The Ball Player's Son

1953

     Little League tryouts were on the other side of Compton at Colin Kelly Park. I refused my mother’s offer to drive me and rode my bike across town, my glove hanging from the handlebars, bat on shoulder, steering with one hand—a hotshot. There were about a hundred kids warming up, a lot of fathers. Nobody knew me. I was the smallest, youngest kid on the field. I sized up my competition and felt I belonged. There were to be eight minor league teams, which took on big league names—Yankees, Indians, etc.—and four major league teams sponsored by the Lions, Rotary, Kiwanis and UCT

     One of the coaches looked me over and commented on how small I was and asked my age. And when I lied and said ten, he told me he was going to try me out with a minor league team. I told him I was going out for the majors like everybody else. He smiled and told me I’d have to grow and earn my way to the majors, just like pro ball. “I oughta know,” he said. “I played pro ball.”

     There was a dozen or so kids trying out for each position and the best players were at shortstop, and so was I. We lined up behind each other for our chances at groundballs. They tried the eleven and twelve year olds first, then us smaller kids. I charged my first grounder, snared an easy hopper in my crouch and snapped a sidearm throw to first. When they hit me one to deep short, I planted my back foot, fielded and threw overhand in one motion, hitting my target. A bunch of coaches clustered at home plate looked at each other, nodding.

     One of the coaches along third base asked another coach, “Who’s the peewee with the good glove? Kid’s slick.” I refused to look at or talk to the other kids trying out for shortstop. Dad had explained to me that when he went to Spring Training with the Tigers there were dozens of players fighting for that position in the farm system, working their ways up to the big leagues, and it was dog-eat-dog, and “somebody trying to beat you out was trying to take food off your plate. They were the enemy.”

     The coach with the fungo, who’d played pro ball, tried and failed to hit a ball through or past me. My throws were on target. When I stepped into the batting cage to take my three cuts, I turned to bunt as I’d been instructed by Johnny O’Neill, deadening the ball, dropping a dead fish on the third base line. Then I choked up and smacked three knockers between third and short, into left field. The coach who’d been hitting grounders stopped when I finished. “I don’t know who you are or where you’re from, Peewee, but you’re a ball player, a natural. We’re gonna find a spot for you somewhere.”

     When I got home I tossed my bike down in the yard, busted into the house and told mother I thought I’d made the majors. And if I didn’t, well, they could jam it. She made a long-suffering face. Then she looked into my eyes, smiled and roughed my hair. “You’re my little brown nut. I’m sure you’ll make the majors. You’re a chip off your father’s block. He’ll be so proud of you.”

     Next day, Mr. Roark, coach of Kiwanis, called and welcomed me aboard. I was going to be his shortstop

                                                              *

     Dad was overjoyed I’d made the majors as the youngest kid.. He and mother agreed he shouldn’t meddle with the team. If he had a night off, he’d sneak out and watch me play like any normal father in the stands.

     The Lions and UCT had the best, oldest players, and the Lions coach was the son of the league president. The Kiwanis and Rotary were allotted kids who were better than those in the minors but nowhere as good as the Lions and UCT players, including Jim Rooker, an obvious star. Our first baseman, the twelve year old coaches’ son, looked like he belonged on the last place team in the minors. He could hardly catch the ball. Coach Roark was a kindly, pleasant man, but knew nothing about baseball and depended on his stocky assistant, Mr. Fletcher, who claimed he played semi-pro ball and had a tryout with the Chicago Cubs. He and I took an instant dislike to each other when I refused to alter my hitting style at his urging.

     “Who the hell are you that you know so much?” he wanted to know.

     “My dad’s Murray Franklin. He played for the Hollywood Stars and the Detroit Tigers and now he plays for the San Diego Padres, and he knows more about baseball than you’ll ever know,” I told him.

     His dislike turned to hatred and he grumbled to Mr. Roark that I should be moved to second base, but Roark refused. Fletcher was a hard-ass, he had this technique on batting where you kept your elbow cocked up, but I was taught to keep my elbow down, so the bat lays level on the shoulder and not jutting up vertically with the elbow up. Fletcher had all the kids hitting with the elbow cocked out, but I continued to refuse. His kid was as terrible a player as Roark’s kid. He seemed to be miserable playing baseball, his old man critical and demanding and embarrassed by his play; while Roark knew his kid stunk, yet encouraged him even when he dropped easy throws to first and looked like a dizzy clown on pop flies.

     We all hated Fletcher and our team played badly. UCT skunked us by 20 our first game. We were inept clowns. I was furious and felt helpless. I hated losing and was already a bad sport at any game on the playgrounds. When dad came home from a road trip I told him how awful we were, but he didn’t seem to want to get involved. In a way, I was disappointed. Yet in a way, I was relieved, for kids at school and on the playgrounds and in Little League were telling me that their dads were saying my dad stunk as a ball player and so did I, because my dad had struck out in a televised game. “Yer dad’s a bum.” I was getting in fights.

     The Lions skunked us. Though Rotary was little better than us, they had a good coach and edged us out. When UCT skunked us again we were a laughingstock. So far, at bat, I had walked a lot because I was short and Fletcher urged me to take pitches until they threw me a strike. His base signs were un-baseball like. I was hitless. We were all flailing hitless wonders.. And while UCT, Lions and even Rotary and minor league teams went out with parents after games to Foster’s Freeze or A&W Root Beer for burgers and shakes, we straggled home, tails between our legs, whupped dogs without treats.

                                                                     *

     The Kelly Field stands extended from behind both dugouts and climbed to a small press occupied by a man who announced the names of each hitter and always mentioned I was Murray Franklin’s son when I came up—“Murray Franklin, formerly of the Detroit Tigers and Hollywood Stars and now with the San Diego Padres.” I felt like a giant searchlight was singling me out. A roaring like the ocean filled my head and I chewed gum furiously and pumped my bat repeatedly like I was not supposed to, and I ground my teeth and felt humiliated when the son of Murray Franklin dribbled or struck out.

     One night the umpire called me out on strikes. Next time up he continued to call strikes on balls just over my shoe tops. The second time he called me out the ocean roar in my head was so loud I panicked and found myself, bat discarded, pushing the umpire in the chest protector. His eyes widened in shock as I pounded on his chest and called him “a fucking blind Tom.” Mr. Roark was on the field pulling me away. Mother was in the stands and hurried down to the dugout in tears and dragged me to the car—the crowd eerily quiet and still. We drove home in silence, and then she began to weep as we pulled up in front of the house.

     “I don’t want you playing Little League,” she said firmly.

     That night, Dad called from Seattle (he called every night) and mother railed at him on the phone, sobbing, then she put me on the line. Dad wanted to know why I hit the umpire. I complained he was cheating me. Mother grabbed the phone and railed at dad some more, claiming I was imitating him by going after umpires. “He sees you do it, so he does it. But Murray, you’ve never touched an umpire, and never would. Your son punched an umpire tonight! I don’t think he should be playing. He feels too much pressure to do well and be like you, and he’s so young and so much smaller than the other kids. I’m just sick, honey. I can’t eat. I just want to throw up.” And she sobbed.

