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)

The Ball Player's Son

                                          FACING LEFTY GROVE

BIG MOE

     It was common knowledge Lefty Grove was the meanest man in baseball. Grove’s own team mates feared him, because if you booted one and cost him a game, or a shutout, he’d give you a look that would kill, and there were those who said Grove hated to lose even more than he liked to win. He was the best pitcher in baseball for nearly ten years, winning 30 games one year and leading the league in strikeouts and everything else year in and year out, a “stopper” who ended up winning 300 games and was an easy Hall of Famer.

     Though Grove was known for threatening team mates when they cost him a game or even a run, if you made a big play for him or got a big hit in a tight game, he’d give you a nod of approval, and that little nod meant more than all this hugging and kissing you see with these modern ball players. And if you were his team mate and somebody on the other team took liberties with your health, Grove was the first to retaliate, and word was—“nobody messed with Grove.”

     The first time I faced him as a rookie in an exhibition game, Grove was an old man, around 40. He had snow-white hair, had put on weight. The Red Sox were using him mostly as a spot starter and reliever. He no longer threw hard enough to scare people, but still, he had that aura, a big vulture, and he awed you. He acted like he owned the field, owned the game, and you were some interloper, and everything he did on the mound was effortless grace, like Williams hitting. A legend.

     My team mate, Schoolboy Rowe, a pitcher, told me Grove’d been washed up for years and couldn’t get off the mound any more. “Get yourself a hit,” he told me. “Drag a bunt.”

     Jim Tabor was at third, and he was slow as an ice wagon, and Jimmy Foxx was at first, looking ragged from another hangover. So I stepped in there. Lefty glared in, looking bigger than I imagined. He threw me a fastball and I dragged it down the third base line and ran like a bat out of hell down the line. As I crossed first base, Foxx never made a move toward the bag. He stood there, watching me fly past. When I got back to the bag there was a hush on the field and in the stadium. Our first base coach wouldn’t look at me. Foxx sidled up, arms folded, stinking like a distillery, with those big arms, biggest in baseball. He talked to me out of the side of his mouth.

     “Jesus, kid, what the hell you doing?”

     Over at third, Tabor stood near the bag, the ball sitting untouched between home and the bag, a perfect bunt. He was staring at me, too. “Nobody bunts Grove, kid,” Foxx told me. “It ain’t done.”

     Now I had to look at Grove. He was halfway between the mound and first, scowling right through me. He growled and turned around and took the ball from Tabor, who looked at me and shook his head, as if to say, “Boy is that stupid ass in for it.” All the guys in our dugout were having a big time falling all over each other, and the guys in the Boston dugout were quiet and grim, like they were waiting for somebody to stick my head in the chopping block.

     “You’re hitting a thousand against Grove, Franklin,” Dizzy Trout yelled from our dugout. He and Rowe jostled each other.

     I kep my head down, took a small lead, while Foxx toed the bag and smacked his glove. “Lefty don’t forget,” he said. “Better hope he’s gone next time you’re up, kid.”

     Sure enough they left him in there and I came up again. Lefty’s glaring at me when I stepped into the box. I played it meek, knowing I was going to get knocked down and deserved it for being dumb and listening to guys like Rowe and Trout, goddam pitchers. So I braced myself to take one on the backside and Grove floated a slow curve down the middle. Strike one. Well, he’ll get me now, I thought, he’s setting me up

     “Hey bush!” somebody yelled from the Boston dugout. “Drag another bunt!”

     I got ready to duck again and he floated I another slow curve down the middle. Strike two. I got out of the box, stared out at Grove. To hell with him, I thought. I don’t give a damn what he does, I’m hitting. Next pitch he comes in tight with a fastball and I whack it off the fence in left and pull into second with a double. I stand there, proud as a peacock, and Lefty’s got the ball back. He steps off the mound and gives me a tiny nod, no smile.

     “Thattaway to swing that bat, kid,” he growled. “You don’t ned to bunt.”

     (Next Sunday installment: “An essential arrogance.”)

                                                       RIP CITY

1958

     The following Saturday after my debut in winter ball, Marco picked me up and drove to the ball park at UCLA. Again I struggled in batting practice, took a snappy infield at second base, pinch hit against a minor league lefty and roped a shot into left center for a long single. The guys in the dugout jumped up and cheered me. Then, after tearing around the bases and sliding under the catcher’s tag to score, they were all laughing. Marco exclaimed, “Some guys are batting practice hitters, some guys are gamers. Franklin’s a gamer, the kid’s hitting a grand!”

     Next at bat I walked and scored again. I made plays in the field. When Marco dropped me off at home, Dad, after working all day (he was putting in close to 70 hours a week), was waiting. “Kid’s doing great,” Marco told him. “Takin’ some good licks at the plate, like his old man.”

     After Marco left, Dad asked me what I hit. I told him fastball.

     “They probably figured they could throw it by you, because you look like a pipsqueak. Now that they know they can’t, they’ll start curving you. You’re hitting minor league heat. You’ll tear it up in high school.”

     The following Saturday Marco drove us to Amerige Park in Fullerton, a spacious yard with long fences. I hit better BP and this time faced a young prospect with serious heat and chipped off several pitches before lashing a blue darter between third and short. High-tailing it down the line, I heard one of my team mates shout, “Nobody can get that child out!”

     Jerry, who went to Anaheim high, pitched well, a prodigy. Joe, watching both of us, nodded at me, puffing his cigar. So far he’d said nothing to me—man was like a Buddha.

