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 Beckley ,
West Virginia 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?”
“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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