     I was suspended for a game. When dad came home he sat me down and explained that from now on I was never to question an umpire, no matter how bad he was. These umpires were not professionals. And from now on I was NOT to listen to or look at anything going on in the stands or anywhere else, but concentrate only on what I was doing on the field, if I wanted to be a ball player and not a “busher.”

     “You can’t get the rabbit ears, Dell. You’re going to have to listen to a lot of ugly garbage because of who you are. Mostly they’re just jealous because you’re a good player and I’m a professional. From now on, don’t worry about anything except playing the game. The game’s for you.”

     Mother still wanted me off the team, insisting it would not hurt me a bit to wait another year, especially since I had three more years of Little League.

     “Rose, sooner or later the kid’s going to have to face what he’s facing now. He has to start working things out on his own or he never will. He needs to play, not be coddled..”

     I was feeling blue. For the first time, I didn’t want to go to the ball park with dad, because I knew his team mates and especially Tobin would want to know how I was doing, and I couldn’t bear to face them when we’d lost every game and the son of Murray Franklin was hitting .000.

Big Moe

                                               

BIG MOE

     “I didn’t have baseball idols when I grew up, and I didn’t pattern myself after any of the Cubs players when my dad took me to Wrigley Field. My father was from the old country in Russia and didn’t know a thing about baseball and didn’t care about sports. Sports were something that interfered with business. In those days, the Irish kids idolized the Irish players and it was the same with the Polocks and Italians and Germans. All I had was Moe Berg, and he played across town for the White Sox

     “As I developed, I worked out my own techniques and simplified hitting and fielding. I didn’t want to be a power hitter who hit long fly balls, because fly balls were almost always easy outs in the big parks, unless you hit one out, but most of our games were played in sandlots, and if you had power, like I did, they played you a hundred miles away and allowed you singles and doubles. I practiced a level swing that was slightly down on the ball, my right wrist on top, so I hit everything with a topspin and made ground balls hop and skid and take wild bounces so it was tough for outfielders to stay with the ball. When I hit the ball on the meat of the bat and pulled it, the ball curved toward the line, and because of my short compact swing, I stood close to the plate and pulled the ball while protecting the outside of the plate. I learned to hit down on the low ball and drive it on a low rise or a high bounce. And I tomahawked the high pitch and hit sinking liners. When I played pepper I choked up on the bat about six inches and made sure as I followed through with my swing that the knob of the bat passed between my wrists and forearms, which automatically kept my right shoulder level. This way I never dipped my shoulder or hitched. This little exercise developed strength in my wrists and shoulders and quickened my bat, and the quicker my bat became the more confident I was I could hit anybody, no matter how hard they threw. This confidence allowed me to keep my weight back and my bat cocked until the last split second, so I didn’t lunge or get off balance against curves or off-speed pitches. I learned to NEVER look for a curveball, because if you guessed curve and was wrong, the fastball was by you no matter how quick your hands were. And you could get beaned. But if you looked fastball, you were always ready, could adjust, and as far as I was concerned a curveball was easier to hit than any other pitch, because you picked up the spin halfway from the mound and waited, and always slowed yourself down and tried to go up the middle, like hitting off a tee. Even at a young age, I was developing what you call ‘a philosophy of hitting.’ I adopted a style that fit my physical abilities. I was an infielder, and infielders didn’t hit for power. Just hit line drives and drive everybody nuts. Be a tough out. Choke up on the bat an inch or two with two strikes and don’t strike out. Guard the dish and bow your neck. Wear the pitcher down, discourage him by fighting off his best stuff until you get a fat one you like and drill it.

     “One afternoon at Wrigley Field I saw the greatest right-handed hitter of all time, Rogers Hornsby, and watching him gave me another piece to add to my philosophy of hitting. He stood deep in the box in a closed stance and hit every ball where it was pitched, and his style was like a ‘second coming’ to me, a revelation, like some people get religion. He hit the outside pitch down the right field line, in the gap between right and center and up the middle. He sent the pitch up the middle anywhere he wanted to. He took the inside pitch down the line or between third and short or into the alley in left-center—blue darters. His hitting was like poetry and the next day I went to the sandlots and kept my old stance and mechanics but instilled some of the things I’d seen watching Hornsby. He wasn’t that big a man but his swing was level and uncomplicated and leveraged from his ass and legs, and his bat was lightning quick and he hit the ball so hard he froze people in the field. Now I was able to get more of my body into the ball and began to drive it farther, and hit rockets that dehorned infielders—and I noticed people were playing me deeper in the field. I became a terror. Everybody wanted me on their team. I felt strong and unbeatable on the field. I had my own style. Walking down the streets of Chicago, or riding my bike five, ten, fifteen miles across town looking for a bigger, better game, I had a sense of who I was—a hitter. A ball player. People waved to me on the streets and asked about my game. At synagogue all the Jewish kids and their parents treated me like a crown jewel, because already I had a reputation as a good ball player going places

     I’d found my calling.

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The Ball Player's Son

                                       THE BALL PLAYER’S SON

1952

     I woke up in the wee hours and found dad swinging his bat in the living room after another game where he’d taken the collar, going 0-4. He was thirty eight, and told me he’d been fouling off pitches he used to hit like “blue darters.” He didn’t know whether to switch to a lighter bat or choke up more. My father, who always had the answers, was totally befuddled and said, “I’m not going to bow out as a Punch and Judy hitter.”

     The next day he was traded to the San Diego Padres along with Herb Gorman. Dad was reluctant to go south because he wouldn’t be home much or be able to stay in touch with the shoemakers who bought from him, but Padres manager, Lefty O’Doul, and his coach, Jimmy Reese, urged dad to come down and play second base and work with a young shortstop prospect named Al Richter. Dad considered O’Doul a prince of a man, and Reese, a fellow Jew, talked him into playing for the Padres

     He found a small apartment near the water, in Mission Beach, not far from Lane Field where the Padres played. Mother drove my sister and I the three hours down highway 1 to Mission Beach on a weekend, and dad took me to the park, where O’Doul, a stately man, winked at me and said I could take grounders from Reese, who immediately took me under his wing and hit me grounders before the players took the field. Reese used a strange looking fungo bat with the barrel shaved flat on one side and taped. Dad said nobody in all of baseball could handle and control a fungo bat like Reese, who consistently lifted fly balls a foot from the fence and made every grounder do any trick he wanted. He had me lunging and staggering with wild bouncers, skidders and short hops.

     Dad yelled at me to stay low, stay on my toes, and adjust!

     I had to get used to a new bunch of players, and they had to get used to me. Every organization was different when it came to kids hanging around the clubhouse, and dad warned me not to rampage through the new one like I did at Gilmore, pestering players. This clubhouse was more cramped, older, moldier, smellier, and missing the intimacy and family atmosphere of Gilmore, which was a unique situation that would probably never exist at any level of baseball again. I hung out with Gorman and Salveson, whom the Padres had also picked up.

