was almost as if I’d hurt his feelings if I didn’t come over. He scooped me up in hands you could sit in, held me eye level and chucked my chin. His clutch hitting and .500 average in the 1947 World Series for the Yankees was a feat nobody on the club had come close to achieving. Still, dad reminded me that Lindell had his best years during the war “while the best players were away fighting for their country.” Lindell walked, talked and carried himself with a swagger. A similar swagger illuminated all professional baseball players as special beings placed on pedestals to be admired and paid homage to, like famous generals and statesmen. Yet among them was an undeclared pecking order, and since Lindell was such a big man with a huge outgoing personality and he’d had those big years with the gloried Yankees and was a World Series hero among that exalted realm, he was on a loftier level, like a war hero. A magnificent athlete, Lindell was in the process of working his way back into the big leagues as a pitcher after falling on hard times as an offensive weapon with the Yanks. He was hoping to catch on with the Pittsburg Pirates, possibly the worst team in all of the big leagues, a team so bad that dad said “they’d be lucky to finish in the middle of the pack in the Pacific Coast League. They got a bunch of raw bonus kids and war time players still hanging on after stinking up the field.”

     Lindell thrived in the Hollywood atmosphere, doing commercials, winning a lot of games and becoming a draw. The Stars and Angels were the biggest draws in town, bigger than the LA Rams football team. Gilmore Field games were attended by show business names like Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, and starlets like Kim Novak and Anne Bancroft, all of them sitting in box seats above the Stars dugout

     So if the team had a star it was John Lindell. Big John was so well known that his son, a few years older than me and, like his dad, a gifted athlete, became the target of mean-spirited antagonists at Little League games. His mother, who sat with my mother at games, told mom that kids and their parents jeered Lindell’s son, forever comparing him  to his father in a demeaning way. They were jealous when he dominated games, and gloated when he screwed up. Finally, at thirteen, Lindell’s son quit playing schoolboy baseball because he no longer wished to endure the abuse, and his mom warned my mom I would soon face the same treatment. Worse than the kids were the parents, whose behavior toward young Lindell was so cruel and vicious that he could not force himself to step onto a ball field. Mother said Lindell, like my dad, wanted his son to experience the game that had been his life and his love; and his son being deprived of a game Lindell loved so much that he hung on in the minor leagues after his talent as a big leaguer had deteriorated, had to be a crushing blow. Big John seemed to love every aspect of the game: playing, batting practice betting and kidding, clubhouse camaraderie, road trips, signing autographs, giving interviews to writers, the adulation and perks—and now his immensely talented son was so disillusioned that the great national pastime had turned sour in his mouth.

     If Lindell, a thoroughly positive and resilient presence who had withstood the highs and hard knocks of the game was a “big fish in a small pond”, my dad was an even smaller fish. Dad sometimes had his picture in the paper, his name in the headlines of the sports page. For a pittance he did a newspaper ad for vitamins. He was accorded a long feature article in the Long Beach Telegram hailing his career exploits. There were pictures of dad in his Detroit uniform and of our family sitting on the davenport while dad stood above us wielding his silver bat—the caption below stating dad wad giving me “pointers on hitting.”

     Everybody in our neighborhood and beyond knew about the article, and already several kids had told me in nasty terms that I would never be as good a ball player as my dad, and was a bum. Mother was already leery of my playing Little League.

     “I don’t want our son ending up like John Lindell’s son, Murray.”

     “Every kid’s different, Rose. Dell’s not Lindell’s kid. Maybe John’s kid doesn’t love baseball like Dell does. I loved the game so much nothing could keep me off the field. He’s the same way. He lives, eats and breathes baseball. He goes to bed with his glove. He’s already playing with kids bigger and older and holding his own. He wants to test himself. He’s a competitor. He’s not like your family. He’s like me. He’s gonna play ball whether you like it or not.”

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Big Moe

BIG MOE

“I was eight, I think, maybe younger, the first time I passed a sandlot and saw a bunch of kids playing baseball. I watched those kids, some my age, others older, kids of all ages, and I thought: I can play that game. I can hit that ball.”