     The following Saturday we played at Blair Field in Long Beach, a beautiful facility that was the first that winter to have a clubhouse. Marco claimed it was as good as most Triple-A league ball parks. Walking into the clubhouse, I felt a keen sense of excitement, as if I was back in the Hollywood Star clubhouse, only this time as a player. We were to play the Pittsburg Pirate winter team.

     “Gonna face some real heat today, Franklin,” Marco told me. “Couple of their pitchers are on the Pirate roster. I’ll get you in against them, see if those guys can get you out.” He grinned at me.

     My stomach rumbled. As always, I sat with Jerry, watching the game, talking baseball, chewing my gum furiously. The Pirate pitcher was a lanky black man, a spot starter and reliever with the Pirates.

     “This guy throws harder than anybody we’ve seen all year,” Jerry told me. The Pittsburg team built an early lead. The Pirate shortstop, Bob Bailey, was a local Long Beach phee-nom, a high school sophomore like me, but a year older than me and already fully developed and built like a grown man. He was better than his reputation as a future bonus baby and hit a towering homerun to left-center and ran it out like it was no big deal. Meanwhile, the Pirate pitcher stayed in the game, because he was mowing people down and throwing a no hitter. They brought me in to pinch hit in the top of the eighth. I choked up on my 35 inch 35 ounce bat two inches and nicked a whistling fastball at my chest. I figured he had no respect for a skinny kid with a uniform hanging on him like sack-cloth, and could blow me down with heat. I fought off several fastballs and finally sliced one foul down the right field line. My team mates rooted me on.

     I was beginning to time him and worked the count full, still waiting for his big curve and excellent change-up, but he threw me another chest-high fastball and I tomahawked it on a vicious line over the shortstop into leftfield, a one bounce single. I grabbed my cap as I tore down the line and rounded first, which I’d never done before. I’d vaguely heard whooping from my team mates. Jerry, from the top step of the dugout, yelled, “Franklin, you’re the worst looking ball player on the field, but nobody can get you out!” The pitcher glowered at me as he shuffled off the mound, shaking his head. Bailey stared at me from short. “Christ, the worst hitter on the team breaks up the no hitter.”

     The umpire at second based sidled up to him. “Hey, nobody’s got that kid out in a month. He’s the real thing.”  Up in the stands, where I shouldn’t have been looking on strict orders from my Dad, I spotted Dad sitting beside Joe Stephenson and Ed Hughes, a big nosed rumpled man who was the head Pittsburg scout. The game went into extra innings. I walked twice and scored twice. We won. Afterwards, Dad drove me home. It was the first time he’d managed to get to one of my games, because he was making a delivery to a shoemaker in Long Beach.

     “I got there just as you broke up the no-hitter. When you rounded first and took off your cap, I got chills up my spine, because that’s what I did when I got a hit off Satchel Paige and broke up his no hitter as a twenty year old college hotdog. That’s the only time I took off my cap. I’m still tingling. It’s all in the genes. I’m a believer in that.”

     (Next Sunday installment: Big Moe faces Lefty Grove)

The Ball Player's Son

                                  UP AGAINST THE BIG BOYS

1958

     I was nervous about my debut against grown men in winter league ball. I was still a skinny kid of around 145 pounds and what had saved me as a coltish brat playing against fully grown teenagers was my ability to hit a fastball with the quick level compact swing my dad had taught me and stressed over and over; a philosophy of hitting that was simplified to succeed in the hardest, most complicated endeavor in all of sports—hitting a baseball hurled at you at various speeds from various angles involving curves and drops meant to baffle and defeat you. I stood close to the plate to protect the outside corner. My bat was ready just above my shoulder, wrists cocked, elbow down. I took a short stride. I kept my back foot planted. With two strikes I choked up on the bat and “guarded the dish,” determined to fight the bastard on the mound as a mortal enemy. I seldom struck out and felt almost deranged with anger when I did. To me, the batters box was my private domain. My identity was of a hitter, a “stick,” even if I had not yet acquired power

    “That’ll come,” Dad told me. “Take your vitamins and swing the weighted bat and the line drives’ll carry farther.”

     A huge ex catcher in the Boston organization named Marco, who ran the Red Sox winter league team for Joe Stephenson, picked me up at our house in Compton. A kindly man, he looked me over and fished a Red Sox uniform out of the trunk of his car. It was at least a size too big for me, but I was awed by it. He drove to a stadium in Huntington Park, explaining I would hit batting practice, take infield, and probably get in the game around the seventh or eighth inning.

     When I jogged onto the field, after meeting and shaking the hand of the large, bearish, cigar chomping ex catcher and now head scout, Joe Stephenson, who was in street clothes, I felt like a skittish ragamuffin among grown men who’d played in the low minors and were still members of the Boston farm system. Marco told me some of the players had already been released and were trying to hook back on and re-sign. They were slick and quick and had stronger arms than me, and glanced in my direction with what I felt was amusement tinged with disdain. I wore my socks low and pants baggy. My cap fit low over my eyes. I needed a haircut. Dad sometimes mentioned that I did not take enough pride in looking like a ball player in my uniform, which was “bush,” and perhaps a negative reflection or perhaps an embarrassment on him.

     A tall skinny kid who could have been my age but did look like a ball player in a perfectly fitting uniform, stared at me in a slightly irreverent manner as he warmed up with a catcher. Watching him throw, it was evident he was a pitcher, and there was about him an aura of cocky confidence, like HE was destined for greatness. I had to step in and warm up with two infielders to get loose, neither of whom invited me. I relished the idea of being seen by fellow players as a joke; I would show them!