     Right off, I found a nemesis in Jackie Tobin, a lean and fleet outfielder who liked snapping his towel at my fanny and testing my toughness. “You a fighter, Meat, or a lover boy?” he sneered. He pulled my cap down over my eyes and squeezed my bicep so hard it hurt, grinning meanly. Tobin, a left handed hitter, exploded out of the batters box on grounders and picked up momentum down the line, his legs pumping like pistons as he leaned forward to hit the bag on throws to first. He was an adept bunter, always a threat to drag one down either line. He was a world class needler and agitator.

     Dad warned me, “Don’t get on the bad side of Tobin, he’s meaner than a rattlesnake and not like the guys on the Stars—he hates kids.”

     Dad’s expression was grim as a few players nodded at me, just as grim.

     “Why’s he hate kids, dad?”

     Dead serious, dad nodded toward Tobin who was fooling around at his locker across the way, and said, “Look at Tobin. If you looked like that you’d hate kids too. You’d hate everybody. You’d hate life. He’s funny looking. Look at those ears and that schnozz. Teeth full of tobacco. Tobin’s captain of the all-ugly team.”

     Every player within earshot nodded agreement.

     Dad nudged me. “Thank your lucky stars, Dell, you’re gonna be a handsome man, like your pappy, and not ugly like Tobin, and have to go through life hating everybody, and everybody hating you. Poor Tobin, he’s never had a girlfriend. He’s no lover boy.”

     Tobin, needing a shave, leered crookedly in my direction. His long, humped nose seemed to start from the top of his forehead. His ears jutted out from the sides of his long, narrow face, like an elephant’s.

     Salveson said, “Meat, go ask Tobin if he can fly away on those Dumbo ears.”

     Dad, the devil’s advocate, said, “Go ahead. Just because he’s ugly and acts mean doesn’t mean he’s tough.”

     I walked toward Tobin who was looking away. A yard or so from him I uttered, “Hey Dumbo, you’re on the all ugly team…” And before I could continue, Tobin was chasing me through the clubhouse snapping his towel, staying just far enough behind to keep me skidding and dodging among chairs and trunks and tables as players jumped out of our way.

     “Gonna get yah, MEAT!” Tobin shouted. “I HATE KIDS!”

     Lefty O’Doul, who paced the dugout during games with his hands tucked under his belt to keep his hands warm, used dad like a coach on the field. O’Doul was no taskmaster, didn’t over-manage or dress down his players unless they were young and stupid, and then he was fatherly. O’Doul preferred experienced players he could trust and leave alone. His name alone was a draw at Lane Field, for he’d been a PCL star, as well as a man who hit .398 in the big leagues and owned a .349 lifetime average—a legend.

     The Padres were the oldest team in the league, a bunch of “old cockers” according to dad. The infield, comprised of dad, Lou Stringer (who’d also come over from Hollywood and had a pretty daughter on whom I had a secret crush but, of course, couldn’t mention), Jack Graham, who’d had big PCL years as a first baseman but hit poorly in the majors, and Al Richter, all in their late thirties, except young Richter.

     Early on, the Padres played inspired, intelligent, nearly flawless baseball and led the league for almost two months. Dad, though still struggling at the plate, hit in the clutch--his trademark. The old cockers were confrontational, aggressive, under-handed cheaters hell bent on winning at any cost. Every game was a crusade, and O’Doul allowed the team to pretty much run by itself.

     Jimmy Reese was always clapping his hands and encouraging players, loved baseball players, had no aspirations to ever manage, was too nice a man to rule a bunch of ball players who saw him as a beloved icon and uncle figure. Dad claimed Reese was as fine a person who ever existed in this world. He was the first man to enter the clubhouse and the last to leave. He didn’t drive a car. Somebody on the team, Gorman, Dad, Salveson, would pick him up at his apartment and drive him to the ball park, or he took a bus. He framed pictures of ball players who’d played with and for him, and in his life there was no other alternative to baseball. He regarded every day at the ball park a great day, never complained and he was always positive and cheerful. I pumped him about Babe Ruth, his roomy on the 1931 Yankees.

     “What was he like? Well, The Babe could consume a dozen hot dogs and a dozen Cokes before a game and still hit two homers and party all night, and come right back and do the same thing the next day.” Reese, a “clean liver,” couldn’t keep up with him, was supposed to be a good influence on him, but nobody else on the team could keep up with The Babe or temper his huge appetites for fun and pleasure.

     “But what was he LIKE?”

     “He’d like you, Dell. Babe Ruth loved kids more than anybody I’ve ever known. He had a big heart. He was just a big kid who never grew up. That was the beauty of The Babe. There will never be another like him. He was a sweetheart.”

     When I asked dad about The Babe, he always said the same thing” “He wasn’t just a power hitter, he was sneaky fast in the outfield, a good base runner, a hell of a pitcher, a great instinctive ball player.”

     Dad fit in with the Padres. Gorman was his roomy on the road, but he was also fond of his doubleplay partner, Al Richter, a Maryland transplant who lived downtown in the San Diego Hotel, where a photo of Al was displayed in the big lobby window beside the front entrance. Dad didn’t think this was a wise thing for Richter.

     “Hell of a nice kid and a pretty fair shortstop,” Dad said. “But I don’t know if he has the stamina. Short’s a tough position and he already looks pooped after two months. When I played short for Beaumont in the Texas League I was leading the league in hitting half the season, but after a while the hot humid weather and the traveling and the doubleheaders wore me down, and I ended up hitting .298 after hitting around .330 most of the year. I started out the season weighing around l80 and ended up at 165.”

     “What’s that got to do with Richter’s picture in the window, dad?”

     “Well, I think that goddam picture’s getting Al too much snaff and boogair.”

     “Snaff and boo-gair? What’s that?”

     “You’ll find out some day. Richter’s got some pretty hot snappers hanging around in the hotel.”

     “Snappers…? What are snappers, dad?”

     “You’ll find out. You gotta watch out for the hot snappers. They’re the ones make you crazy, get you in a slump. Richter looks like he’s gassed half the time. I’ve seen the strongest guys in baseball fade in August because of snaff and boogair and the hot snappers.”

     “What about you, dad? Do you stay away from the snaff and boogair and hot snappers? That why you been in a slump?”

     “Dell, I’ve played every inning of every game for two months and I’m thirty eight years old, and I’m not half as tired as Richter. What does that tell you?”

     “You aint been messin’ with the snaff and boogair and hot snappers.”

    Dad nodded at me, grinning.

     “What about Gorman and Salveson and Tobin and Earl Rapp and Graham and Stringer, dad? Do they stay away from the hot snappers?”

     “Uh…that’s enough on that subject. Let’s go play pepper.”

     The team started fading, and then went down quick, dying. And sure enough, the bachelor Richter, a lean man with a crew-cut and handsome mug, looked sluggish in the field and his bat went to sleep. Dad, who’d started to regain his batting form during the Padre rise to first place, was out of gas too, his bat in a worse tailspin than Richter’s. The clubhouse went from a happy place full of humorous horseplay to a glum collection of players cursing, punching lockers, kicking over chairs and tossing gloves after each loss.

