The Ball Player's Son

                    THE LONGEST, BLOODIEST BRAWL OF ALL

1953

    

The Angels rose to third place and were playing a weeklong series against the Stars. Every night game that week was hotly disputed and the vendettas, instigated by Bragan, had grown dangerous. Dad drove to Gilmore Field with Hattan and took me and a friend, Ron Bart, a huge 12 year old, a brute, a Little League all star and one of the top kids at South Park. Awaiting us was a Sunday doubleheader.

     Since the games were sold out and no seats available, Ron and I ended up behind the rope at right field, among a bunch of Hollywood Star knothole kids who hated the Angels, so automatically hated Ron and me. By the second inning we were having words with them as we defended Angel players. Ropes winding from both foul lines in the outfield were set up for the jam-packed overflow.

     Early in the first game, in retaliation for some fireworks the day before, Hattan planted one of his infrequent fastballs in Frank Kelleher’s ribs. Kelleher, my Dad’s friend, whom Dad said was one of the good guys, had been on a hitting tear that was demolishing the Angel pitching staff, and he rushed to the mound and decked Hattan, who jumped up to do battle. Players from both benches and bullpens instantly swarmed onto the field and a skirmish started near the mound as umpires and peacemakers eventually managed to quiet things down. Kelleher was ejected.

     While order was being restored, several nearby kids realized my father was Murray Franklin and began razzing me, claiming my Dad would get his ass kicked by the Stars, and several grown-ups and an usher got between us.

     Then short, wiry Teddy Beard ran for Kelleher and stole second. When he tried to steal third the Angels had him by five feet, and as Dad, straddling the bag, caught the ball, Beard started his slide too close and flew into him thigh-high, spiking him on the forearms and chest. Dad’s cap flew off, his bald head glinted in the sun, and then his fists were working in a blur. Both dugouts and bullpens charged onto the diamond and skirmishes whirled like spinning tops. A mountain of bodies piled up near the mound, new bodies entering while others flew out or charged back in; smaller skirmishes, moving, squirming, flailing, broke out all over the infield like a runaway saloon brawl from the movies. Certain players squared off, while others flitted around swinging wildly. While Dad was pummeling Beard, Gordy Maltzburger, coaching third, trying to be peacemaker, pulled Dad off Beard from behind, leaving him open for Beard to punch. Dad ducked the punch and shrugged off Maltzburger, who was being pulled off by Stan Hack. That was when McLish, on a full-tilt sprint from the bullpen, leveled Beard with a vicious punch and then proceeded, as Dad described it, “to pinch the little bastard’s head off.” Then Dad and McLish, like roving commandos, went head-hunting, which meant trying to inflict as much pain and damage as possible on anybody in a home uniform, be they peacemakers, friends or not. The umpires were helpless to stop it.

     Bart and I lost track of Dad and suddenly we were engaged with the knothole kids, pummeling, kicking, rolling around on the grass outside the ropes, until an usher and some adults broke it up.

     The donnybrook went on and on, showed no signs of abating until, eventually, a stream of fifty-plus LAPD cops surged onto the field to restore order. Bart and I ducked under the rope, dodged an usher or two and sprinted across the grass toward the action, veering into the box section of the ball park. By this time the melee was slowing down as cops separated brawling players. Uniforms were torn and filthy, caps lost. Ball players cursed and pointed fingers at each other as they were led to their dugouts. The last thing we saw before ducking into a tunnel was Dad pointing a finger and barking at the Star players as two understanding cops led him away with half smiles.

     The cop at the clubhouse door knew me and allowed us to enter the room full of cursing, pacing, grumbling, torn-up players vowing retaliation. Most of them refused medical treatment. Dad was sitting on the table in the training room, the trainer rubbing antiseptic on deep spike wounds on his chest and forearm. He’d refused stitches until after the second game of the doubleheader, which he intended to play. When he spotted me his face turned into a wide grin. “There’s my boy!” I told him Ron and I fought with the knothole kids from Hollywood and he told his team mates, “Them’s fightin’ Compton boys!”

