(Scrolling back to 1949 in this memoir will provide baseball junkies with the very essence of the game and the father/son relationship to it)

                                                    BACK TO BASEBALL

1963

     A figure out of the past showed up at our house, somebody I hadn’t seen since I was a small boy in Compton: Little Jules, dad’s old friend from the Mountain State League. He was bald as a marble, nattily clad, the same old lefty with hooked beak and the grotesquely bent arm from throwing decades of breaking stuff in the low minors. Exuding irrepressible effervescence, he was lavish in praise of our digs and Dad’s success. He was now scouting for the Houston expansion team and working under head scout Fido Murphy, who was out in southern California trying to sign players to stock the rosters of their minor league system. Jules nearly crushed my hand when dad re-introduced us, and regarded me with admiration.

     “Look at the forearms on the kid, Murray, just like you, chip off the old block, spitting image, grown into a man.” He grinned at dad. “He’s you with a good head of hair.” I was sure Jules knew I’d been booted off the Cerritos team and run off the field by Buford and consequently tabbed a flake, malcontent, psycho. But Jules told us he’d heard I had “big league tools.” He believed that if I had anywhere near the ability of Dad, which Dad quickly confirmed, there was no reason I could not sign and begin my climb to the big leagues, especially since I’d made the Anaheim tournament all stars. “Almost all those kids are playing pro ball somewhere, and those who aren’t are in college and will sign someday. You’re the only one who hasn’t, and look, with expansion, you got a great chance with the dilution of talent.” He smacked my arm playfully. “It’s the perfect opportunity.”

     Tryouts and exhibition games among prospects were being conducted on the UCLA home field at Sawtelle off Wilshire Boulevard. I’d played there numerous times with Boston in winter league. I drove out with my old pal, Dave Sturrock, who was going to Long Beach state to become a coach and wanted to bring me moral support. He kept reminding me I was the best ball player he’d ever seen, better than all the guys we’d played against and that were now playing in the minor and major leagues. But when I arrived at UCLA I felt sluggish, like my body was in quicksand. For the first time ever, the sight and sound and smells of a ball diamond felt alien as the smack of ball into glove and the knock of ball off bat melded with anxious chatter and a couple coaches yelling at players. The diamond was crawling with players warming up and playing pepper and taking infield. I’d never seen so many players on one field.

     Jules spotted me and called me over and I was introduced to Fido Murphy, a very short block of a man at least 60 whose face resembled that of a rumpled bulldog with under-bite. He stood with along the first base line, his X ray eyes quickly appraising my entire presence. Jules here,” he said in a gruff voice. “He tells me you’re a helluva a ball player, a chip off the old block  I remember your dad, and he was a helluva a ball player. Good to have you aboard. Go warm up and we’ll see if you’re the player Jules says you are.”

     . Among the excited, high-energy, chattering mob, anxious to display their wares, I found an older guy perhaps 25, a first baseman, to warm up with. Most everybody out here was a free agent, and we were all looking each other over, and I realized I was the only one out here with a mop of hair protruding from under my cap like straw and a stubble of beard. I didn’t FEEL like a ball player. Dad had urged me to get a haircut.

     Fido had me at shortstop, where a few players awaited their turns to pounce on grounders and throw to first, reminding me of my Little League tryouts at 9 years old, a lifetime ago. I recognized a few players I’d once competed against. Some sleek black kids were being timed running down the first base line after their last hit in BP. Fido’s assistant coach rapped grounders to the infielders between pitches. Houston, like the Dodgers, was scouting black track stars and trying to convert them into baseball players to intimidate teams on the base paths, like Maury Wills. I wondered did they possess the stealing and base-running instincts I did. Did they understand the fanatical, nuanced, neurotic, blood feud of facing a hateful and hating pitcher? Did they have it in them to so infuriate an opponent with every tactic imaginable that it rallied your own team to go to war against them?

     From shortstop the field seemed slanted uphill and first base a hundred yards away. I felt a sudden urge to tell Fido I was a centerfielder, where, for a very short time, before I went into the doghouse at Cerritos, I felt a natural freedom and ease. Flat-footed, the first few groundballs handcuffed me, one bouncing off my chest. I didn’t feel coordinated.

