CHARLIE GEHRINGER--SECONDBASEMAN

                                    

BIG MOE

     Next to Rogers Hornsby, Charlie Gehringer of the Detroit Tigers was considered the greatest secondbaseman of all time. He was a home-grown Michigan native who’d been holding down second base since 1926 and was going to the Hall of Fame. There was no more popular player in the history of the franchise, and that included Cobb and Greenberg. He was a darling of the front office and the fans and press. In Detroit he could do no wrong. He was a better fielder than Hornsby and a more all-around player, probably the most fundamentally sound player in the game, a guy who went about his business as a total professional, and a master of every phase of the game—running bases, sliding, bunting, hitting behind the runner, going out on pop flies, making the doubleplay, going to either hole, stealing a base, getting you a scoring sacrifice fly, anything you needed to win a game.

     He was a quiet reliable guy who, like DiMaggio, never made a mental error and could freeze you with a look if YOU made one, because you were hurting the club and taking food out of his mouth; he was the kind of leader you didn’t want to disappoint, all business, respecting the game like a religion, and if you didn’t respect it the same way, and disappointed him, you were gone.

     He hardly said boo to me when I came up, never went out of his way to help me or give me advice, and he knew who I was, knew I’d been a top infield prospect in the organization and being groomed to take over his position even if I was a shortstop, and he knew he was just about finished as a ball player, but he wasn’t about to give up his position to some interloper written about in the local paper as his replacement.

     Gehringer knew that helping me meant helping the ball club, and the ball club for years had been his life’s blood, and it was obvious he was hurting the ball club, because he could no longer hit or cover any ground. The team knew it, he knew it, everybody in the league knew it, and finally, in ’42, they kept him on the roster mostly as a pinch hitter, for the fans; and then one of the writers who got a thrill out of making somebody miserable wrote a column with headlines in the Detroit paper saying I, Murray Franklin, was taking over his position.

     He never said a word to me that day in the clubhouse. When I took batting practice there was already a crowd around the dugout booing my every swing, and during infield it was the same: boos and personal insults. And when the game started and I was announced as the secondbaseman, the entire packed house booed me, and they kept right on booing me when I ran on the filed. And when I ran off the field at the end of the first inning, a bunch of wolves near our dugout dumped garbage on me, coat hangers, corn cobs, filthy rancid stuff, and they cussed me and insulted me like I’d murdered Gehringer, telling me I’d never hold his jockstrap, and Gehringer sat in the dugout and never said a word or looked at me, and the booing and insults didn’t stop until I pulled a single into left field.

     But then it started all over again. God forbid I booted one! It felt like every eye in the stadium was on me, hoping I’d boot one, so they could run me out of town, and for a while the writers kept comparing me to Charlie, and the fans kept right on booing me, so I was relieved to go on the road and away from those Detroit fans. As for Gehringer, he sat the bench all year, never warmed up to me, never offered any advice or encouragement, and I never held it against him, because that was the nature of the dog-eat-dog times—you didn’t want anybody taking your place and you never felt secure. He was a proud man, a legend. He’d been so great, and it couldn’t have been easy to see somebody else playing a position he’d held down for 20 years.

     (Next Sunday installment: “An Act of Blatant Cowardice.”) 

                                  A SILENT, GNAWING, BRUTAL FEUD

1959

     Dad and I were not talking, nor offering apologies, because neither of us was capable of apologizing. Our feud seethed with such acrid resentment we refused to look at each other. When passing his store mornings with my crew I skittered on. Tension was taut at the dinner table. A welt from my flogging him with his jacket was scabbed over on Dad’s pate, and occasionally he glanced up at the ceiling, where a smudge of grease was left from the pork chop that flew from my grip after I was punched out, reminding me. Mother tried to break the ice by asking me how I was doing in baseball, but these overtures received only stony silence or grunts.

     In league play I was holding my own at the plate as lead-off hitter, but my fielding had begun to fall apart—specifically the accuracy of my arm, never a problem before. Coach Edgmon was easy and fatherly on his players, and especially with me, clapping his hands and urging me to shake it off when I booted one in the field or ground my teeth, barely holding my temper when I made out.

     “You can’t get a hit every time,” he told me. “Relax. Get ‘em next time. You’re hittin’ over three hundred.” But I wanted to hit .400.