     First baseman Fuzz Richards, who’d taken the worst punishment from blindside fists and was gouged and spiked when trapped beneath the mountainous pile-up, was getting sewn up by a doctor—over twenty stitches in his backside. He was furious. Bud Hardin sported a shiner and stalked the clubhouse holding an icepack to his eye and vowing to get revenge on Dale Long. Dad began ranting about Bragan, whom he blamed for inciting the brawl by sending Beard after him. “I don’t even know Beard, but he came in spikes high going for my balls. Now he’s got a broken leg and two closed eyes, and that’s what you get when you’re a dirty ball player—he’s finished.”

     Dad’s face had no nicks, though his knuckles on both hands were bruised and cut and swelling. Stan Hack, who, during the brawl had spent most of his time looking for Bragan, who he claimed hid in the dugout, approached Dad at the training table. “Moe, Bragan’s slated to catch the second game. I’m starting you and leading you off, and I want you to call out that yellowbelly. If they run you I’ll pay the fine. I’ll have Hardin waiting to come in for you.”

     Dad grinned. “Skip, I’ll go after him, but Bragan won’t fight—he’s a man with a paper asshole.”

     McLish, bat perched on shoulder (he was a decent hitter who sometimes pinch-hit), standing behind Dad, nodded, then rubbed Dad’s head as if it was Holy, and winked at me.

     Second game, Ron and I were not about to return to the ropes in right field, instead stationing ourselves in the aisle a few rows up from the seats above home plate, ignoring and avoiding ushers who tried to move us along. Cops were posted like sentries at both clubhouse doors, in front of both dugouts, down both foul lines and bull pens and along the ropes.

     When Dad came to bat every Angel was on his feet in the dugout. Dad stood there looking down on Bragan, spewing profanity and insults, kicking dirt on the plate, on Bragan’s spikes, while the ump stared out toward the field. Dad’s head bobbed as he chewed on Bragan, who picked at clods of dirt, tossing them around. Finally Dad stepped into the box, pounded his bat hard on the plate and stared at the pitcher, Red Munger, who proceeded to walk Dad on four pitches.”

     Dad said afterwards, “I called Bragan every name in the book. I’ve never seen a man take more shit and hunker down like a gutless coward. He tried to blame the umpires. The ump, he was enjoying every minute—grinning like a shark. Told me he wouldn’t run me under any circumstances. I told Bragan we were ON if Munger came anywhere near me—for Hack. Munger’s an old hand, he knew what was going on. He threw me four straight pitches a foot outside. Bragan’s all mouth.”

     The second game was uneventful. Next day L.A. sports pages quoted Bragan blaming the umpires for the brawl. Sportswriters reported the bloodiest, most prolonged brawl perhaps in baseball history. The front pages were full of photos, as were the back pages; the most prominent in all the papers and later in Life Magazine was one of Beard flying at Dad with his spikes high, like swords, his face contorted like a kamikaze, while Dad waited, ball in glove. The articles were full of descriptions, quotes, commentary, and already scribes were trying to drum up a return bout in the next series between the two teams at Wrigley, where LAPD Chief William Parker vowed to preside over a legion of cops to keep the peace. Beard’s season was ended with a broken ankle. Dad got stitched up and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier.

     “I’m not one to condone it, but dammit sometimes fighting is a good thing. It clears out your tubes.”