Hitting the ball, that’s what hooked me. I didn’t have a glove. The kids had little gardener-type gloves, flimsy leather or cloth, the fingers separate, no webbing, but I went out there with no glove and caught balls bare handed. Right off, a bigger kid maybe fifteen or sixteen, an Irish kid named Kelly, smiled at me and told me I had ‘good hands’. He let me use his glove to shag in the outfield. I watched the other players. I knew I could do what they were doing. Some of them could hit the ball, others struggled. I saw where they struggled. They swung too hard or swung up on the ball or they looked away when they swung and missed, or stepped away from the ball because they were a little scared, or they held the bat wrong with their hands, didn’t have their knuckles lined up right, and Kelly, he showed me how to line up my knuckles so that my top knuckles lined up with the top knuckles of my other hand, though later, when I’d developed a philosophy of  hitting, I often lined up the knuckles of both hands for better bat control, especially with two strikes on me.”

                                                                       *

“The first time I swung a bat I cracked a line drive. Just happened. But everybody took notice. Kelly watched me hit a few more, and said: You’re a natural, kid, you got good whip in your swing. You got wrist action. You’re gonna be a ball player. You’re gonna play on my team, kid.”

                                                                       *

“I rode my bike into another neighborhood to get away from the goddam Polocks and Germans, and I saw right away that if I could play baseball, well, I’d be accepted anywhere. I had a free pass. Here I was, from another neighborhood clear across town, in somebody else’s territory during a time in Chicago when people seldom strayed from their home turf, and because it looked like I might become a decent ball player, this kid

Kelly, who ran the neighborhood, wanted me back, took me under his wing. He told me to get myself a glove, and that’s what I did. I found a goddam gardener’s glove to keep the ball from stinging my hand. When you start out with a glove like that you have to make sure to watch every ball into your hand and use your free hand to corral the ball, and it ends up making you a better fielder down the line when it’s time to get a bigger, better glove.”

                                                                       *

“Now, everything changed in my life. Baseball took precedent over everything, including school. All I thought about in school was getting on my bike and sailing the few miles to the sandlot to play baseball with the Irish kids. They didn’t care if I was a Jew or a monkey with a tail, as long as I could play ball. I was more than welcome. Was somebody to respect and be treated like an equal. Hell, I could run and I could throw, talents you can’t learn. Even at a young age I could outrun most of the kids, and I realized also that I had exceptional reflexes and reactions to balls hit and pitched to me. When summer came, I played morning, noon and evening, came home late for dinner every night and received a beating from my father, who warned me he’d beat me with the strap every time I was late, but already I loved baseball so much that getting to play an extra hour was worth the beating. My mother, she didn’t like the strappings every night. But my father was the ruler of the household, and though they fought over these nightly strappings, he got his way.”

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The Ball Player's Son

1950

“Make sure to wear yer cup, Meat. Gotta protect the family jewels. Yer dallywhacker’s the future of the Franklin clan.”

 “You a lover boy, Meat? Got a girl friend?”

“I aint got no girl friend.”

“Heard you like to kiss the girls, Meat.”

“Bullshit. I aint kissin no girls.”

“You will, Meat. Hey, kid, you a lover or a fighter?”

“A fighter.”

I sat at Dad’s stall. The Hollywood clubhouse was spacious, clean, bright, as good as most big league clubhouses according to Dad. There was enough room for two of us, but I preferred sitting on his traveling trunk working on his equipment while he signed autographs or played cards. There was a table where players pulled up folding chairs to play cards or sign baseballs, bats, or black-and-white glossies of themselves. Everything in the clubhouse was organized by Nobe, who was indispensible to the players, seeing to their every need. Nobe treated everyone with kindness and respect.

“How you, little Franklin? You want soda pop?”

Just off the manager’s office was a big red Coca Cola cooler with beer and soft drinks chilling on blocks of ice. Nothing was free. On the wall above the cooler was a check list of the entire roster of players and coaches, and every time one of them pulled a bottle out he checked his name. If I shoved my little paw into the painfully icy water to withdraw a Nehi or Delaware Punch, I checked Dad’s name. Nobe took note, smiling.

“You smart like you daddy.”

Dad was one of the few college graduates on a team where most of his team mates began their careers ahead of him by signing before or after high school and kicking around in the minors, while Dad starred at the University of Illinois. His first real year of pro ball was at Beckley, West Virginia in the Mountain State League, where he hit .439, the highest average that year in all of organized baseball, earning him a silver bat exactly like the two given to the players with the highest averages in the American and National leagues. So Dad was a pheenom, quickly moving up to Beaumont in the Texas League, Detroit’s toughest proving ground for the big team, where he first appeared in 1941,already twenty-seven years old.