     After watching the pros whistle line drives all over the field, and fly balls to and over the fences, and flagging down their hard grounders at second, I tried too hard in batting practice and felt embarrassed at pulling so many high bounces and foul balls. I was over anxious. Marco, pitching BP, kept urging me to relax, stop trying to kill the ball.

     When the game started, I was on the bench, and sat in a far corner of the dugout away from the bat rack and the horseplay among tobacco chewers and cussers who’d played together for years. Finally, the lanky kid who’d sized me up in a superior manner sat down beside me. A left-handed hitter, and right-handed thrower, he’d hit the ball well in BP. He offered his hand, and we shook. “Jerry Stephenson,” he said. “I’m Joe’s kid. You’re Murray Franklin’s kid, huh?” When I nodded, he smiled. He had fine features and intelligent eyes and beneath his coolness a high-strung energy. “Ball player’s son, like me. They kind of resented me at first, too,” he said, nodding toward the players. “But now they’re cool. Don’t sweat it. You got a nice stroke at the plate, very unique. Your Dad teach you that?”

     I nodded. We started talking, like instant good friends. Jerry, too, played Legion ball at 14 and held his own. He said his Dad started him out as a pitcher as soon as he could walk. As we talked, we watched the game, and, as innings passed, tension rose as I anticipated my chance. In the seventh inning, Marco called us over and told Jerry to pitch and put me at second.

     Jerry showed unusual poise and command of his pitches. His technique was perfection and his fastball had movement and his curveball was more a slider and had bite. Nothing was hit to me. At the plate I faced a hard throwing right-handed low minor leaguer. After timing his warm-ups, I choked up on the bat and rifled his first pitch past his ear into centerfield and tore down the line, rounding first and faking to go to second. Marco, coaching first, clapped his hands.

     “That’s the stroke, kid. You’re a singles-doubles hitter.”

     When the game was over (I did not get up again) Marco told me to keep the uniform and he’d pick me up the following Saturday; Joe Stephenson, standing beside Jerry, puffing his cigar, meaty face inscrutable, nodded at me. Later that night, at the dinner table, I was nonchalant when I told Dad I was one for one (a rope). Ho looked at my mother and nodded, then winked at me.

     “That’s my boy.”

     (Next Sunday installment: “Rip City.”

 

                        THE PHEE-NOM STARTS HIGH SCHOOL

1958

     I walked around with this feeling that great things awaited me, and were expected of me. I awakened every morning exhilarated by the prospect of being a great ball player, a big leaguer with his own baseball card who signed autographs and lived the life his father and those who reached the top experienced. I had recently turned 15 and not only held my own in American Legion ball between my freshman and sophomore years, but had discovered as I matured that I possessed what the assistant football coach and head baseball coach at Compton High, Ray Edgman, described as the quickest acceleration of any athlete in town, including the black kids who eventually beat me during the last few yards in the 100 yard dash in citywide track competition. I could steal bases and run between holes in football and elude tacklers—a gift that boosted my already bursting confidence.

     Coach Edgmon wanted me to play football, but Dad discouraged it, and in truth I had no stomach for the barbaric grind of the game that would threaten my knees as a future baseball hero. Instead I went out for basketball and was the only white kid to make the junior varsity, and right off I felt in over my head. The Compton High basketball team, its players culled from a huge population of kids, was the best in the state, and the coach, Bill Armstrong, was establishing himself as the Johnny Wooden of high school basketball and building a dynasty. One of the stars was big Marvin Fleming, a former basketball player of the year who would go on to win four super bowl rings for legendary coaches Vince Lombardi and Don Shula as a football tight end. His cousin, Roy Jefferson, was a starting forward on the JV basketball team and would go on to be an all pro wide receiver in the NFL and, like Marvin, win a super bowl ring.

     The guard I had to beat out, Freddie Goss, would go on to be the player of the year and start on a UCLA national championship for Johnny Wooden, and was already a varsity first string guard—a sophomore phee-nom!

     The black kids on the team, members of junior highs across town that thrashed us at Roosevelt, held an almost contemptible attitude toward me, implying it was their game, and I didn’t belong. The only kid on the team who seemed to have a friendly nature toward me was Loman Young, who, unlike the rest of the black kids, couldn’t jump, but, like me, could handle the ball and shoot. He was a junior. When the season started, Mr. Armstrong, who coached the JVs and varsity, played us only during “mop up” time after our team demolished everybody by 40 points. Loman and I, inglorious subs for the first time in our young athletic careers, sat together in the back of the bus during road games while the kids up front joked and shouted at each other, oozing victory adrenalin, ignoring us. Coach had already warned both of us that our JV team could beat most varsity teams in the area, and that our chances, even though he liked our games, were slim with more good players coming up through the junior high system—kids already seen as “blue chippers” for college careers.

     Loman had started as JV shortstop his sophomore year and informed me he was going to beat out a senior for shortstop. I quickly alerted him that I, too, was a shortstop and would beat both of them out. We began joking and joshing, picking on each other. Whenever we ate lunch at the benches just off the main quad, where racial tensions were already building, I over heard some white kids I’d known for years at Roosevelt, including Bowlin and Ron Bart, muttering “nigger lover” when they passed by.

     When my gorge rose, Loman clamped my arm. “Pay ‘em no mind, Dell. They’re too ignorant to know better.”

     “They used to be my friends, Loman.”

     “Used to be. Don’t need them kind of friends.”