     (Next installment: Big Moe Faces “Bear Tracks” Greer in the Texas League)

The Ball Player's Son

                                THE ANGELS COME-A CALLING

1953

     Dad, a little grouchy from retirement and trying to get his business going in our garage, laid down the law to me: “I know you’ve been going against my rules the minute I’m away on a road trip. I know you disobey your mother and tease the hell out of your sister and come and go like a free agent, but your corking-off days are over as of this minute, now that I’m here full time.”  He was also irate with me because I’d been kicked out of two Hebrew schools where a Rabbi had tried, along with other serious Jewish kids, to tutor me toward a Bar Mitzvah, when all I wanted to do was play ball with my gentile friends, and now this sacred Jewish rite seemed out of the question, a situation which further infuriated him because he’d been forced as a kid to make his Bar Mitzvah and was hell-bent on steam rolling me into making mine. At this point, no Hebrew teacher would have me.

     So I was overjoyed when Dad received a call from Stan Hack, manager of the LA Angels of the PCL, asking him to come out of retirement and play the last two and a half months of the season for him. Hack, a stellar third baseman for the Chicago Cubs for years, was now managing their top farm team. He told Dad that if the Angels finished near the top of the division he’d land the Cub job in 1954, and he needed a veteran to play an all-around utility role.

     Dad hung up the phone smiling. “It’s good. Stan thinks I can still do it. I’m going to play out the season for him. I wouldn’t do it for anybody else. Stan’s one of the good guys in the game, Dell.”

     The entire time Dad played for the Stars, the Angels were their cross-town rival, and since that time, the rivalry had grown heated and bitter; stony grudges existed among players on both teams, what Dad called “bad blood.” Dad, who was familiar with almost all the Angel players, still harbored animosity toward the Stars, not only because they traded him, but especially since they hired Bobby Bragan as their catcher-manager and signed a bunch of young players and good prospects, making the Stars the premiere team in the PCL. Bragan possessed nearly every fault Dad despised in a ball player: He made his bones in the big leagues during the war, he was a pop-off, a showboat, an instigator, a clubhouse lawyer, a front office politician and stooge. That Stan Hack felt the same way about Bragan pleased Dad no end. But still, the Stars had a few players who’d been Dad’s team mates, and he’d always been on good terms with Handley, Maltzburger, burly, quiet Frank “Mouse” Kelleher, feisty catcher Eddie Malone and Chuck Stevens.

     The Angels played at Wrigley Field, a near clone of the stadium in Chicago, holding twice as many fans as Gilmore Field. Dad took me with him to the ball park and the team accepted him like some kind of savior, everybody coming over to shake his hand and welcome him aboard.

     Right off, I made a friend—Dixie Upright, a reserve left-handed hitting outfielder with a southern drawl, a balding, square-shouldered man who wore colorful sport coats and shoes, a “dandy,” according to Dad. Upright was like Gorman in that he invited me to sit at his locker and bone his bats.

     The Angel clubhouse, compared to Gilmore’s, was a pit, ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’. No fan had any idea that this beautiful ball park with ivy-covered walls housed a rank, dank grotto of a clubhouse as second rate as some bush-league locker rooms. But Dad didn’t care, he was happy to be playing again. A couple of weeks off had allowed him time to rest and heal. He liked Hack’s coach, Jackie Warner. He’d played Navy ball with catcher, Al Evans. He liked Joe Hattan, a tough lefty pitcher. Dad said there was a good “feel” to the team.

     “Some guys, you just look at them, something about their faces, you know they’re good guys, but other guys, they got the kind-a faces you’d like to hit.” That’s how he felt about Hollywood outfielder and notorious base stealer, Carlos Bernier. “The little rooster likes to show people up. He slid into me hard down in San Diego, stealing second, and I    ‘accidentally’ (he winked) fell on top of him and kneed the little showboat in the balls. He got the point.”

     Dad didn’t seem to like any of the new players on the Hollywood Stars, and said: “I’ll force myself to dislike the ones I like, because it’s just like raiding a whorehouse, the good ones go with the bad.”