     At shortstop, I was trying to compensate for my average arm by hurrying or loading up my throws instead of going with my natural rhythm, and tossing balls in the dirt. I was “thinking” too much. I knew I should talk with Dad, who always solved my problems instantly with small, subtle tips that were often just as psychological as mechanical. Several times I could not control my temper, and Bart and Bowlin were grumbling about my performance and alluding to Edgmon “coddling me.” Worst of all, I grew tight, tentative. Overnight I’d gone from cocky and confidant to fearful of muffing one.

     Edgmon finally took me off shortstop, switching me to second, replacing me with Loman.

     “You’re a little nervous out there at short,” he told me in his trophy-laden office, where I gritted my teeth and pleaded with him to let me stay at short and work things out. He shook his head. “I figure the shorter throw’ll take the pressure off you, son. Loman, he doesn’t have your range, but he’s got that strong, steady arm. I think you’re gonna be the best damned secondbaseman in the league. I’m doing this for the good of the team, and your good, too. It’s the right move.”

     Loman did not gloat, but instead encouraged me with pep-talks.

     When I got home, I didn’t tell mother about Edgmon’s decision. She was studying down in the den, about to get her teaching degree from Long Beach State to go along with her nursing degree so she could be a high school nurse. She made straight A’s. One minute Dad called her an “intellectual egghead with no common sense or understanding of the business world,” and the next he bragged to his shoemakers that she had an IQ of over 150, which she did.

     She saw I was down in the dumps and gazed at me, full of adoration, understanding and compassion, “the motha look,” as Dad described it, so sappy, and I began squirming, though Mother was my true confidante, which Dad interpreted as her protecting me. After he’d tried to teach me to drive in his stick-shift Rambler, and yelled at me and called me stupid when I ground the gears and eventually slammed into a gas station, jumped out and fled a mile home, Mom taught me on an automatic transmission and I did fine. He was jealous of her when I passed the DMV driving test.

     She sat me down. “Dell,” she said firmly, looking me straight in the eye, like she did everybody, unnerving many. “It’s up to you to be the mature one in your relationship with your father. You must make an effort to understand him and be a bigger, more tolerant person than he is. He can’t change, but you can. We both know your father is domineering, and controlling. He thinks he has to be. He can be a bully. He’s very jealous and petty, and he’s vengeful. You have no idea how he tried to dominate me early in our marriage. This was such a shock, because during our three years of engagement he was a perfect angel. Then I learned this whole other side of him. He forced me to quit the air lines as a stewardess because he didn’t want other men looking at me. He cheated me in cards for twenty years before I caught him. He tried to teach me to drive and humiliated me so I almost left him. The same with golf. You most understand that NOTHING you do in life will satisfy him. Your father, bless his heart, but he is so insecure, he is, well, a belittler, and the reason he is this way, believe it or not, is because he is frustrated and disappointed he never got as far as he should have in baseball, and if you let him drive you crazy, honey, you will be unhappy, and I can’t bear to see you this way, so miserable, hating your father who loves you more than you ca imagine. Dell, listen to me—if you take your father, and baseball too seriously, I fear it could have a very, very dangerous influence on your life.”

     She sighed, still gazing at me. “You are NOT just your father, you are also of me, and you should not be ashamed of that. You are much, much more sensitive than your father. You see and feel things he doesn’t, and you see gray, where he only sees black and white.”  Still gazing at me with the ‘motha look,’ she leaned forward and kissed my forehead, an act I’d been discouraging since becoming a teenager, and I squirmed, but she smiled, understanding my squeamishness at all things mawkish. “Please start talking to your father again. He’s always sorry when he knows he’s wrong, but he’s not going to admit it, and honey, his heart is breaking. Since the day you were born he has loved you like no other, and always put you first. You are his pride and joy, and you must put yourself in HIS shoes. That is the secret to living—putting yourself in everybody’s shoes. Be big. Remember, Dell, as my mother says—‘nobody is that wonderful, and nobody is that terrible.’ The only way I have been able to survive your father is to understand him, and forgive him. There’s no harder man to live with, but I could spend a lifetime trying to find a better man, a more decent man, a man as unique and interesting as your father, a man with his kind of character. You must be the adult in the relationship.”

     I knew she was absolutely right. I nodded. “I’ll talk to him, if he wants to talk to me, but you’ve got to tell him I don’t want him at my games, because Mom, he makes me too nervous, and I feel so much pressure that sometimes I can hardly think or breathe out there.”

     She looked deep into me, and nodded. “Okay. It’ll hurt him, but it might be the best thing to do right now—for both of you.”