     To give the Padres a boost, Long Tom Alston, a pheenom from the next level of the minors, was called up. Tall, black, a left-handed power hitting firstbaseman, he joined three negro members of the team: a burly outfielder named John Davis, the stout starting catcher Lenny Summers, and old Theolic Smith, a crafty pitcher dad knew from his days playing in Mexico and Cuba. Those three men kept to themselves like a separate enclave in the clubhouse, and took the young raw Alston , who was from the deep South, under their wing. Alston towered over his new team mates and was quiet, averting his eyes when I stared trying to figure out what to say to him. The local sportswriters had written him up as a hopeful savior, but dad had already expressed doubts to Gorman and Salveson.

     “The kid’s got a pretty swing in the batting cage. He’s a big man with a hitch and he’s gonna have a hell of a time hitting the high inside fastball, and he won’t be able to hit big league lefties with a paddle. I think he’s gonna end up one of these batting practice hitters.”

     Sure enough, Alston was vulnerable at the plate, failing to give the team the boost it badly needed

     Dad was disappointed in Alston. “I tried to talk to him about his hitch. He’s strong enough he can shorten up his swing and still hit with power. But he won’t listen. I guess he doesn’t trust me, and I guess I can’t blame him. God knows I want him to get going so we can win some goddam games and stop stinking it up. The kid’s not ready for this caliber of ball. He’s got a great pair of wrists, but what is he? Twenty? Twenty one? He’s not ready. A firstbaseman HAS to hit, and he won’t cut it.”

     Dad was one of the few white players to go out of his way to be friendly with black players on the team. The usually hard kidding didn’t involve the black players because of obvious reasons. Dad seemed comfortable around them, probably because when he played in Cuba he was the only white player on the team, and his team mates had been warm and friendly, brought him and mother into their homes and taught him the language. Maybe he liked blacks because he was a Jew and understood what it’s like to be hated and treated like shit for no good reason. He claimed black ball players got a screwing. He’d played against them all when he and Lou Boudreau were standouts at the University of Illinois and barnstormed for side money against Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige and all the great black players of that era. Dad claimed there were a lot of horseshit players who would’ve been squeezed out of the big leagues if black players had been allowed to play.

     The Padres ended up slumping to fifth place. When the season ended on that dismal note, dad and mom had a serious discussion on whether he should continue his career “hurting all over” and with a .227 average, a humiliating embarrassment and by far the lowest average of his career—he, a man who had been the gem of the Detroit minor league system and in 1938 had led the world in hitting with one of the highest averages in baseball history.

     The last two months of the season Les Cook, the trainer known as “Cookie,” a bit of a grump, spent half hours before and after games trying to keep dad whole. Dad wanted to hang on and atone for his rotten second half of the season—“a Goddam disgrace.” He believed he could still produce, if he could stay healthy. And he did need the money to get his business going. And O’Doul wanted him back.

     But watching him play, and go downhill, and listening to the fans boo him and yell at him to hang it up, cut me to the core.

 

                                  THE BALL PLAYER’S SON

1951

     My mother felt I was becoming too “one-dimensional” and in an effort to see if I might be interested in things other than baseball, attempted to interest me in a musical instrument. After two lessons I was kicked out of accordion school. I suffered through the Cub Scouts, wanting no part of going to the mountains where there was no baseball. Next was Hebrew school, where I was again kicked out by an outraged rabbi who informed my parents I behaved like an anti-Semite when I pummeled studious fellow Jewish kids; they decided to put off Hebrew school indefinitely.

     Mother was also alarmed at my profanity, my swaggering about, my teasing her when dad was gone on the road’; once chasing her around with a dead mouse. She slapped me for the first time and cried when I used the word ‘nigger;’ she washed my mouth out with soap, explained to me the ugly sin of using that word, and made me promise to never use it again. She related the history of our country treating black people as slaves, of humiliating them, stealing their pride and spirit.

     Mother worried that I wouldn’t be well-rounded. Already a teacher had recommended I see a child psychiatrist because I disrupted class and craved attention. I was too aggressively competitive. She took me to a lady shrink who had me draw whatever came into my mind. So I drew two baseball players, one a giant of a man, the other a small child.

     My mother and father quarreled over his influence on me. She tried to convince him to keep me out of the clubhouse and away from the crude ball players. But dad insisted I was just like him when he was a kid and he’d turned out okay, and besides, dad insisted, taking me away from the ballpark would break my heart.

     I got my way. I’d sort of become the Hollywood Stars mascot. Over the winter dad hired Handley, a carpenter, Maltzburger, an electrician, and Sandlock, a roofer, to build a den connecting the garage to the master bedroom of our house in Compton. All three of those men had their individual trades but could do anything when it came to building a home and, since dad was starting a small shoe findings supply business in the garage, they were all occupied, though dad was not allowed to help build the den because he was so inept they referred to him as ‘Six Fingers McFiddick’ and sent him on runs to the hardware store and lumber yard with a prepared list so he wouldn’t come back with the wrong supplies.

     Dad claimed no team he’d ever played for was as close as the Stars. They held team parties. (Though most of the players had kids, I seemed to be the only one obsessed with baseball and adapted to the clubhouse.) Big John Lindell had the biggest, best parties. And the one dad had in the newly built den during spring training was a rousing success, with me swirling about like a fondly petted dog..

     Lindell was the size of a coke machine and as irresistibly engaging as he was big. “Hey, Little Meat, come on over here and say hello to Big John.” It was almost as if I’d hurt his feelings if I didn’t come over. He scooped me up in hands you could sit in, held me eye level and chucked my chin. His clutch hitting and .500 average in the 1947 World Series for the Yankees was a feat nobody on the club had come close to achieving. Still, dad reminded me that Lindell had his best years during the war “while the best players were away fighting for their country.” Lindell walked, talked and carried himself with a swagger. A similar swagger illuminated all professional baseball players as special beings placed on pedestals to be admired and paid homage to, like famous generals and statesmen. Yet among them was an undeclared pecking order, and since Lindell was such a big man with a huge outgoing personality and he’d had those big years with the gloried Yankees and was a World Series hero among that exalted realm, he was on a loftier level, like a war hero. A magnificent athlete, Lindell was in the process of working his way back into the big leagues as a pitcher after falling on hard times as an offensive weapon with the Yanks. He was hoping to catch on with the Pittsburg Pirates, possibly the worst team in all of the big leagues, a team so bad that dad said “they’d be lucky to finish in the middle of the pack in the Pacific Coast League. They got a bunch of raw bonus kids and war time players still hanging on after stinking up the field.”