     “Yer rusty, kid, hang tough,” Fido hollered, and his coach lashed me another, which I trapped awkwardly on one knee (a no-no) to keep it from going through my legs. Then, not planting my right foot, I bounced a throw to first. The heavyset guy I’d warmed up with scooped it up, then pointed a glove at me and shouted, “Relax, kid! Take your time! You’re okay, babe!”

     Then Fido roared, “Where’s the arm, Franklin? I thought you was supposed to have an arm. I thought you was a stud!”

     I had no rhythm or feel for the game, continued to scuffle. I blocked balls, aimed throws that lacked zip--goosing the ball. “Jesus Christ,” I heard Fido grumble to Jules, loud enough for me to hear, no doubt trying to motivate me, but clearly losing patience as I lost heart. “He looks like he’s afraid of the goddam ball! He ain’t half the player as his old man!”

     Jules clapped his hands. “Shake off the cobwebs, Dell baby. We know it’s been a while. Give the kid a chance, Fido.”

     Later, in BP, Fido and Jules stood by the batting cage while I hacked away. I hit one ground ball after another, but no rising ropes. Where was my pop and snap? The bat felt like 40 pounds of cement. The harder I tried to quicken my swing, the more I flailed away. I felt like slamming the bat over my own head.

     “His timing’s off, he’s got a good level swing, like his old man,” Fido conceded, “Okay, that’s enough, Franklin. You got a game tomorrow night at eight. Yer startin’ at short. Then we’ll see what you’re made of. Now hit one more and run down the line!”

     I pulled one in the hole and took off for first and felt like I’d never get there. My uniform felt like a strait-jacket soaked in ocean water. Driving home, Dave said, “God, that Fido’s an asshole, the prick couldn’t stop bringing up your Dad. It’s bullshit.” At home, Dad asked how it went. I told him my timing was off at the plate and in the field. He asked had I practiced. I told him I had, but I hadn’t.

     (Next Sunday installment: The Metamorphosis)                            

    (Scrolling back to 1949 in this memoir will provide baseball junkies with the very essence of the game and the father/son relationship to it)

                                “THE KID’S BLOWING SMOKE UP MY ASS”

1963

     In the quiet of my room, mother made sure nobody disturbed the genius as I continued to churn out pages on my typewriter, having no idea where the words, ideas and scenes came from. I was influenced by everybody and anybody I read, and especially the last author I read. At class I was infuriated when Mills dismissed my new idol Steinbeck sneeringly as “written out, contrived, embarrassing…”

     “You should like Steinbeck, Mills,” I stood and shouted as he scrunched around in his seat to regard me with the same superior sneer. “He fought for social justice and the underclass all his life. They even called him a Commie, like they do you!”

     “Steinbeck’s lost his way,” he said calmly. “Just like you’ve never found your way, suburban hotdog. Get over yourself.”

     Where was my best pal, the plain-speaking plain thinking Angus when I needed him? How I missed The Big A’s simplistic views on everything. My father, like Mills, was equally repulsed by the “suburban hotdog” and mystified by his seemingly overnight transformation. There was no discussing anything with me now, especially since we’d never really talked about anything except baseball; though he often went to great lengths to impress upon me the benefits and joys of running his own business, watching it bloom, being his own boss answering to no one, a sly Jew out-witting his fellow Jews in competition and stealing their customers with better deals and cunning tactics, proudly screwing the government with ingenious and outrageous write-offs, putting people to work and providing them a living, possessing the freedom and new affluence to vacation in Hawaii with mother and buy an El Dorado Cadillac and eat in swank restaurants and fit mother in diamond jewelry and designer attire and put my sister and me, if I wanted, through 4 years of college!

     I would have none of it. I’d make my own way, my own money, thank you. The business to me was a waste of time compared to aspiring to be a writer. I mocked all the appliances, gadgets and gizmos he brought home on special deals with a sense of accomplishment and excitement. His sporting of success, his starting a business from rock bottom, “making gelt from dreck,” was, to me, no big deal. To my mind his journey emanated not out of choice, but necessity, so that he was just another number punching a clock—be it his own—and controlled by a system drowning in material excess while wallowing in the American propaganda machine brainwashing us all into thinking having all this shit made us the greatest and happiest people in the world, when in truth our blatant consumerism made us obscene and spiritually bankrupt in the eyes of great philosophical writers like Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac and most of Europe.