“Hey Moe, the kid’s a phee-nom!” That was dark, burly Jim Baxes, ‘The Greek’, an affable jokester and member of the pepper crew, one of my favorites, along with Gene Handley who never teased me with the ‘lover boy’ tag or called me ‘Little Moe’. Gene referred to me as ‘Digger O’Dell’, a handle I liked.

A few stalls down from Dad was Jack Salveson, who, according to Dad, was a legendary drinker with few rivals in the game. “Rudy York and Jimmie Foxx, they couldput it away too. When I played at Little Rock we had a catcher named Tony Rensa. After every game he went to a little bar downtown and drank close to a case of beer, then went to his room and went to bed and showed up the next day at the park bright and bushy- tailed like he hadn’t had a drop.”

When thick, bucket-assed and balding Salveson, cap low over his eyes, pitched, sweat popped from his face and streamed down his neck in gouts. No matter how cold the evening, his uniform was soaked through by the middle innings. He changed sweatshirts at least once a game . If it was a warm afternoon and Salveson pitched, he was a brutal,almost pitiful sight as he lugged around through the late innings huffing and puffing. Salveson had an elaborate yet economical windup, throwing hard sinking stuff hittersbeat into the ground; a control pitcher, he often went nine innings on less than a hundred pitches. His mechanics put very little stress on his arm. He’d done time in the big leagues and played for nearly twenty years, he was a mild and gentle man who drove to the ballpark with Dad and was one of Dad’s closest friends on the team.

After each game he pitched, Salveson sat at his stall in only his jockstrap and drank six beers in about thirty minutes. The first beer went down in one amazing swig. After the sixth beer he’d trudge to the shower where he remained under the steaming hot pulverizing spray for a very long time, exposing his right shoulder to the water, returningto his stall red as a lobster, towel around his waist, forehead dripping sweat. Nobe would hand him another cold one. Then he and Dad and Gorman and Sandlock and Handley would gather and rehash every single play of the game. They drank beer. These were pre-war ball players, meat and potato eaters, older than most of their team mates, and this was their tradition: get to the park early and discuss the opposition, play cards, joke around, and stay after the game for the rehash. They were as reluctant to leave the clubhouse as they were eager to enter it, and my mother claimed that those men were the happiest in all of America and wouldn’t trade places with anyone.

I didn’t say much, just watched, listened, steeping myself in their every move and jargon until I was a cloned amalgam of every ritual, whim and habit a pro picks up in his career. Dad’s habitual ritual at the plate became my ritual exactly.

“Wearin your cup out there, Digger O’Dell?”

All pitchers and infielders wore protective steel cups in their jockstraps. I quit wearing mine because it jabbed and chafed my thighs, but then one day a pepper grounder took a wild hop and popped me in the groin and I went down writhing in pain, and merciless ball players had a big time riding me for being too dumb to wear my cup. When I explained to Dad that the steel cup cut my thighs, he bought me a plastic cup cushioned on the edges with foam rubber, a “pussy cup.”

“You don’t listen to those guys, you plenny tough,” Nobe told me. And Frankie Jacobs, the trainer, nodded. Without Frankie Jacobs the Stars would have had trouble fielding a team. Dad always tipped he and Nobe a sawbuck, unlike most of the players who came from parts of the country where money was scarce and food was fought over and tipping was alien to them. Dad spent a lot of time on the rubbing table while the

diminutive Jacobs kneaded his muscles, joints and limbs. Being in the war, and playing so many years, his shoulders and knees were rickety. Often his knee swelled to the size of cantaloupe. He pulled muscles, and he played, Jacobs wrapping the discolored areas tightly with Ace bandages. Most unsightly were Dad’s variety of ‘strawberries’ from hard slides; along his hips, buttocks and upper thighs were ugly abrasions, red jelly welts scabbed over and torn open again each time he slid. Frankie treated them with ointments to keep down the hot pain, covering them with compresses held tightly with white adhesive tape, and he played, and after each game Frankie ripped the compresses off his hairy skin and Dad never made a face. Both men winked at me, sharing secret pride in the endurance of pain.

“Gotta be tough if you wanna be a ball player, kid,” Jacobs said. “Your dad, he’s as tough as they come. You grow up half as tough as Big Moe, you’ll be a helluva man and a ball player.”