     Lindell thrived in the Hollywood atmosphere, doing commercials, winning a lot of games and becoming a draw. The Stars and Angels were the biggest draws in town, bigger than the LA Rams football team. Gilmore Field games were attended by show business names like Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, and starlets like Kim Novak and Anne Bancroft, all of them sitting in box seats above the Stars dugout

     So if the team had a star it was John Lindell. Big John was so well known that his son, a few years older than me and, like his dad, a gifted athlete, became the target of mean-spirited antagonists at Little League games. His mother, who sat with my mother at games, told mom that kids and their parents jeered Lindell’s son, forever comparing him  to his father in a demeaning way. They were jealous when he dominated games, and gloated when he screwed up. Finally, at thirteen, Lindell’s son quit playing schoolboy baseball because he no longer wished to endure the abuse, and his mom warned my mom I would soon face the same treatment. Worse than the kids were the parents, whose behavior toward young Lindell was so cruel and vicious that he could not force himself to step onto a ball field. Mother said Lindell, like my dad, wanted his son to experience the game that had been his life and his love; and his son being deprived of a game Lindell loved so much that he hung on in the minor leagues after his talent as a big leaguer had deteriorated, had to be a crushing blow. Big John seemed to love every aspect of the game: playing, batting practice betting and kidding, clubhouse camaraderie, road trips, signing autographs, giving interviews to writers, the adulation and perks—and now his immensely talented son was so disillusioned that the great national pastime had turned sour in his mouth.

     If Lindell, a thoroughly positive and resilient presence who had withstood the highs and hard knocks of the game was a “big fish in a small pond”, my dad was an even smaller fish. Dad sometimes had his picture in the paper, his name in the headlines of the sports page. For a pittance he did a newspaper ad for vitamins. He was accorded a long feature article in the Long Beach Telegram hailing his career exploits. There were pictures of dad in his Detroit uniform and of our family sitting on the davenport while dad stood above us wielding his silver bat—the caption below stating dad wad giving me “pointers on hitting.”

     Everybody in our neighborhood and beyond knew about the article, and already several kids had told me in nasty terms that I would never be as good a ball player as my dad, and was a bum. Mother was already leery of my playing Little League.

     “I don’t want our son ending up like John Lindell’s son, Murray.”

     “Every kid’s different, Rose. Dell’s not Lindell’s kid. Maybe John’s kid doesn’t love baseball like Dell does. I loved the game so much nothing could keep me off the field. He’s the same way. He lives, eats and breathes baseball. He goes to bed with his glove. He’s already playing with kids bigger and older and holding his own. He wants to test himself. He’s a competitor. He’s not like your family. He’s like me. He’s gonna play ball whether you like it or not.”

                                       +                  +                    +

Big Moe

BIG MOE

“I was eight, I think, maybe younger, the first time I passed a sandlot and saw a bunch of kids playing baseball. I watched those kids, some my age, others older, kids of all ages, and I thought: I can play that game. I can hit that ball.”

Hitting the ball, that’s what hooked me. I didn’t have a glove. The kids had little gardener-type gloves, flimsy leather or cloth, the fingers separate, no webbing, but I went out there with no glove and caught balls bare handed. Right off, a bigger kid maybe fifteen or sixteen, an Irish kid named Kelly, smiled at me and told me I had ‘good hands’. He let me use his glove to shag in the outfield. I watched the other players. I knew I could do what they were doing. Some of them could hit the ball, others struggled. I saw where they struggled. They swung too hard or swung up on the ball or they looked away when they swung and missed, or stepped away from the ball because they were a little scared, or they held the bat wrong with their hands, didn’t have their knuckles lined up right, and Kelly, he showed me how to line up my knuckles so that my top knuckles lined up with the top knuckles of my other hand, though later, when I’d developed a philosophy of  hitting, I often lined up the knuckles of both hands for better bat control, especially with two strikes on me.”

                                                                       *

“The first time I swung a bat I cracked a line drive. Just happened. But everybody took notice. Kelly watched me hit a few more, and said: You’re a natural, kid, you got good whip in your swing. You got wrist action. You’re gonna be a ball player. You’re gonna play on my team, kid.”

                                                                       *

“I rode my bike into another neighborhood to get away from the goddam Polocks and Germans, and I saw right away that if I could play baseball, well, I’d be accepted anywhere. I had a free pass. Here I was, from another neighborhood clear across town, in somebody else’s territory during a time in Chicago when people seldom strayed from their home turf, and because it looked like I might become a decent ball player, this kid

Kelly, who ran the neighborhood, wanted me back, took me under his wing. He told me to get myself a glove, and that’s what I did. I found a goddam gardener’s glove to keep the ball from stinging my hand. When you start out with a glove like that you have to make sure to watch every ball into your hand and use your free hand to corral the ball, and it ends up making you a better fielder down the line when it’s time to get a bigger, better glove.”

                                                                       *

“Now, everything changed in my life. Baseball took precedent over everything, including school. All I thought about in school was getting on my bike and sailing the few miles to the sandlot to play baseball with the Irish kids. They didn’t care if I was a Jew or a monkey with a tail, as long as I could play ball. I was more than welcome. Was somebody to respect and be treated like an equal. Hell, I could run and I could throw, talents you can’t learn. Even at a young age I could outrun most of the kids, and I realized also that I had exceptional reflexes and reactions to balls hit and pitched to me. When summer came, I played morning, noon and evening, came home late for dinner every night and received a beating from my father, who warned me he’d beat me with the strap every time I was late, but already I loved baseball so much that getting to play an extra hour was worth the beating. My mother, she didn’t like the strappings every night. But my father was the ruler of the household, and though they fought over these nightly strappings, he got his way.”

                                                           *          *          *

The Ball Player's Son

1950

“Make sure to wear yer cup, Meat. Gotta protect the family jewels. Yer dallywhacker’s the future of the Franklin clan.”

 “You a lover boy, Meat? Got a girl friend?”

“I aint got no girl friend.”

“Heard you like to kiss the girls, Meat.”

“Bullshit. I aint kissin no girls.”

“You will, Meat. Hey, kid, you a lover or a fighter?”

“A fighter.”

I sat at Dad’s stall. The Hollywood clubhouse was spacious, clean, bright, as good as most big league clubhouses according to Dad. There was enough room for two of us, but I preferred sitting on his traveling trunk working on his equipment while he signed autographs or played cards. There was a table where players pulled up folding chairs to play cards or sign baseballs, bats, or black-and-white glossies of themselves. Everything in the clubhouse was organized by Nobe, who was indispensible to the players, seeing to their every need. Nobe treated everyone with kindness and respect.

“How you, little Franklin? You want soda pop?”

Just off the manager’s office was a big red Coca Cola cooler with beer and soft drinks chilling on blocks of ice. Nothing was free. On the wall above the cooler was a check list of the entire roster of players and coaches, and every time one of them pulled a bottle out he checked his name. If I shoved my little paw into the painfully icy water to withdraw a Nehi or Delaware Punch, I checked Dad’s name. Nobe took note, smiling.

“You smart like you daddy.”