     Throughout the year a slowly burning fuse had simmered between the Stars and Angels. By mid-summer of the long PCL season—one hundred and eighty games—the feud had turned ugly. Even Stan Hack, a man of perennial sunny disposition and known as ‘Smiling Stan’, was spoiling for a reason to bait Bragan into a fight. A lot of grudges had developed. Also, since Stars led the league, they carried themselves with a swagger, serving to irritate the Angels all the more. Every inning of every Star-Angel game was heated and spiced with knockdowns and bruising take-out slides at second base; and the bench jockeying was personal and vicious. There were constant rhubarbs with umpires; the fans, always into the fray and yelling down at the field. And the situation was further heated by sportswriters in the local papers. Every baseball zealot in the L.A. basin felt a brawl coming on. Stan Hack must have had a nugget of wisdom filed away in his brain when he invited Murray Franklin, a renowned brawler, into this incendiary mulch.

     Joe Hattan lived near us, and he and Dad drove to the ball park together, while I sat in the back seat. Hattan had pitched well for Brooklyn and was in a World Series. Now, at thirty-seven, he’d lost movement and velocity on his fastball and had become what Dad termed “a junker.” There were more than a few junkers in the PCL—pitchers who once threw hard but lost it and learned to use various delivery angles, curves, change-ups, palm-balls, knucklers and scroogies that somehow set up a mediocre fastball to come in like a shot from a bazooka—like the master junker in the Big Leagues, the Yankee’s Eddie Lopat, whom Dad described as really tough to hit after facing fire-ballers like Allie Reynolds and Vic Raschi. San Diego had a lefty named Bob Kerrigan who threw a bunch of incredibly slow, bobbing, dropping, bending pitches that tied hitters into knots. “The sonofabitch could hit you between the eyes and never hurt you—but he gets people out,” Dad said.

     Hattan was a large, pale, lunky man with a deeply creased face and light, spiky hair. On the way to the ball park he and Dad talked about certain players, the game that night, and what they planned to do after their retirement, which was soon. But the moment they entered the clubhouse, everything changed.

     Out the clubhouse, normal people with no affiliation to baseball, tried mostly to be gracious and civil to one another, shying away from confrontation and competition. But ball players in the clubhouse challenged each other to bets in cards and golf, constantly taunted and teased each other. In the clubhouse, any unfortunate physical defect could earn you a name: Fatso, Banana Nose, Prune Face, Slew Foot, Piano Legs, Chicken Legs, Butcher, Fiddler, Hog Jaw, Liver Lips…Nothing was sacred, nobody above exposure and ridicule; and that included Dad, and me. And right off on a tip from my Dad, I got the “Lover Boy” treatment from the Angels, and was coming right back at my new idols.

     One of Dad’s new team mates was Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish, a strapping, thick-chested, right-handed pitcher from Oklahoma, an Indian owning a deadpan sense of humor and a sly twinkle in his eyes. Dad said McLish was a natural athlete, “one of those quiet guys you don’t want to mess with.” Dad regarded Indian athletes as “game, skillful fighters.”

     Rudy York, an Indian player out of Georgia who had monster years with Detroit and Boston, was Dad’s room mate when he was with the Tigers. Unlike McLish, York was a boozer who became unmanageable when he drank, yet had the ability to recover from terrible hangovers and perform well every day. Prodigiously strong, York did everything in his power to help Dad, and was one of the best sign stealers in the game, once getting picked off second base while trying to signal Dad at the plate, for a curve ball. Dad never wanted to know what was coming, unlike York who was a brilliant ‘guess hitter’.

     “Rudy could guess right, and when he did he hit it a mile. He was so broad he had to turn sideways to get through a doorway. He hit seventeen homeruns in a month one year. He got in a fight with a team mate once when he was drunk and it took five of us to pull him off before he killed the guy. He had him dangling out of a fire escape ten stories up.”

     Dad finally had to change roomies and get away from York because of the drinking and York depriving him of sleep. One night York came in late in a despondent state, woke Dad up mumbling over and over, “Murray, I got no plume, I got no plume, Murray, you got a plume.” It took a while for Dad to figure out that York meant a college diploma, which he revered. Mother said that York worshipped Dad because “he looked down on nobody” even though he was educated.