     I had not told Loman or anybody that in government class there was a black girl named Jane who was very bright and studious and cute and laughed at almost everything I said and smiled at me with genuine warmth and allowed that smile to linger, and that I always waited for her to get up first at the end of class so I could walk behind her and marvel at her ass, which was unlike any ass I’d seen on any white girl and had me swallowing hard. There was no mixed dating on campus and if there were riots would be ignited instantly. At the lunch tables, Walter spotted me gawking at everything in a skirt, black, white or Mexican, these fully developed high school girls having changed my mind about not being a lover boy, though I’d never admit that to anybody, not even Loman, to whom I felt comfortable enough to tell anything.

     “I see you got your eye on the hot stuff.” He grinned, a very well-knit, fine-looking kid, perfectly groomed and dressed, from a family of many. “You ain’t about to get to first base with any of ‘em the way you dress, Norman.”

     “You keep callin’ me Norman, I’m gonna start calling you Amos.”

     “Lookin’ like you do, in them old man’s rags, ain’t no girl gonna give you the time of day, Norman.”

     “I ain’t a dandy like you, Amos. I don’t need fancy clothes to get me a woman.”

     “Shoot, you ain’t gonna get no woman the way you carry on, Norman. You need new rags, new ears, them rotted out fallin’ apart tennis shoes is gross, and that dumb-ass white-boy crew cut don’t look human when it grows out six months; looks like God done made you bald and glued up your skull and tossed a bunch-a hay on top. You need new hair, new attitude, new jumpshot…”

     “Amos, Norman’s gonna run circles around you when we go out for shortstop.You know how good I am? I played Legion ball at thirteen. A scout from the Boston Red Sox called my Dad and wants me to play winter ball with minor league professionals and college prospects. I’M a prospect!”

     He put down his soda pop. “You foolin’ with me?”

     “Nope.”

     “Then you best play, Mr. Ragman. You crazy if you don’t. Why you wanna play hoop when you the white flunky nobody pass to? If you good as you say you are, you got to go find out.”

     “What about you? You gonna stick it out and be the black flunky nobody passes to?”

     He laughed. “Think Mr. Cool Babe Young gonna get a head start, too, Mr. Ragman.” He clamped my forearm. “Gonna beat your sorry ass out.”

     (Next Sunday installment: Facing the big boys)

                     BIG MOE’S CRUSADE AGAINST JEW BAITERS

     Playing for Beaumont in the Texas League, we had a pitcher on our team named Stith, a big stocky farm-boy who belonged to a Nazi Bund. He knew I was a Jew and he started in early in the season baiting me, trying to goad me into a fight-- Jew this, Jew that, sheenie, kike. I decided to take it. I didn’t want the reputation as a troublemaker fighting with team mates, because it was hard enough in those days getting to the top, and I was on my way. But Stith wouldn’t let up. It was 1939, and the things going on in Germany and Europe, with the anti-Semitism, were still going on in this country. Stith kept putting Nazi arm bands and literature in my locker. He taunted me. There was still the stereotype that Jews wouldn’t fight back, and Stith, a bully, had no idea I could fight, and I let him and all the guys on the team who felt that way think that, played possum.

     Only a pitcher and pal of mine, John Gorsica, a Jersey guy, knew, and he wanted a piece of Stith, too.

     I had broken my leg earlier in the year and was not myself, and Stith knew this, too. Our manager, Al Vincent, knew Stith had been riding me all year with the Jew baiting and Nazi bullshit, and he and his coach let it go. Every night I came home from the park and let the rage build. Then, in Tulsa, on one of the hottest days of the year, we were staying in a hotel downtown and had just finished a series and were waiting for the bus to take us to the train station. The bus that picked us up carried the visiting team that was going to play Tulsa.

     As I came through the swinging glass doors of the hotel with the rest of the team, Stith, waiting for me on the sidewalk, ambushed me with a wild sucker punch and knocked me down. This was what I’d been waiting for. I jumped up and squared off with him just as the bus pulled in from the train station.

     Stith kept charging me, and I boxed him—jab jab jab. He was sweating and snorting like a damn pig, trying to get his hands on me, but I kept moving from side to side, hitting him with both hands until his nose and mouth and eyes were bleeding, and then I started teeing off hitting him as hard as I could. One of his eyes was in trouble and I went after it with one straight right after another until I had him out on his feet against the building.

     By this time Vincent was yelling at me, trying to pull me off Stith, and I turned on him and told him to get the hell out of my way, and then I went back to work on Stith, holding him against that building and carving out that eye, until the eye was dangling by a thread and his nose was busted flat, and I wouldn’t let him go down until his face looked like mush, and then I threw the bastard across the sidewalk into the gutter where he lay with his eye out and a black hole in the socket, and then the trainer and a few players were there, and Vincent had hold of me. I shoved him off and told him I wanted him now, because he’d condoned Stith’s Jew baiting all year, he’d enjoyed it, and Vincent, seeing the look in my eye, didn’t want any part of me, but I was just getting warmed up. I was soaked in blood and sweat and didn’t have a mark on me. By this time some of the players were filing off the bus and it was dead quiet and I looked at my team mates and some of the players getting off the bus and told them if any of them had any problems with Jews to get it off their chests and settle it right now, because I was good and warm.

     A few of the players were green around the gills at the sight of Stith. Nobody wanted any part of me, and I don’t blame them, because I was as mad-dog crazy as I’d ever been. Since the beginning of my career this had built up in me.

     “We’ve settled our differences,” Vincent said. “Let’s get back to baseball.”