Dad was one of the few college graduates on a team where most of his team mates began their careers ahead of him by signing before or after high school and kicking around in the minors, while Dad starred at the University of Illinois. His first real year of pro ball was at Beckley, West Virginia in the Mountain State League, where he hit .439, the highest average that year in all of organized baseball, earning him a silver bat exactly like the two given to the players with the highest averages in the American and National leagues. So Dad was a pheenom, quickly moving up to Beaumont in the Texas League, Detroit’s toughest proving ground for the big team, where he first appeared in 1941,already twenty-seven years old.

“Hey Moe, the kid’s a phee-nom!” That was dark, burly Jim Baxes, ‘The Greek’, an affable jokester and member of the pepper crew, one of my favorites, along with Gene Handley who never teased me with the ‘lover boy’ tag or called me ‘Little Moe’. Gene referred to me as ‘Digger O’Dell’, a handle I liked.

A few stalls down from Dad was Jack Salveson, who, according to Dad, was a legendary drinker with few rivals in the game. “Rudy York and Jimmie Foxx, they couldput it away too. When I played at Little Rock we had a catcher named Tony Rensa. After every game he went to a little bar downtown and drank close to a case of beer, then went to his room and went to bed and showed up the next day at the park bright and bushy- tailed like he hadn’t had a drop.”

When thick, bucket-assed and balding Salveson, cap low over his eyes, pitched, sweat popped from his face and streamed down his neck in gouts. No matter how cold the evening, his uniform was soaked through by the middle innings. He changed sweatshirts at least once a game . If it was a warm afternoon and Salveson pitched, he was a brutal,almost pitiful sight as he lugged around through the late innings huffing and puffing. Salveson had an elaborate yet economical windup, throwing hard sinking stuff hittersbeat into the ground; a control pitcher, he often went nine innings on less than a hundred pitches. His mechanics put very little stress on his arm. He’d done time in the big leagues and played for nearly twenty years, he was a mild and gentle man who drove to the ballpark with Dad and was one of Dad’s closest friends on the team.

After each game he pitched, Salveson sat at his stall in only his jockstrap and drank six beers in about thirty minutes. The first beer went down in one amazing swig. After the sixth beer he’d trudge to the shower where he remained under the steaming hot pulverizing spray for a very long time, exposing his right shoulder to the water, returningto his stall red as a lobster, towel around his waist, forehead dripping sweat. Nobe would hand him another cold one. Then he and Dad and Gorman and Sandlock and Handley would gather and rehash every single play of the game. They drank beer. These were pre-war ball players, meat and potato eaters, older than most of their team mates, and this was their tradition: get to the park early and discuss the opposition, play cards, joke around, and stay after the game for the rehash. They were as reluctant to leave the clubhouse as they were eager to enter it, and my mother claimed that those men were the happiest in all of America and wouldn’t trade places with anyone.

I didn’t say much, just watched, listened, steeping myself in their every move and jargon until I was a cloned amalgam of every ritual, whim and habit a pro picks up in his career. Dad’s habitual ritual at the plate became my ritual exactly.

“Wearin your cup out there, Digger O’Dell?”

All pitchers and infielders wore protective steel cups in their jockstraps. I quit wearing mine because it jabbed and chafed my thighs, but then one day a pepper grounder took a wild hop and popped me in the groin and I went down writhing in pain, and merciless ball players had a big time riding me for being too dumb to wear my cup. When I explained to Dad that the steel cup cut my thighs, he bought me a plastic cup cushioned on the edges with foam rubber, a “pussy cup.”

“You don’t listen to those guys, you plenny tough,” Nobe told me. And Frankie Jacobs, the trainer, nodded. Without Frankie Jacobs the Stars would have had trouble fielding a team. Dad always tipped he and Nobe a sawbuck, unlike most of the players who came from parts of the country where money was scarce and food was fought over and tipping was alien to them. Dad spent a lot of time on the rubbing table while the

diminutive Jacobs kneaded his muscles, joints and limbs. Being in the war, and playing so many years, his shoulders and knees were rickety. Often his knee swelled to the size of cantaloupe. He pulled muscles, and he played, Jacobs wrapping the discolored areas tightly with Ace bandages. Most unsightly were Dad’s variety of ‘strawberries’ from hard slides; along his hips, buttocks and upper thighs were ugly abrasions, red jelly welts scabbed over and torn open again each time he slid. Frankie treated them with ointments to keep down the hot pain, covering them with compresses held tightly with white adhesive tape, and he played, and after each game Frankie ripped the compresses off his hairy skin and Dad never made a face. Both men winked at me, sharing secret pride in the endurance of pain.

“Gotta be tough if you wanna be a ball player, kid,” Jacobs said. “Your dad, he’s as tough as they come. You grow up half as tough as Big Moe, you’ll be a helluva man and a ball player.”

Dad laughed. “Dell’s tough, Frankie. He eats nails for breakfast.”

I managed to worm my way into the dugout during games, claiming I couldn’t stand sitting with a bunch of “yakkety women.” Management felt I was too young to be a bat boy, but as long as I behaved myself I could sit in the dugout. There, I felt part of the action. I wore my Hollywood Stars uniform. After the game I showered with the players. They all had individual methods of lathering up and toweling off. They spent a lot of time primping. They whipped soap brushes into cups of lather and carefully applied it, then scraped their faces smooth with Gillette blades advertised on TV boxing matches. They smacked on aftershave lotion and cologne, dabbed on deodorant, tweezed out nose hairs. They sprinkled chests, crotches and feet with baby powder – brushed, flossed and picked their teeth and inspected themselves in fogged mirrors. They were natty dressers and experts at folding neckties. Each player seemed to regard himself as cock of the walk, and especially Dad, who was once voted by the local press as the ‘best dressed player in town’.

Gorman was a persnickety groomer. He was Dad’s young Jewish protégé and roomie on the road (they wore bow ties), and engaged to a knockout named Rosalie, who sat with my mother and the other wives during games. Gorman always invited me to sit with him at his stall. He suffered joint stiffness and smelled strongly of liniment, and was forever advising me.

“You can be a fighter and a lover, Dell, just like your dad.”

“Dad’s no lover boy.

“Sure he is. Like me. You will be too when you meet the right gal.” He watched me bone the bat. “Push down hard on the meat of the barrel, Dell. See where the wood is loose and dented? That’s from hitting the ball solid.” Gorman had two good years in a row, hitting over .300, driving in 100 runs. “We call that the sweet spot. You know you’re getting good when you keep hitting the sweet spot. I’ve gone two months without breaking that lucky bat.” He rapped his knuckles on the side of the wooden stall. “That’s why I choke up an inch or two, so I won’t bust the handle. When I finally break this bat I’ll nail and tape it up and give it to you cuz you’ve done such a fine job of boning it. Okay, that’s enough. Let’s go to work on my glove.”

Like Dad and most players, Herb Gorman used a broken-in, flabby glove during games, and broke in a backup glove during practice. Dad always shoved an old ball into a new glove, bound it with twine and tossed it into a tub of water and let it soak a couple days to soften the leather and take the stiffness out of it. Then he rubbed it with a lot of neatsfoot oil. I’d become an expert oiler of gloves and boner of bats, and Nobe was pleased that certain players allowed me to do these jobs from time to time, though I was not allowed to touch anybody’s gear unless asked to, while Nobe was free to do what he wanted.