     McLish and Dad talked a lot, though as usual Dad hung out with the infielders. The Angels had a feisty, under-sized second baseman named Frankie DePrima’ and a slick shortstop in Gene Baker, quiet, polite, the team’s best player and only Negro; and a bulldog third baseman named Bud Hardin. Dad was to relieve these players and get some action platooning with Upright in left field, while future big leaguers Bob Talbot, a fleet, blond centerfielder, and Bob Usher, a thickset right-fielder who wore his pants low to his ankles like Mantle, played full time.

     Right off, Dad began scalding the ball, and the team seemed inspired as Dad gave them a lift. His body English regained its old bounce. One evening he made a diving game-saving somersault catch in left field after charging a line drive, and the entire team came out of the dugout to smack his ass and pound his back while the crowd gave him an ovation. The team started winning. Dad’s batting average, below .230 when he quit, began climbing steadily as he hit over .300. He was no longer arguing with mother or getting on my ass for bad behavior.

     “Your old man, he’s not through yet. Rackin’ that pea pretty good. I feel strong as an ox, seeing everything big. You never know about this game.”    

     (The next installment involves Murray Franklin triggering perhaps the greatest, longest, bloodiest brawl in organized baseball history).

The Ball Player's Son

                                              HITTING  .439

BIG  MOE

 I signed with Detroit for $100 a month and they sent me to Beckley, West Virginia in the Mountain State League. I took a train from Chicago and got off in the middle of the night at a tiny deserted depot outside of a town called Prince. Pitch dark outside. Only sound the crickets and frogs. I sat there on a bench for hours, wondering how long they were going to leave me out there until an old guy in a beat up truck came for me. Had about three teeth in his head. Hillbilly. But he was in a suit. Right off he welcomed me to Beckley and the team and all he talked about all the way to the boarding house where I’d live was the ball club.

     In those days, before television, it seemed every little town in the country had a ball club affiliated with a big league team. The Sporting News was thick as a book, covered every minor league, and each big league team had around 15 to 20 farm teams, so that when you went to spring training there were at least 20 players trying out for your position; it was dog-eat-dog.

     These mountain people loved their baseball and loved their players. They’d do just about anything for you if you were a ball player. If you played well you got little rewards, like a free haircut or a dinner at one of the diners. These were poor people. The country was poor even before the Depression hit, so now they had nothing, and when they came to the ball park to watch us play it was something very, very special for them. I saw right off that we, as players, the way we played, meant a lot to them, raised their spirits, and you learned that the little things you gave to them meant a hell of a lot in the long run. It was a damn good lesson on life, and humility, to never get too big for your britches.

     Going away to play ball as a professional and getting paid for it made me appreciate how good I had it. Most of these folks would never have the opportunity to get an education or make a lot of money or get taken care of health-wise. They had bad teeth, bad posture and joints from going down in those mines, a place I’d never go, and so you didn’t bitch at your own living conditions or going from town to town to places like Huntington and Bluefield in an old jalopy of a team bus through those treacherous mountains on bad roads. On those hair-pin turns the fog was so bad that sometimes I’d sit on the front fender and yell directions back at the driver.

     But it was fun, just to play ball and be part of that life, and see the look on the faces of these people when you talked to them at the ball park or in the streets and gave them an autograph. It was all you needed to go out there and play your ass off.

     I hit .439 in 1938, led all of the baseball leagues in America, and won the only silver bat handed out to the player with the highest average, along with the top hitters in the American and National Leagues. It was a magical year. Everything I hit felt solid. I was close to reaching my physical maturity and I ran the bases like a wild man, turning singles into doubles and doubles into triples, and in the local papers they called me “Grease Lightning.” I was on top of the world, the luckiest guy alive, because I’d met Rose the year before and she was the girl of my dreams, and we wrote every day and talked on the phone while she went to nursing school in Chicago. My father, who’d never cared a hoot about baseball, and along with my mother wanted me to study medicine or law or business like most Jewish kids in college, was so proud of me that he took the train to be with me when they presented me the silver bat. And my mother was so proud of me she cried.