      Gorsica was grinning at me. As for Stith, he was finished. He lost that eye. He never played ball again. And I feel good about that. Never regretted gutting that pig, and if I’d killed the bastard I wouldn’t have lost a nights sleep, because it would be a better world without Stith and his kind.

     (Next Sunday installment—The Phee-nom starts high school)

The Ball Player's Son

                           THE PHEE-NOM HITS A ROAD BLOCK

1957

     The Anaheim American Legion Tournament consisted of 80 teams throughout California and was the most prestigious of its kind, arguably, in the country. It was played at La Palma Park, a beautiful, sculptured stadium with stands and outfield bleachers like a minor league stadium.The tournament drew huge crowds throughout August, and scouts and bird-dogs from every big league team sat in their plaid shirts and straw and linen hats and alpaca sweaters with note pads and time-watches up and behind home plate below the press box like birds perched on rows and tiers of telephone lines. In 1955 Dad coached Compton kids to seven straight wins and the championship, our reward being seven days in a paid hotel in Catalina the week before Labor Day, with $5 a day for expenses. Most of  the players on that team were playing out their last years of Legion ball (a few signing big league contracts) and while in Catalina completely tore the place apart and were kicked out of our hotel the second night, kicked out of our second hotel the third night and kicked off the island the fourth day.

     Dad’s words to the boys when they got off the ferry at the dock in Catalina were, “You boys get as much snaff and boogair as you can, but don’t get thrown in jail.”

     I tagged along with my best friend, Jimmy Henrich, son of our Junior High coach at Roosevelt and Dad’s assistant, Ed Henrich, (His oldest son, Bob Henrich, signed a big bonus with Cincinnati) and watched these guys get drunk, peroxide their hair blond, chase women, brawl with guys from certain parts of LA, and generally represent rowdy Compton in a manner described by islanders as “the most horrible representatives of American youth ever seen.”

     In 1956, Dad and the team nearly repeated, and this year, with a thirteen year old at second base on our first game before a full house at night, Dad was introduced to the crowd from the press box as former Detroit Tiger and Hollywood Star and coach of past Anaheim tournament champions and received a rousing ovation to which he came out of the dugout and doffed his cap; the Dodgers hadn’t come out from the east yet and he was still a hero.

     So far, his kid had held his own. I was choking up on a 35 inch 35 ounce Nellie Fox    coke-bottle shaped model bat, standing on top of the plate like Nellie, and chipping away, not quick enough yet to pull heat but managing to whack a few shots up the middle and into right field. When I came to bat my first time, I was introduced as the son of Murray Franklin, and I ground my teeth and seethed. My Dad coached third base. He clapped his hands. His uniform fit him perfectly with his socks high at the knees, while his kid wore his uniform baggy with his socks low like Mickey Mantle. Our relationship had evolved to my working for him in his store as a means of learning the business and earning a little money, which gave me independence, and realizing I was not in agreement with everything he said and did, and thus we argued, and I was accused of being disrespectful and a wise-ass and when he snapped and snarled at me suddenly spurting venom, I felt myself gorged with visions of retaliation but had none, and therefore talked back and was chased, gleefully discovering that since I had become the fastest white kid of my age group in Compton, he could no longer catch me.

     Yet all was different on the ball field. Dad was king and never to be disputed. You gave him a long look when he gave signs. Just by watching him coach and talk throughout the game you learned invaluable baseball knowledge. Of this I was still in awe, and after grounding out my first time at bat, I settled down and played well enough as we won our first two games with a younger team lacking the older prospects of the past two years.

     Dad was coaching several young kids around my age, including Jimmy, and two of our team mates, Pat Pomeroy, who Dad felt was a natural hitter with a major league arm, and Ken Bowlin, a rangy pitcher, already a prospect with a live fastball and good control and a cocky attitude—quarterback on our Roosevelt football team, on which I was a halfback. The four of us hung together and played over-the-line baseball at Roosevelt, two-on-two basketball and tag football, cussed and talked pussy though only Jimmy seemed to be getting anywhere with the budding teenage girls in skintight skirts who chewed gum and tried to ignore our awkward and obnoxious attempts at conversation. Among the four, I was by far the most backward and ineffective, a drooling drooler..

     Dad referred to us as “The Four Stooges.”

     Bowlin and I did not like each other, though we weren’t enemies. He hinted I was the privileged son of a former big leaguer and had all the advantages. The fact we were team mates was our only bond, unlike with Jim, who was my best friend and fellow baseball junky. We were playing a heated football game at Roosevelt the day before our third game when Ken and I, opponents, got into a vile argument and he said something referring to me and my father and I attacked him, had him back-pedaling as I snorted fire, and just as I was about to punch him again he threw the football as hard as he could at my face and when I put up my hands to block it red hot pain seared through my thumb as I hit the ground clutching my wrist and staring at a thumb that had dislocated to the other side of my hand—a sight so grotesque nobody could look at it.

     In agony, I sprinted a half mile to my dad’s store, barged in and he took me immediately to the emergency room, where the doc took an x ray and then lay me down while the three stooges looked on as Dad held me down. The doc pushed and jiggled until he wrenched the thumb back into place. I took no pain killers. He put a cast on me. Bowlin delivered a weak apology. Dad just stared at him, said nothing. He knew about Bowlin—he hung with Ron Bart, now 16 and huge, our first baseman and starting tackle going both ways on the Compton High football team, and now a virulent racist whose hatred of blacks was never hidden as he referred to and used the word “nigger” like a bludgeon. He had a car, and Bowlin drove around with him.