     (Next Sunday installment: “Charley Gehringer—Secondbaseman”)

                                              VARSITY DEBUT

1959

     A contingent of neighborhood pals, most of whom I’d known since grammar school, were in the stands of the windswept pasture of our Compton High ball field for my debut. My father was nowhere in sight. He had a delivery route in the afternoons that included South Central LA, San Pedro, Long Beach, South Bay, San Gabriel Valley cities, Huntington Park and clear out to Pasadena and Burbank and Hollywood and downtown LA. He usually got home around 6 in the evening or later, exhausted, having been up early and opening his store at 7:30 in the morning. Instead of sending out salesmen working on a commission and making shoemakers pay shipping costs, he worked as a mostly one horse, nonstop operation, taking orders and delivering free in a day or two, cutting everybody’s throats on prices and discounts, a big fish eating the little fish as he proudly described it, allowing him to finally “get over the hump” profit-wise.

  

     I got up four times and banged out three singles, walked, stole a base, and played errorless in the field, and we won. Coach Edgmon flashed me a fatherly smile afterwards and patted my butt. Coach Armstrong pulled me aside and told me he was happy I’d made a decision to play only baseball. My friends stood after my last hit, gave me an ovation, and left. Walking home by myself, I was literally floating along the sidewalk about half a mile from home, on Alondra, when Dad pulled alongside me in his Nash Rambler station wagon. He stopped and I got in and instead of starting out he just stared at me with an expression indicating he was severely disappointed.

     “I went three for three, Dad,” I exclaimed proudly, hoping to wipe the look off his face. “I stole a base, walked, no errors, and we won.”

     “I know,” he said.

     “I didn’t see you there,” I said.

     “I was there. I saw everything. Saw you looking all over the place when you’re supposed to be paying attention to the game. I saw you visit Bowlin on the mound twice and tell him how to pitch. An infielder NEVER goes to the mound unless he’s called in to discuss strategy by the manager. Who the hell are YOU telling Bowlin how to pitch! You want your team mates telling YOU how to play? Bush! A disgrace. Just because you got a couple hits you’re telling everybody how to play the goddam game…since when does a 15 year old hotdog tell everybody where to play?” I started to answer but he cut me off. “That’s Edgmon’s job. Next thing you’ll be telling HIM how to run his goddam team.”

      My stomach churned with instant hot nausea. “Guess nothing I do satisfies you…”

      “It’s not just about playing the goddam game, it’s about conducting yourself like a ball player, not strutting around like some rooster who acts like he invented the game, craning his head all over, looking at the girls, looking at your friends, looking at the scouts…I’ve never in my life seen such horseshit behavior on a ball field.”

     He started the car and headed home in silence. I went straight to my room and slammed the door shut, lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, wanting to punch savagely

the face of the man which told me it didn’t like me, nor what I’d become, or was becoming. Oh, maybe like most fathers he loved me, but that didn’t prevent him one iota from finding me disgusting and even revolting.

     When I finally got to the dinner table, mother looked agitated and unhappy. I’d heard them arguing from my room. Mother had made pork chops and mashed potatoes and peas and I speared three pork chops off the platter and slapped them onto my dish. Dad flashed me the beady eye.

     “What have I told you before?” he growled. “Take one. You eat one, then take another. You don’t take three. Those chops aren’t going anywhere.”

     “I always end up eating three,” I protested.

     He speared two off my plate and dropped them on the platter. “You always take the three biggest chops. A pig. It’s time you learned some goddam table manners.”

     “Murray,” Mom protested. “Do you have to notice everything he does? Let the boy eat!”

     He pounded the table, rattling dishes, causing sister Susie to wince and come close to tears. “You stay out of this!” he snarled viciously at Mom. “I’m in charge here! Stop protecting him! His manners are a disgrace and if it’s the last thing I do, if I have to starve the wise-ass, I’m gonna teach him some goddam table manners!”

     As I poised my fork to spear my chops back, the identical murderous look was on dad’s face as when I was beating him in hand-slapping.

      “Don’t do it, I’m warning you…”

      My fork was barely in the chop when the lights went out. Next thing I was all the way into the living room, on my back, shaking out the cobwebs, feeling at my jaw. Mother hovered over me, and Susie was crying and had out her baton, ready to do battle in defending me from Dad, who sat in his dinner chair, a gloating grin on his face.