     That year I felt like nobody, nobody in organized baseball, could get me out.

The Ball Player's Son

                                                  BOO-BIRDS

                                                  

1953                                          

     The fans at Lane Field had been booing Dad. He and Mom were having a lot of whispering conversations out of my earshot. He looked worried all the time, fearing the inevitable unconditional release every ball player receives when he is no longer able to produce and is cast into the real world of dog-eat-dog survival.

     While home during a series against the Angels at Wrigley Field, an old friend named Jules, who’d played against Dad in the Mountain State League in 1938, came to the house. Small and wiry, with a bald dome and a severely hooked nose, Jules admired Dad as a fellow Jew and kept an eye on his career. He dressed in slacks and sport coat and an open-collared shirt and wingtip shoes with white toes. Dad told me Jules was a little left-handed “junk-baller” who got no higher than A ball and eventually became a player/coach on low minor league teams. Finally he tired of the hard life of grimy busses and fleabag hotels in the Midwest and Appalachia, and became a ‘bird-dog’.

     Jules was an exuberant, jovial man who solemnly informed me that I was the “spitting image” of my father. He told me what a great ball player my Dad was and how he got the “royal shaft” from Detroit. Jules stayed for dinner, raving over mother’s cooking and coddling Susie. Afterwards he gravitated to the living room where he picked up Dad’s silver bat from the mantle above the fireplace and respectfully inspected it, admiring the mirror sheen from my weekly polishing.

     “I don’t care where you play. To hit .439 is one of the wonders of the world. I hated facing your father. I never saw a player like him. Powerful man. Playing shortstop and hitting ropes all over the field. And run? Fastest man in the league. He should have been up with Detroit the next year. Musial went right up. Boudreau went right up. Your dad was good enough to play right then.

     After he left, Dad told me Jules knew he’d been playing badly, and since he was in the area scouting, wanted to “lift his spirits.” He also explained that Jules couldn’t sign a prospect, combing high schools and reporting what he’d seen to a head scout, who is the only one can sign a kid. “Most scouts try and play down the talent of a kid and steal him, sign him up as cheaply as possible. Scouts are not to be trusted.”

     “Not Even Jules?”

     Dad shrugged. “Jules is a fine, honorable man. He’s one of those guys in love with the game. Even more than me. It’s like being in love with a beautiful woman who never loves you back, but you keep loving her all your life. That’s Jules. The game’s everything to him. He’s what we call in the business a “lifer.”

     I asked Dad why Jules thought Detroit gave him a raw deal. He explained that the owner of the Tigers, Spike Briggs, was a Catholic and played favorites. He’d actually handed rosary beads around in the clubhouse and he’d find them in his stall. Dad said they played Charley Gehringer, a hall of fame legend, when he was “so far over the hill he was finished, useless,” while he sat. But he never said a word, swallowed his pride, even when Mother, who knew little about baseball, could see he was getting the shaft and urged him to demand to play or be traded. But Dad said that no amount of demanding would’ve made a difference because “they owned you.”

    
      “What’d you do with the rosary beads?”

     “Gave ‘em back and kept my mouth shut.”

     “What about Hank Greenberg? He’s a Jew.”

     “Hank was already established, a legend like Gehringer. But he put up with his share of Jew-baiting. He out-worked the bastards and shoved it down their throats.” He paused, looked at me. “Sometimes, Dell, you have no control over the events in your life. You have to eat a little crow, and sometimes a lot of crow, and you gotta make the best of it because there’s no other choice. It’s no different in baseball than in life.”