Dad laughed. “Dell’s tough, Frankie. He eats nails for breakfast.”

I managed to worm my way into the dugout during games, claiming I couldn’t stand sitting with a bunch of “yakkety women.” Management felt I was too young to be a bat boy, but as long as I behaved myself I could sit in the dugout. There, I felt part of the action. I wore my Hollywood Stars uniform. After the game I showered with the players. They all had individual methods of lathering up and toweling off. They spent a lot of time primping. They whipped soap brushes into cups of lather and carefully applied it, then scraped their faces smooth with Gillette blades advertised on TV boxing matches. They smacked on aftershave lotion and cologne, dabbed on deodorant, tweezed out nose hairs. They sprinkled chests, crotches and feet with baby powder – brushed, flossed and picked their teeth and inspected themselves in fogged mirrors. They were natty dressers and experts at folding neckties. Each player seemed to regard himself as cock of the walk, and especially Dad, who was once voted by the local press as the ‘best dressed player in town’.

Gorman was a persnickety groomer. He was Dad’s young Jewish protégé and roomie on the road (they wore bow ties), and engaged to a knockout named Rosalie, who sat with my mother and the other wives during games. Gorman always invited me to sit with him at his stall. He suffered joint stiffness and smelled strongly of liniment, and was forever advising me.

“You can be a fighter and a lover, Dell, just like your dad.”

“Dad’s no lover boy.

“Sure he is. Like me. You will be too when you meet the right gal.” He watched me bone the bat. “Push down hard on the meat of the barrel, Dell. See where the wood is loose and dented? That’s from hitting the ball solid.” Gorman had two good years in a row, hitting over .300, driving in 100 runs. “We call that the sweet spot. You know you’re getting good when you keep hitting the sweet spot. I’ve gone two months without breaking that lucky bat.” He rapped his knuckles on the side of the wooden stall. “That’s why I choke up an inch or two, so I won’t bust the handle. When I finally break this bat I’ll nail and tape it up and give it to you cuz you’ve done such a fine job of boning it. Okay, that’s enough. Let’s go to work on my glove.”

Like Dad and most players, Herb Gorman used a broken-in, flabby glove during games, and broke in a backup glove during practice. Dad always shoved an old ball into a new glove, bound it with twine and tossed it into a tub of water and let it soak a couple days to soften the leather and take the stiffness out of it. Then he rubbed it with a lot of neatsfoot oil. I’d become an expert oiler of gloves and boner of bats, and Nobe was pleased that certain players allowed me to do these jobs from time to time, though I was not allowed to touch anybody’s gear unless asked to, while Nobe was free to do what he wanted.

On the way from the clubhouse to the dugout, I walked with the players up the wood slatted ramp below the stands in the darkness latticed with cracks of light slicing through dust motes sifting down from myriad cobwebs, rotting timbers, stale beer accumulation, dead rodents, decades of trapped cigarette smoke, leaky urinals, human vapors, and all of it combining to produce the familiar stench of a ball park as we clack clacked toward the glimmer of daylight that was the gateway to the emerald green field shimmering beneath the bright blue sky.

I took my usual spot toward the far end of the dugout, away from the hive of activity up front by the drinking fountain and bat rack, where Fred Haney and his coaches Jo Jo White and Big John Fitzpatrick entered a world in which their faces turned into stern, beady-eyed masks as they delivered signs, whispered to each other, conferred with players, yelled at umpires and opposing players, chewed, spit, cussed, scratched, kicked at debris on the filthy floor or clapped their hands in approval of a play well done. Bench players joined the intense transformation as soon as the first ball was pitched, composing a chorus of amusing, and sometimes lethal, bench jockeying.

“Hey pitch, what snake pit were you in last night? We can smell you from here! Yer eyes look like piss holes in the snow!”

Nothing encouraged a bench jockey more than a player visibly distracted by relentless carping. “Hey Rabbit Ears! Got a red ass?”

Among these men, the desire to win bordered on psychotic. Even when competing at cards in the clubhouse, they kicked over chairs when they lost. If the ball club was on a losing streak they were all sour, glum and nearly unapproachable, and I stayed away. On the bench, Dad warned me to look, listen, learn and keep my mouth shut. I was a guest. Though it was not easy to sit still and be quiet.

