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.