     So I sat in the dugout with a cast on my left hand while Dad coached our young team to the final game, until we were beaten by a huge bonus baby from Chaffey, Larry Maxie, who threw big league heat and was headed straight to the big time until, like a lot of kids, hurt his arm and labored in the minors for years.

     The kid who took over second, a Mexican kid named Franco Cruz, played great, and Dad asked at the dinner table, “You think you’d’ve held up to the pressure like he did?”

Franco played great defense, turned double-plays, but couldn’t hit, and didn’t hit.

     I wasn’t sure, but of course I told him yes.

     “I think so, too,” Dad said. Then he stared at me for a few seconds. “You think you could have hit that big kid, Maxie? He struck out seventeen of us and we only got two hits. He throws as hard as most big leaguers.”

     “Well, he wouldn’t strike me out.”

     Dad glanced at mom and Susie, winked; then offered me the slightest of grins. “That’s my boy. Guard that dish!”

     (Next Sunday installment: Big Moe’s Crusade.)

The Ball Player's Son

                                       BACK TO THE BASICS

1957

     “Murray, he’s not ready for Legion ball,” mother insisted. Dad had coached the Compton American Legion team the last two years to championships, exciting everybody in our sports fanatical town, and felt I was ready for bigger competition. “He’s not fourteen yet, you’re pushing him too hard!”

     “ Dammit, Rose, he pushes himself hard. That’s the way you gotta be if you wanna be any goddam good. Let him play. He wants to play. I think he’s ready. I wouldn’t play him if I didn’t think he was.”

     “Murray, those are men out there. Eighteen year olds. Did you face eighteen year olds when you were thirteen?”

     “Damn right I did. So you stay out of this. If I think he’s ready, and he thinks he’s ready, he’s ready. We don’t need any goddam mollycoddling.”

     All the kids in Compton wanted to play for Dad, and I knew they resented me—a thirteen year old taking their position. They idolized Dad, who went out of his way to encourage and praise the poorer, underdog kids, and cracked the whip on the talented kids who were full of themselves. I heard some of them muttering that I was getting to play only because I was his son, and should be playing Colt League or Babe Ruth League with kids my age. Just a year or two ago, as an eleven and twelve year old, I’d been batboy and mascot, and now that the older guys who’d adopted me were gone, I was this child among physically mature teenagers with cars who drank beer and whiskey and talked about pussy and regarded me as an unproven punk

     All I had was baseball, and the fact that at Roosevelt junior high I played football, basketball, baseball, and ran track, and started and succeeded in all of them to the degree I was known as an athlete already coveted by Compton High coaches as a future star. So early on, I was dead set on impressing my older team mates. I felt exposed, on stage. A strange new urge tugged at me—to drift away from my environment of Compton and show up somewhere else where nobody knew me and I could be Dell Franklin, hotshot phee-nom, and not the son of Murray Franklin playing for Murray Franklin. Start new and clean.

     I was gritting my teeth a lot. And, most agonizing, I’d suddenly begun booting ordinary groundballs. If there was any part of my game that brimmed with confidence no matter what, it was my ability to gobble and snare any kind of grounder, looking slick. I loved taking infield, loved flashing my talents. It was me.

     But now I was booting everything, and my team mates were snickering and nodding. Nor was Dad pleased, and he made it a point to be harder on me than anybody else, and Christ, I was so bad, so off balance, that balls were playing me instead of me playing them, and I found myself flinching. I felt shaky, my confidence shot. I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about this. I was especially shamed when Dad, trying to show his players there was no reason to be gun-shy at the plate, allowed our hardest thrower, Dave Skaugstead, who would later sign for a bonus, to nail him on the backside several times, and Dad claiming “the mosquitoes are biting early this year, ey, girls?” Later, at home, I saw his backside was purple and red with welts.

     Finally, in a game, at second base, I muffed two easy groundballs and stood in the corner of the dugout on the verge of punching the wall, fighting my temper, which had been flaring up, knowing it looked bush and nothing infuriated the old man more than his kid behaving like a busher—an immediate reflection on him and a desecration of what he was proudest. Dad said nothing, he wouldn’t look at me, until the drive home.

     “Tomorrow,” he said grimly. “Tomorrow we’ll see what you’re made of.”

     We walked across the street to the Roosevelt Junior High baseball diamond, where I’d been a star on an undefeated team. The infield, this time of year, was a neglected rock pile, as Dad described it, full of pebbles, clods and bad hops, which Dad wanted. First off, soon as we got there, he scolded me vehemently for jogging out to shortstop—“YOU WANNA PLAY THE GAME YOU DON’T SLOUCH LIKE A GODDAM SADSACK-- YOU HUSTLE OUT TO YOUR POSITION LIKE AN EAGER BEAVER—NOTHING LOOKS AS BUSH AS A LOAFER AND THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE RIGHT NOW, A QUITTER AND A GODDAM LOAFER!” And then, before I could even get set, Dad, fungo in hand, laced a rope that short-hopped and glanced off my bicep, stinging, and I flexed it, and before I could get set again he laced me a ground-hugging top-spinner that ate me up and bounced off my shin, which ached deep in the bone. “Ha ha ha,” he jeered. “Two balls, two boots!” Another rocket smacked hard off my chest. “That’s three! I’m gonna get your hair-lip next. You stink! You’re stinking up the game. Wanna quit? Go on, gutless, crawl off the filed like a whipped cur.”

     I heard myself bellow, “FUCK YOU!”