     “That was just my Betsy Ann shot,” he called. “A love-tap, bird boy, not my Susie Q.” He doubled up his left-hook fist.

     I stood and began screaming at him. He rose and came toward me and I picked up his windbreaker as he came over and whipped it across his face and ripped a small chunk out of his bald head. He grabbed his head and his eyes flashed with murder and I took off out the front door with the old man on my ass. Of, course, he couldn’t catch me. I stood out on the sidewalk while he threatened to “break me into a thousand pieces” when he caught up with me. I gave him the finger while he reached up to halt the flow of blood from his head. Evidently I’d gotten him with the zipper-end.

     I turned and began trotting. I wandered over in the darkness to Roosevelt Junior high and ended up walking down Long Beach Boulevard and then Atlantic, just walking, boiling, thinking about taking out my savings and allowing Susie to break open her piggy bank and give me what she had and hitch-hiking off into the sunset, and the only reason I wouldn’t was because of baseball. I was exhausted and starving and thought of visiting my grandparents on my mother’s side a block from us, but knew my dad would be looking for me there. I knew also that after he cooled off he’d calm down, though this was the first time I’d ever struck back at him. He’d had me on the ground a couple times over the years and Susie always clobbered him with the baton while mother screamed and beat on him.

     Later, much later, on the verge of collapse, I reasoned Dad was in bed because he had to mind the store so early, and knocked on the back door of my grandparent’s house. Grampa was up—a night owl who went to sleep in the wee, wee hours, slept late, ate eggs and only eggs; then, in his white short-sleeve shirt, black baggy pants, Dobbs Fifth Avenue hat and black shoes, walked all over Compton and clear into Long Beach and sometimes into South Central LA where he was known as “the walking man.” He smoked a pipe and cigars. He studied religion and hated them all and cornered door-to-door preachers and corrected them on their spiels. He read the Russian authors, the German philosophers, listened to classical music, had played the oboe and flute in small town bands back in Wisconsin and was a tailor all his life who had no patience with customers and terrified all my cousins in his house and wouldn’t let them make any noise or touch anything but favored and spoiled me because he’d been my surrogate father for two years while Dad was away in the war.

     Mother always said, “Grampa loves you and knows you better than anybody.”

     He was the only non-Russian Jew in the family, a French-Belgian born outside if Liege, who came to America as a child and had no accent.

   . He let me in, smelling of pipe smoke. He was completely bald and because he seldom wore his false teeth, his chin nearly touched his nose. Dad claimed he looked like the cartoon character, Snuffy Smith. He knew why I was here. Gramma got up and made me bacon and eggs and poured as much milk as I could drink. Dad had come looking for me earlier. He was angry but they calmed him down. Gramma went to bed and grampa put me up on a couch in the den, which had a piano. He liked to sit in his den alone and read and listen to Rachmaninoff or Beethoven or DeBussy or Amos and Andy on the radio and smoke his pipe. Tonight we sat and talked.

     “Your father, he’s a good man,” he explained, “but this baseball stuff, it’s crazy. It’s just a game, Dell. You don’t know it now, but you’re a scholar, and an artist.” He grinned at me, false teeth out, puffing his pipe. “Like your mother.”      

     (Next Sunday installment: “A Silent, Gnawing, Brutal Feud.”)

                                        AN ESSENTIAL ARROGANCE

1959

     Loman and I were locker partners in the smelly, dilapidated Compton high locker room, where the shower floors were coated with piss from athletes and gym kids peeing for decades. Loman and I were practically panting with excitement for varsity tryouts. We walked onto the field together, warmed up and played pepper together, bantering about our shortcomings the whole time. He owned a rifle of a natural throwing arm from the hole between third and short, and labeled me a rag arm. But I covered much more ground in a low crouch and called him “turtle.” I was a line drive hitter, but he had more power, and called me a “punch” hitter. I called him Mr. Whiff. Two Mexican kids, a senior and junior who started the year before, also tried out for short, and they treated me with the scorn I had coming as the privileged son of an ex big leaguer. My attitude was one of essential arrogance implying they didn’t belong on the same field with me.

     I realized I did not have a strong arm, especially from the overhand release. I threw three-quarter arm and at times side arm if I was moving toward my target, and I had perfected from hours of practice a quick release of the groundball from the low fielding crouch that compensated for the lack of velocity in my peg. I seldom straightened to throw, but completed the entire process of catching and throwing out a base runner in one single motion, a no-brainer; an automation that enabled me to seldom think too much and commit an error. I didn’t even have to look at my target, knowing the ball would get there.