On the way from the clubhouse to the dugout, I walked with the players up the wood slatted ramp below the stands in the darkness latticed with cracks of light slicing through dust motes sifting down from myriad cobwebs, rotting timbers, stale beer accumulation, dead rodents, decades of trapped cigarette smoke, leaky urinals, human vapors, and all of it combining to produce the familiar stench of a ball park as we clack clacked toward the glimmer of daylight that was the gateway to the emerald green field shimmering beneath the bright blue sky.

I took my usual spot toward the far end of the dugout, away from the hive of activity up front by the drinking fountain and bat rack, where Fred Haney and his coaches Jo Jo White and Big John Fitzpatrick entered a world in which their faces turned into stern, beady-eyed masks as they delivered signs, whispered to each other, conferred with players, yelled at umpires and opposing players, chewed, spit, cussed, scratched, kicked at debris on the filthy floor or clapped their hands in approval of a play well done. Bench players joined the intense transformation as soon as the first ball was pitched, composing a chorus of amusing, and sometimes lethal, bench jockeying.

“Hey pitch, what snake pit were you in last night? We can smell you from here! Yer eyes look like piss holes in the snow!”

Nothing encouraged a bench jockey more than a player visibly distracted by relentless carping. “Hey Rabbit Ears! Got a red ass?”

Among these men, the desire to win bordered on psychotic. Even when competing at cards in the clubhouse, they kicked over chairs when they lost. If the ball club was on a losing streak they were all sour, glum and nearly unapproachable, and I stayed away. On the bench, Dad warned me to look, listen, learn and keep my mouth shut. I was a guest. Though it was not easy to sit still and be quiet.

I couldn’t help but observe differences between infielders, outfielders and especially pitchers. Dad said pitchers were not normal and the bullpen was a world in itself. Pitchers were his enemy, always had to be the center of attention during games, only worked four or five days, and were the worst cheaters.

“If you are a pitcher’s best friend and get traded to another team and have to face him, you are the first player he will throw at. Most deplorable, they are trying to drive you out of the game and starve your family.”

“Even Salveson?”

Dad nodded gravely. “Let me tell yah something, Dell: Every single man who puts on the uniform is out for himself. They want your job. You can be friends, and I’ve made some good friends in this game, but we’re all fighting to survive, just like everybody else in this country, only we’re worse.”

On this Saturday afternoon both teams were on each other. The air was charged with the tension of an impending brawl. Dad and his team mates held old grudges against certain players. Everybody was on the top steps of both dugouts, hollering, ready to surge out onto the field. Finally the umpires, whom the Hollywood players had been needling and calling “Horseshit” and “Blind” throughout the game, warned both benches to put a stop to it.

This only provoked the players on the Stars to become personal and vicious in their abuse. Even a squirt like myself could see that the umpires were actually human – and turning red in the neck and gritting their teeth at the storm of insults coming from the dugout. Most of the vileness was directed at a blocky-jawed sourpuss first base ump whose intelligence and manhood were brutally savaged as, evidently, he’d called a horseshit game behind the plate the night before. Finally he couldn’t take any more and moved several steps toward our dugout, pointed a warning finger and issued a retaliatory salvo at the bench – which only served to ignite the wronged players, who now leaped at the dugout screen like a pack of wild dogs, cursing and insulting the ump with caustic profanity.

“Who the fuck paid YOU off last night? You goddam blind Tom!” roared my father.

The ump immediately ejected him with a thumb.

Dad, whom this umpire called out last night on a low outside pitch that Dad insisted was a foot off the plate, exploded from the dugout ripping his cap off and headed for the umpire at full speed and miraculously stopped inches from the ump’s face and, jaw to jaw, his head bobbing so close to the ump’s I feared they’d butt heads, Dad cursed him with such startling ferocity and profanity I found myself recoiling. The ump turned away, but Dad was on him, implacable. They moved in a comical circle. And then Haney was on the field wedging himself between Dad and the ump. The Star crowd booed lustily. Haney blew a gasket and tossed his cap and kicked it and went nose to nose with the sourpuss. Then Fitzpatrick was between Haney and Dad, and the ump tossed both of them. But the rhubarb went on and on, as the other umpires came over to stand between the players and the sourpuss, and finally the three ousted penitents strode to the dugout and hurled upon the field catcher’s masks, shin guards, chest protectors, bats, balls, towels – and the crowd booed and hissed while the opposing team stood calmly on the top steps of their dugout, very amused, some laughing, for they had dominated the series and were eight runs up.

When order was restored, Dad, Haney and Fitzpatrick retired to the clubhouse, and a squeaky voice chirped at the umpire who stood arms folded behind first base: “Goddam blind Tom, open your eyes you fuckin red ass!” Gorman and Sandlock quickly stashed me between them.

The umpire marched to the dugout and peered in. “What the hell was THAT? A bird?” His tiny eyes roved down the bench in a severe squint. Nobody said a word. Then he spotted me. “Who’s that goddam kid?”

“It’s Franklin’s kid,” Sandlock piped. He took my cap off and placed it on his head like a beanie and pulled his own cap down over my ears. “He’s a criminal – like his old man.”

“Get him OUT-A here! No kids in the dugout!” He jerked his thumb at me, “You. Out of the goddam game. Get that little mouse in the clubhouse, or so help me God I’ll run the whole goddam team.”

The players hustled me out of the dugout and down into the clubhouse, all of them laughing and roughing my head. When Dad found out I’d been kicked out of the dugout for cussing the umpire, he growled and told me I was finished sitting in the dugout, and if I continued to be a pain in the ass he’d take away my clubhouse privileges and make me sit with the women, in the stands. He was still tongue-lashing me when one of the

pitchers, stocky Pete Mondorf, a quiet ex-football player, walked by and patted my ass. “Little Meat,” he said, “Don’t take any guff from those umps.”

Later, John Lindell exclaimed, “Kill the umpire, Meat!”

And Handley: “There he is, Digger O’Dell, chip off the old block.”       

                                                         *          *          *

THE BALL PLAYER'S SON

A Baseball Memoir ~ by Dell Franklin

Summer, 1949

Gilmore Field, Hollywood, California. I sit with my mother a few feet behind the screen and the field and we are surrounded by the wives and children of my father’s team mates – the Gene Handley’s, the Mike Sandlock’s, Chuck Stevens’, Jack Salveson’s. We are an intimate island unto ourselves, an extension of the royalty spotlighted on the lush green field below. Murray ‘Big Moe’ Franklin, my dad, walks up to the plate and spreads his legs, digging his rear right foot into the dirt. He pumps his bat twice before settling it on his right shoulder, staring at the pitcher. There is a sense he is relaxed and sure of himself, and yet he is coiled when the pitcher goes into his elongated windup. He lifts his front foot slightly and steps forward as the pitcher unleashes a ball that spits past Dad with a violent hiss that makes me cringe and crashes into the catcher’s mitt and the umpire raises his right hand and bellows “STEE-RIKE!” I hear voices from the stands – 

“Hey Franklin you take the good ones and swing at the bad ones! No wonder you aint hittin yer weight! YER A BUM!”