I couldn’t help but observe differences between infielders, outfielders and especially pitchers. Dad said pitchers were not normal and the bullpen was a world in itself. Pitchers were his enemy, always had to be the center of attention during games, only worked four or five days, and were the worst cheaters.

“If you are a pitcher’s best friend and get traded to another team and have to face him, you are the first player he will throw at. Most deplorable, they are trying to drive you out of the game and starve your family.”

“Even Salveson?”

Dad nodded gravely. “Let me tell yah something, Dell: Every single man who puts on the uniform is out for himself. They want your job. You can be friends, and I’ve made some good friends in this game, but we’re all fighting to survive, just like everybody else in this country, only we’re worse.”

On this Saturday afternoon both teams were on each other. The air was charged with the tension of an impending brawl. Dad and his team mates held old grudges against certain players. Everybody was on the top steps of both dugouts, hollering, ready to surge out onto the field. Finally the umpires, whom the Hollywood players had been needling and calling “Horseshit” and “Blind” throughout the game, warned both benches to put a stop to it.

This only provoked the players on the Stars to become personal and vicious in their abuse. Even a squirt like myself could see that the umpires were actually human – and turning red in the neck and gritting their teeth at the storm of insults coming from the dugout. Most of the vileness was directed at a blocky-jawed sourpuss first base ump whose intelligence and manhood were brutally savaged as, evidently, he’d called a horseshit game behind the plate the night before. Finally he couldn’t take any more and moved several steps toward our dugout, pointed a warning finger and issued a retaliatory salvo at the bench – which only served to ignite the wronged players, who now leaped at the dugout screen like a pack of wild dogs, cursing and insulting the ump with caustic profanity.

“Who the fuck paid YOU off last night? You goddam blind Tom!” roared my father.

The ump immediately ejected him with a thumb.

Dad, whom this umpire called out last night on a low outside pitch that Dad insisted was a foot off the plate, exploded from the dugout ripping his cap off and headed for the umpire at full speed and miraculously stopped inches from the ump’s face and, jaw to jaw, his head bobbing so close to the ump’s I feared they’d butt heads, Dad cursed him with such startling ferocity and profanity I found myself recoiling. The ump turned away, but Dad was on him, implacable. They moved in a comical circle. And then Haney was on the field wedging himself between Dad and the ump. The Star crowd booed lustily. Haney blew a gasket and tossed his cap and kicked it and went nose to nose with the sourpuss. Then Fitzpatrick was between Haney and Dad, and the ump tossed both of them. But the rhubarb went on and on, as the other umpires came over to stand between the players and the sourpuss, and finally the three ousted penitents strode to the dugout and hurled upon the field catcher’s masks, shin guards, chest protectors, bats, balls, towels – and the crowd booed and hissed while the opposing team stood calmly on the top steps of their dugout, very amused, some laughing, for they had dominated the series and were eight runs up.

When order was restored, Dad, Haney and Fitzpatrick retired to the clubhouse, and a squeaky voice chirped at the umpire who stood arms folded behind first base: “Goddam blind Tom, open your eyes you fuckin red ass!” Gorman and Sandlock quickly stashed me between them.

The umpire marched to the dugout and peered in. “What the hell was THAT? A bird?” His tiny eyes roved down the bench in a severe squint. Nobody said a word. Then he spotted me. “Who’s that goddam kid?”

“It’s Franklin’s kid,” Sandlock piped. He took my cap off and placed it on his head like a beanie and pulled his own cap down over my ears. “He’s a criminal – like his old man.”

“Get him OUT-A here! No kids in the dugout!” He jerked his thumb at me, “You. Out of the goddam game. Get that little mouse in the clubhouse, or so help me God I’ll run the whole goddam team.”

The players hustled me out of the dugout and down into the clubhouse, all of them laughing and roughing my head. When Dad found out I’d been kicked out of the dugout for cussing the umpire, he growled and told me I was finished sitting in the dugout, and if I continued to be a pain in the ass he’d take away my clubhouse privileges and make me sit with the women, in the stands. He was still tongue-lashing me when one of the

pitchers, stocky Pete Mondorf, a quiet ex-football player, walked by and patted my ass. “Little Meat,” he said, “Don’t take any guff from those umps.”

Later, John Lindell exclaimed, “Kill the umpire, Meat!”

And Handley: “There he is, Digger O’Dell, chip off the old block.”       

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