     After a couple of days, coach Edgmon moved the two Mexican kids off shortstop and began a competition between Loman and me. In an intra-squad game, a big Mexican pitcher named Castillo sized me up and planted a fastball in my back. I knew it was retaliation for his two pals being demoted and took it. I refused to rub. As I trotted to first, he eyed me and I ignored him. When I was on first, he still eyed me, and I took a good lead. He turned to get the sign, got into his stretch, and I took a huge lead. He threw over. I got back easily. I took another huge lead. Ron Bart, a senior, about 200 plus pounds, slapped another tag on me as Castillo came over again. Bart wouldn’t talk to me. He had marked his territory as a racist and had brawled with blacks trying to put a foot in Senior Square on the main quad, a place no black student had dared enter over the years. There had been near riots when a black girl had won out over four white girls for homecoming queen. Ken Bowlin had followed Bart’s lead, drove around with him in Bart’s car and had made varsity as a starting pitcher. If possible, he was more full of himself than me.

     I stole second easily, popped up, stared at Castillo, who stared back, and took another ridiculous lead. He threw over twice and then I stole third and popped up and smacked the dust off my pants and took another lead and yelled out at Cruz.

     “You can’t hurt me with your shit! Hit me again! It’s an automatic triple. I own you!”

      I sensed his hatred of me. I didn’t give a shit. The game was mine. He was an interloper. Nothing could stop me. Next time up he threw me a fastball tight, which I took, then ripped one down the line for a double and coach took him out. I was all about the game. Nothing else mattered, or interfered. Nothing.

                                                              -----

     I made varsity shortstop. Even with his strong arm, coach moved Loman to second. There was no gloating. We still picked on each other, but also spent hours after practice working on the doubleplay until we were slick. We talked baseball. Loman was calm and cool while I was fidgety and intense. When I made a suggestion on how he should hit, he just stared at me. I felt everybody should hit as I’d been taught by my Dad.

     The early morning of our first varsity game, I walked down Alondra boulevard with a few of my old neighborhood pals, cork-offs, clowns, card players, pussy talkers, virgins, all of us. We always passed Dad’s store, which was between a liquor store and insurance office and across the street from the Richfield gas station on the corner of Santa Fe and Alondra, a busy hive.

     Beyond the wide front window, behind a long waist-high counter, Dad conducted business with a crowd of shoemakers eating his donuts, drinking his coffee, buying his merchandise while he held court. Summers I’d worked for him as a stock boy and knew most of these customers and no matter how busy he was he always noticed us kids lollygagging by, and if he didn’t I’d pound on the window and double up my fist and shake a menacing fist and challenge the old man to a mock-fight. Right off he’d get the killer look and rush to the doorway and start taunting me.

     “Hey bird-boy, who’ve you whipped lately? You can’t whip nobody.”

     My friends, all of whom were terrified of Dad, the most notorious bad ass in town, watched me shadow box. “You’re old and slow, Dad. I’m Sugar Ray.”

     This morning I did the same. He stood outside the door in his boxer’s stance. “When you’re twenty, and I’m fifty, I’ll still whip you, bird-boy, and when you’re thirty, and I’m sixty, I’ll still whip your ass. And when I’m seventy, God willing, and you’re forty, I’ll STILL whip your ass!”

     “I’m too quick for you, Daddy-o. I got the quicker hands.” I threw a flurry of punches.

     He strode toward me in his menacing crouch, my friends backing away, kids ambling along behind us pausing to observe, kids on the other side of the boulevard pausing to watch as we squared off in a game of “hand-slap.” I held out my two hands locked together and he swung and missed and I gloated and when he put out his hands I whacked him three times and then missed and then he got me twice. It went back and forth. I connected more, but my knuckles were cut and raw while his were fine as he addressed the crowd and his shoemakers who came out to observe the contest.

     “You got no punch, bird-boy. You’re a slapper, a tissy-prissle.”

      I still frisked around, but clearly the crowd felt Dad had won, and he was in his glory, but I still talked trash, and he grinned, told his shoemakers, “that’s my boy, he’s crazy like his mother,” and as I walked off, he cupped his hands at his mouth and hollered. “Play it right, Dell, and rip that pea, boy!”

      He was still at the door grinning as we crossed the street in our mile trek to school.

     (Next Sunday installment: Varsity Debut)