                                                          ******

     Dad and I drove to San Diego while Mom and Susie stayed home. We talked baseball all the way down, at my insistence, relentlessly quizzing him about everybody he played against, especially the great ones like Williams and DiMaggio. I had a shoe box full of baseball cards and shocked my parents by memorizing the batting average of every player in the Sunday sports page statistics. I also wanted to know about Earl Rapp, the Padres new star player, one of the best in the PCL, an outfielder who carried himself with quiet dignity. Rapp was graceful on the field, fluid at the plate, a fine left-handed hitter. Rapp had all the tools—a pretty good arm, some speed, good fielder, decent power.

     “I think the front offices of most teams get it in their heads that Earl can’t hit lefties. I think he can. But after a while, if THEY think that way, well, YOU start thinking that way too. Earl goes up to the big leagues, and time after time, he stops doing the things he does in the PCL. I think it’s a mental thing.” Dad pointed to his head. “And he’s an outfielder. An outfielder has to hit or it’s no dice. A great infielder, like, say, Eddie Miller, even if he can’t hit, he’ll find a place in the big leagues.”

     “Rapp’s tearing up the league. Will he get another chance?”

     “Not now. He’s over thirty. Too late.”

                                                           ******

     Dad remained mired in the most brutal slump of his career. The best part of his game had always been his hitting—his trademark as a ball player. But now he couldn’t buy a hit, and I wondered if he was ever going to hit again. I sat with Mullins and listened to the fans boo, accusing Dad of being over-the-hill and ready to be put out to pasture and replaced by somebody who could produce. “He’s barely hitting his weight,” I told Mullins. “He always said he’d quit when the day came he couldn’t hit his weight.”

     “He’ll hit,” Mullins reassured me, adjusting his glasses, showing me his tobacco-stained teeth. “Besides, your daddy’s the kind of player don’t always need to hit to help the team. He does everything right. Some day you’ll understand that.”

     But Dad had a miserable game, booting a routine play at second, hitting into a double-play, getting called out on strikes with the bases loaded. The boos rained down. Later, he was pulled for a pinch hitter. The next day I sat with Mullins again, and Dad was on the bench, but pinch-hit in the ninth with the winning run at second, and connected on a pitch that sent the leftfielder sprinting to the fence. At the crack of the bat it sounded like a home run. Mullins and I and everybody around us stood as the leftfielder punched his glove and caught the ball eye level, his back against the fence. Dad kicked dirt as he rounded first, then chugged off the field, head down.

     “Snake bit,” Mullins muttered.

     After the game we stopped at a diner for burgers, and he told me about a game in the Texas League where he hit nine line drives in a double-header and went 0 for 9, either hitting one right at somebody or getting robbed. “Next game I dragged a bunt for a single my first time up, then hit a ball off the plate that bounced so high I was on first before it came down, then broke my bat blooping one into right field for another single. My last time up I hit seeing-eye-dog single up the middle, went 4 for 4 and never hit the ball hard. So what that tells you is, if you’re a good hitter everything evens out. I’m not sure I’m a good hitter anymore. It’s hard to keep your confidence up when your body no longer responds.”

     Back at the apartment, Dad put me to bed and phoned Mother, and they talked for a long time. I couldn’t sleep. Dad came into the room and sat on the bed. “I quit baseball tonight, Dell. I called O’Doul and told him I’m done. I don’t have it anymore. Right now I’m hurting the ball club. I’m embarrassing myself. I always told myself that when it came to this I’d hang it up. Thing is, it’s a helluva a lot harder to do than I thought it’d be.” He hugged me, and it felt like my chest was going to explode, bursts of sobs erupting, snot all over my face. Like somebody died. Dad said it was okay. He was okay. He’d prepared for retirement. He’d had enough.

     “I gave it everything I had, every play, for damn near twenty years. I never cheated the game or anybody I played for. I earned every cent they paid me. That’s the way I played the game. All in all, your old man had a pretty good career and lived a life few men experience.”  He managed a smile, smacked my shoulder. “Now it’s your turn.”