     “Jesus Christ, where did all those big words come from, bird-boy?” Dad demanded to know as we sat at the dinner table. “You talk like a kid with a paper asshole. You don’t know from nothin’. Go out in the world. And since when does a son of mine become so goddam uppity?”

     Like mother and grampa, now that I took a music appreciation class, I darkened the front room and listened to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and even my sister gazed at me like I was off the reservation.

     Dad turned to mother, his face red. “The kid’s living under MY roof, eating MY food, he’s making fun of his old man, and blowing so much smoke up everybody’s ass we’re all choking on it.”

     Mother retorted, “What you must understand, Murray, is Dell’s finally finding himself.”

     “Bullshit,” Dad groused.

     (Next Sunday installment: Back to baseball)

    (Scrolling back to 1949 in this memoir will provide baseball junkies with the very essence of the game and the father/son relationship to it)

    “I’VE BEEN GOOD TO BASEBALL, BASEBALL HASN’T BEEN GOOD TO ME”

BIG MOE,

     Bucky Harris and Gabby Hartnett were fine players in their days and a pair of true gentlemen. Hartnett was a Hall of Fame catcher, a guy I watched growing up in Chicago, and Harris played and managed half a century. They were almost too nice to be in baseball.

     In 1946, when I returned from the service, they were at spring training with the Tigers down in Lakeland and were going to manage and coach our farm team in Buffalo. I’d had a great spring, hitting over .400, got myself into great shape after a 3 year layoff. The general manager, Jack Zeller, called me into his office and told me they wanted to send me to Buffalo and start the season with Eddie Lake, Eddie Mayo, Bloodsworth, and Skeeter Webb, four guys who couldn’t carry my jockstrap. Well. I refused to go down. I was half crazy with anger, and I wanted to kill Steve O’Neill, the manager, and the rest of the stooges in the front office running the team. I asked Zeller what was going on, because he wasn’t a bad guy, and he knew I could play rings around those guys, but he said “his hands were tied.” That’s what they all tell you.

     I asked to be traded. Zeller said he’d work on it, which was more bullshit. Hartnett and Harris told me to cool down and come up to Buffalo and play for them. Rumor was very strong they were both going to the Yankees the next season, with Harris as manager, and he promised he wouldn’t go to New York without taking me along. He’d always liked me, believed in me, and he told Rose that, and tried to get her to persuade me to go with them, and SHE wanted me to go, too, but, like I said, I was too mad and fed up with the Detroit organization by that time to keep playing for a prick like Spike Briggs.

     Harris and Hartnett understood and told me not to give up hope, because the Yankees wanted a Jewish ball player with some hitting punch to play third and utility. There was a huge following of Jewish fans in the Bronx. A perfect situation. When you’re in a line-up with guys like DiMaggio and Henrich and Rizzuto, your batting average automatically goes up thirty points.

     But hell, time was running out on me. I was 32 years old and felt Detroit would never trade me to New York, because they knew damn well I’d come back to hurt them and make them look stupid. So I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, really getting the shaft. Going to Buffalo at this point was humiliating, and so I got an offer to jump the big leagues and go down to Mexico for a lot more money than I’d make in the big leagues, and I took it, and told Briggs to stick it up his ass. A local sportswriter interviewed me and I told him, “I’d always been good to baseball, but baseball had never been good to me, and I had to do financially what was best for my wife and son.” I’d had enough of getting handed rosary beads before games and watching donkeys play my position.

     In professional baseball, sometimes it’s not just about playing the game, although it should be that way. I’m no Alibi Ike and I don’t believe in sour grapes and I always look forward to the next step and never let the bad breaks bother me and made the best of a situation, but sometimes you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and have no control over things and have to sit and watch the prime years of your career go down the drain, wasted.