     The next few minutes Dad blistered me on the foot, shoulder, ankle, shin, nose and finally ripped another grass-skimmer that took a wild hop and popped me directly in the balls. I went down in an agonized heap while half the kids in the neighborhood who hung out at the playground, looked on as I writhed and rolled around on the ground. Then Dad was standing over me, leaning on his fungo, a gloating mean grin on his face.

     “Where’s your goddam cup, dummie?” Before I could tell him I forgot it, he went on, “What’s the first thing I taught you as an infielder?...Now go home, put your cup on and get your ass back out here. Then we’ll really find out what you’re made of. Go on.”

     Mother cringed as I stormed into the house limping, bleeding, bruised. I slammed the door of my room shut, put the cup on and sprinted back to the diamond where Dad waited, still leaning on his fungo, grinning, about ten kids surrounding him in an adoring circle, obviously having listened to his humorous stories.

     “Well, kid, there’s no reason to be scared any more. I’ve bunged you up everywhere and you’re still here.” He glanced at the kids, who’d been retrieving balls I’d muffed, then at me. “What’s happened, meathead, is you’ve grown like a weed overnight. You’re going through what we call the ‘young colt stage’. Your legs are longer. You’re not as low to the ground as you used to be. You’ve got to get back to the basics—stay low, on the balls of your feet, charge the ball with long, smooth strides, always low, because, like I’ve always said, every hop’s a good hop when your ass is down. Glide. Light on your feet like a boxer. Stop thinking. Nothing dumber than a ball player who thinks too much. You got the best pair of hands around, Meat. Okay? Let’s go.”

     He hit me several easy choppers, which I charged and lobbed back, urging him to hit ‘em harder. Scorch ‘em he did, and I began trapping and short-hopping violent top-spinners and grass-skimmers and one-hop rockets at my feet. He hit blue-darters to my left, my right, straight at me. I found a rhythm. No matter what he hit me, I flagged it down. As I gobbled ball after ball as fast as he could hit them, I became lathered in sweat, panting like a dog and grinning like a stooge as I began quick-releasing throws to a kid at first base, and the old man, he was grinning back

     “That’s my boy! Can’t keep a Franklin down. Way t’ scoop that ball, Digger O’Dell!” He hit me about a hundred grounders before I muffed one. At that point he was worn out and flipped the bat away and walked out to me. By this time half the neighborhood was at the cyclone fence bordering the school, watching this brutal exhibition, curious about the Franklins, that family where the husband and wife yelled at each other and sometimes the father chased the son halfway down the block, infuriated at his hotshot insolence, shaking his fist, the son taking refuge at his mother’s parents a block down the street.

     Now Dad had his paw on my shoulder. “You might not boot one the rest of the year. Nobody’s got better hands than you. You’ve always had the stuffings to play this game. Every ball player goes through tough times. I helped you get out of it, but later, when you grow up and play a higher brand of ball, you’ll have to learn to work things out on your own.”

     I couldn’t wait for the next game, and my next groundball, and when it came, it was like I’d never had a doubt, making it look easy.

     (Next installment: The kid plays Legion ball, until…)

The Ball Player's Son

                                        BIG MOE GOES OUT IN STYLE

      1953

         

     Dad continued to hit well and make plays at three positions. On my birthday he took me to a weeknight game at Wrigley, got me a box seat behind the Angel’s dugout, and went 4 for 4 and made a great catch against the wall in left field. On the way home he said that game was dedicated to me, a birthday present. “Sometimes things don’t work out the way you want, but tonight everything turned out as well as I could’ve asked for—might be my last time.”

     I never wanted much from Dad on my birthdays. He always wanted to take me shopping and buy me nice clothes, but I hated clothes, preferring to wear old rags until they disintegrated, which seemed to bother him, because the way a person dressed, according to Dad, showed one’s pride. He said that part of being a father was giving kids nice things. But I told him I didn’t need anything but baseballs, a glove, a bat, a football, a basketball, an old radio to listen to games in my room, and nothing else except going to the ball park with him. What else was there?

     Dad kept hitting the ball well, until September, when he began tailing off. One Saturday afternoon he dropped an easy fly ball in left field, which just popped out of his glove. He displayed no anger or disgust as boos rained down. During the drive home I asked him what happened.

     “I just dropped it,” he said, annoyed.

     “Did you lose it in the sun?”

     “No. A good ballplayer knows how to shade out the sun.”

     “Did you lose it in the high sky?”

     “That high sky bullshit is for Alibi Ike’s.”

     “Then how could you drop an easy fly right to you? a can of corn? You never had to move!”

     “Dell, you don’t go a whole season without booting one. Sometimes you make a good play on a tough chance, rob a guy, and then you turn around and boot an easy one. But I will say one thing: I never make an easy play look hard.”

     “How many balls you dropped in the outfield, Dad?”

     He winked at me. “Today was my first.”

     Even as the sports pages revved up the Angel-Star rematch to a fevered pitch, the series was without incident. Before the first game, Jack Phillips of the Stars, a big man at 6’ “4 and over 200 pounds, one of the easiest going guys around and perennial peacemaker, asked Dad why he clobbered him, and Dad explained, “Jeez, Jack, I was hitting anything in a home uniform, sorry about that.” Cops still stood near both dugouts throughout the series. The Stars showed themselves to be the superior team, the best in the PCL, with players like Dale Long, Lee Walls, Kelleher, Phillips and Tom Saffel putting the slug on the Angels. And the last road trip of the season was the end of Dad’s career. Mother, Suzie and I drove up to San Francisco to meet him on a Monday evening. Right off, Dixie Upright took charge of me so Dad could join Mom and take Suzie shopping and out to eat seafood on the wharf.