“You aint got a hit in two weeks FRANKLIN – YER WASHED UP!”     

That is my first memory of baseball, and it is as if that was my first day alive in this world. Everything bright technicolor as if I’d just hatched from an egg or emerged from a cocoon. I knew nothing else at the time. I did not understand that my Dad was in the worst slump of his career and local sports writers were excoriating his performance as well as the Hollywood Stars front office and manager Fred Haney, who’d gone out on a limb to sign him to the roster for a stretch drive in chase of a pennant. Dad had been injured, and suspended from baseball for a year for jumping the big leagues in 1946 to play in Mexico. He’d been just recently reinstated and, at thirty-five he was not and would never be the ball player he’d been before the war.

Dad wasn’t one to stay in shape when out of the game. Trying to make ends meet after moving into a tract home in Compton, he worked sparingly for coolie wages at JC Penny’s in the sporting goods department and his college degree in Physical Education allowed him to substitute coach in grammar schools, but our family survived mainly on what was left of his Mexican League bonus, most of which went to the house.

In time, Dad took me to the clubhouse, a private sanctum suspicious of outsiders, where acceptance had to be earned, even by me, a seven year old. Grown men amble about naked or half naked, revealing pale legs and torsos, only the necks, forearms and faces baked dark by the sun. They were not heavily muscled, though strong in the arms and legs – men who moved with a graceful assurance uncommon among men on the streets. Smells of liniment and logangesic balm wafted from the cramped trainer’s room and neutralized individual odors of sweat, flatus and sour feet.

I came to feel a part of the clubhouse. Dad gave me an old glove and the clubhouse attendant, a Japanese named Nobe, restrung it with rawhide, oiled and placed it on my hand, a large swatch of flimsy leather into which I worked my tiny fingers, flapping the glove like a duck flapping its wings, then pounding the pocket with my fist and then a beat up practice ball. Soon I was bouncing the ball on the concrete floor and catching it, then firing it against the cement walls, snaring bouncers as players dodged out of the way, until Dad ordered me to quit tearing up the goddam clubhouse and scaring the hell out of everybody.

Johnny O’Neill and Gene Handley sort of adopted me and gave me the nickname of ‘Little Meat’. They tossed balls across the clubhouse floor for me – and I was a fetching dog pouncing for his master, imaginary tail wagging.

The oldest player on the Stars, a rotund relief pitcher with limitless patience and a passel of kids, the beloved ‘Kewpie’ Barrett, taught me to tie my shoe laces, an assignment handed him by my father after his own effort failed. “Yore daddy makes you a little nervous,” he said. Barrett spent a batting practice in the dugout making me tie my laces over and over until I got it down. When I took time off from that exercise it was for a trek to the drinking fountain, which proved an obstacle course of players spurting tobacco juice at me. They sat on the bench working on large chaws, aiming and arching their salvos of dirty brown spit, building puddles beneath them on the cement floor littered with Beechnut wrappers, gum wrappers, wadded gum, regular spit, cigarette butts, clods of red clay, old line-up cards, pages from the Sporting News…

“Hey Meat, wanna plugga tobacky? Grow hair on yer chest.”

Dad warned me that if I chewed tobacco my teeth would fall out and I’d be ugly like the tobacco chewers on the Stars. He flashed his pearly whites in a smug grin and showed me his pack of Spearmint. “Keeps the mouth clean and wet.”

“Now ya can kiss the girls like a lover boy, Little Meat,” a player goaded.

When the stars donned shorty uniforms, Dad had the club make me one. He showed me how to roll my long sanitary socks to keep them from slipping to my ankles (which looks bush), without using a garter, which Dad claimed cuts off circulation in your feet. Over and over Dad rolled his own sanitaries into his stirrups and then did the same for me. I had skinny legs, and when I rolled my own socks they immediately drooped to my ankles. Dad grew impatient with my ineptitude; and finally Gorman slipped me heavy rubber bands when Dad wasn’t looking.

After weeks of begging Dad to coax management into allowing me onto the field during batting practice, Haney agreed, providing I stayed deep in center field with infielders Handley, O’Neill, Buddy Hicks, Jim Baxes, and Dad. Here they played pepper, which involved one man hitting the ball back to team mates who stood perhaps ten yards away, fielding each ball they tossed to the hitter, who placed the ball firmly, going

from player to player. Each player got to hit – all exercising precise control of the bat. The fielding and throwing were of a particular rhythm that picked up speed and acrobatic flourish as the game gained momentum. They were doggedly competitive, bantering, goading, gambling for sodas and beers. From time to time, to break up the magical domination of an exceptionally adept hitter, they lobbed a ball wide or zoomed it low, and the hitter was always prepared. They were like magician jugglers. Flipping balls behind their backs with uncanny accuracy. Faking throws. Handing off. They laughed and joshed and spat, and while doing these things they groomed me to field, and only field, instructing me to stay low and keep on the balls of my feet and make sure my ass was down, glove open and out in front, throwing hand perched above the glove in case I needed to bare-hand a bad hop or a boot. At first they slapped me soft grounders and made a fuss over my snares. But soon they recognized my intensity and hit balls harder, putting a little spin on them, and then it became a challenge for me to flag down every ball, wanting more and more.

One day Dad instructed me to choke up on a smaller bat and hit pepper. “Don’t try and place the ball like we do. Just watch the ball into your bat and meet it, like a bunt, but hit it a little harder than a bunt.” His team mates encouraged me. So I stood against the fence and eagle-eyed each ball lobbed to me and met it with the barrel and heard the clean sweet knock and watched the ball jump in a straight line or bounce in front of the fielders who snatched the ball and showed it to me before flipping it overhand on a slow arc so I could adjust and knock it back. I grew more confidant with each pitch. They were elated with my progress, my father beaming. I became more and more adept at the bat, now trying to place each pitch to a new player, going down the line just like my mentors, who seemed to be accepting me unconditionally into their established domain.

Walking off the field after pepper, Dad placed his arm around me as we approached the dugout, which was mobbed by kids hanging over nearby railings wielding fifteen-cent scorecards for autographs. Their eyes suddenly switched to me, hawk-like, curious, unforgiving. Dad and my mentors signed the kids’ cards, asking them if they wanted to be ball players when they grew up, patting their heads fondly when they exclaimed that they did. Then the players headed for the batting cage or their positions on the field, and I found myself eye to eye with the knothole kids. A hot sinking feeling flashed through my stomach. I nodded at them. None of them nodded back.

“Who’s that?” one kid grumbled, eyes black agates.

“Aint he cute in his little shorties.”

“You a sissy boy?”

“He aint no ball player.”

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