     I had good years in Mexico, and in Cuba, had a great time, but still, it wasn’t the big leagues. And sure enough, in ’47, Harris goes to the Yankees as manager and they win a World Series! If I’d listened to Rose, things would be different now. We’d probably be New Yorkers. But that’s all water under the bridge, and you should never forget there’s a lot of heartbreak in baseball, especially if you love the game and will go anywhere, under any conditions, to play.

     And especially if the money’s better.

     (Next Sunday installment: The Kid’s Blowing Smoke Up My ass.”) 

     (Scrolling back to 1949 in this memoir will provide baseball junkies with the very essence of baseball and the father/son relationship to it)

                                                THE BOHEMIAN BRIGADE

     Instead of hitting a ball around or playing basketball or hanging out with Angus, which was what I usually did on weekends, I was invited to Professor Edwards’s home for a writing seminar that was to be totally ad-lib and spontaneous. I was to bring nothing but my typewriter. Dave lived in a slightly ramshackle turn-of-the-century Victorian home in a leafy part of old Whittier. Couches, chairs, sofas, futons, all blanketed, were scattered about in a spacious sunlit main room with wooden floors. Nearby was a kitchen, its countertop piled with dishes. A huge pot of stew simmered on the stove. Beer cans and wine bottles and glasses sat on ledges and tables. A stereo piped turned-down folk music. Everybody smoked and a few puffed marijuana. Did I want any? No! I didn’t even smoke—another reason to scoff at the stiff.  I did happily swig from a bottle of cheap wine and later grabbed beers from a fridge—all supplied by Dave.

     The group consisted of about a dozen of the most venal anarchists—a few from our class—led by J. Hampton Mills, and various writers who’d studied under Edwards and gone on to 4 year colleges or jobs or no jobs in the real world. Edwards told us to write about whatever entered our minds. I dashed out a slipshod account of an affluent girl from a prime suburban home (modeled after Dawn Meadows) who falls to personal ruin and degradation and becomes a toothless, drug-bedeviled harridan/whore and homeless lesbian. I titled it “Gidget Goes to Hell.” Edwards, while reading this babble, had to halt a few times to laugh, though my cohorts refrained from such levity and exchanged glances indicating I was hopeless. They all chain-smoked furiously.

     I remained aloof, observing from afar, a dog lost and wandering in the wrong backyard. These folks were aloof, self-righteous, intolerant, judgmental, sneaky, jealous of each other, cloaking their true feelings in lies lavishing praise on their precious, sometimes flowery, sometimes minimalist, didactic, acidic, amateurish, plagiaristic, bogusly experimental works. Dave occasionally winked at me, which helped soften my sense of estrangement and lameness, which I actually relished.

     Mills actually lodged here. He found little salvageable in anybody’s work. He now wrote a weekly column in the Cerritos school paper, for whatever that was worth in this institution of apathetic zombies. His main axes to grind were with our government and Americans, whom he felt were ignorant, intolerant, racist, greedy, mindless, cosmetically indulged, imperialistic, war-mongering, materialistic, complacent, spoiled, and, most irredeemable, indifferent to the misery of the under classes here and throughout the world. We were the most hated, hateful and monstrously despicable race on earth. Once, when I questioned his bombast, he called me a misinformed simpleton, and I called him a calculated eccentric and a pretentious fraud, to which he scoffed jeeringly and informed Mr. Edwards he must be “losing his marbles to allow a stunted suburban fool like ME in his seminar.”

    When the subject of Steinbeck, my new idol, came up, Mills said the great man was “written out, contrived, embarrassing…”

     I countered, “You should worship Steinbeck, Mills. He fought for social justice and the underdog. They even called him a Communist, like they do you.”

     “Steinbeck’s lost his way. You’re a living, breathing cliché.”

      They had to separate us, Edwards in the middle. Mills retired to his room adjoining the front parlor. Edwards immediately warned me to watch what I said, because Mills liked to eaves drop and collect material to use in his columns against his myriad enemies. I purposely lingered near his room and spouted my own particular brew of blasphemy, hoping to draw him out of the room for a fisticuff, but of course he was non violent and in contempt of all forms of competition (which was for children), his scholarly rejoinder being to lose himself in the clattering of his typewriter.

     I drove home wondering who I was becoming and if it was any damn good.

     (Next Sunday installment: Big Moe is not impressed with his Kid.)