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).