     “Where we goin’ today, Meat? Ride the cable cars? Hit the snake-pits? How about a double-dipper at the movie house? It’s yore day, kid. Y’all and Dixie, that’s a team, boy.”

     Dixie treated me to bunkhouse breakfasts, hot beef sandwiches at Tommy’s on Van Ness, all the coke and popcorn I could hold and, all week long, took me to shoot-em-ups and war movies. We were not about to have anything to do with dramas, musicals or romance. It was like being with another kid, only a full grown one. I told Dixie that Dad cried when they shot the dog in “Old Yeller.” Don’t tell nobody, but old Dixie bawled too. Ain’t nothin’ worse’n seein’ a dog get it.”

     During games, Angel management allowed me into the dugout, in street clothes, for the season ending series. The team was still fighting with Portland and San Francisco for third place. Dad was exhausted. He’d played almost every inning of every game since coming out of retirement—but he kept plugging away, and the Angels plugged away and ended up in third place, which ensured Hack the Cub job.

     “Can’t happen to a nicer guy,” Dad said. “But Christ, Chicago’s a horseshit club. Dumb organization. Stan won’t last long there and he deserves better—he’s a good baseball man.”

     Dad’s last time up in professional baseball was a clear sunny September afternoon. Tony Ponce was pitching for San Francisco. Seal Stadium, spacious, known for its fog and damp air, often deadened long fly balls and kept them in the park. But on that day the ball Dad hit exploded off his bat as if whopped by a golf club. The crack of the bat resounded throughout the ball park and the little white pill arced to impossible height as it climbed toward and then hit the top of the light tower beyond left-center field. The Angels jumped off the bench to follow the flight of the ball as it soared and Dad rounded first base hard and then slowed to a trot refusing to smile or show any emotion as he crossed home plate, where he shook hands with the next hitter, finally smiling, then getting butt-pats and back-slaps from all his team mates, really grinning big and proud.

     Later, strolling through the lobby of the downtown hotel where we stayed, Dad picked up a newspaper and found an article on the front page of the sports section claiming Mickey Mantle had hit the longest tape-measured homerun ever—565 feet! He grinned at me. “Mine would’ve gone farther if it hadn’t hit the light tower.”

     I browsed the paper. “The Mick’s hit a beer sign after clearing Griffith Stadium, Dad. They call that the airport, don’t they?”

     “Best ball I ever hit today. If I’m at the airport, I hit the beer sign.” He clenched his fist to show off his bulging forearm. “I’m still learning. What I learned today is you don’t have to take that big a hard swing to hit one out. It’s like that short, compact punch that always knocks a guy out. You hardly feel it it’s so light. That’s how it felt today when I hit that ball off the light tower. Hot damn! It’s a helluva feeling to get a hit your first time up in pro ball, and then go out the same way.”

     When the Angels had their after-season awards banquet, Dad and Mom dressed up in their best, taking turns at the mirror and checking each other out and making a huge deal about what to wear before finally deciding. They smelled of cologne and perfume and were brimming with happiness, and in the morning, when I woke up, they were in the kitchen, all lovey-dovey, and sitting on the kitchen nook was an ashtray with a trophy on it of a boxer, and beneath it, on a brass plate, were the words—“Puncher of The Year.”

     Dad leered at me. LAPD Chief William Parker, evidently having listened to his troops describe the great battle between the Stars and Angels, presented it to Dad. I guess his team mates gave him a pretty good ovation.

     (The next installment jumps ahead to 1957, with the Ball Player’s Son trying to play American Legion ball at 13 for his Dad)

The Ball Player's Son

                                        BEAR TRACKS GREER              

                                             

BIG MOE

    After my big year at Beckley, Detroit moved me up to Beaumont in the Texas League, the last stop before getting called up to the big leagues. It was a tough pitcher’s league and the weather was something you couldn’t get used to--ninety-plus degrees every day four months straight, humid, you never stopped sweating (there was no air conditioning), that heat sapped you and you lost weight, and didn’t sleep well, so you were fighting it, and there was no use bitching, everybody was in the same boat.

     Houston had a pitcher, a mountain of a man with the biggest goddam feet I’ve ever seen, Ed “Bear Tracks” Greer. He had a lantern jaw that stuck out like Senator Claghorn, and I guess you could say he looked intimidating. They say he was crazier than Bobo Newsome, who I played with and against—a pretty crude guy—and I think Bobo hung on because he wasn’t dangerous, and ended up pitching for just about every team in both leagues.

     Greer had real good stuff and threw hard, but as a person he was so wild and unpredictable that even in those days they couldn’t bring him up to the big club because there was no telling what he might do. Hell, he might strangle a team mate, or throw somebody off a building, or go to a bar and get stabbed by a woman or get himself beaten to death by a mob.

     For some reason I had Greer’s number, and I nailed him pretty good. Sometimes baseball is just that way. We had an outfielder at Detroit, Bruce Campbell, a left-handed hitter, who wore out Feller while other guys looked helpless against him. The Yankees had a tough lefty named Marius Russo, and he had hard stuff that bore in on a right-handed hitter, and he jammed the hell out of me, and I hated facing him, couldn’t hit him with a paddle. But Greer, only time he got me out was when I hit one right at somebody.

     One night, after I racked him around and ran the bases like a maniac, I got up to the plate and he took his time, looking me over, and I knew he was going to dust me, and he did. Okay. I got up. He stood out on the mound, peering in at me with these spooky eyes, holding the ball in his big paw, flipping it and catching it. Well, before I settled in, he quick-pitched and dusted me again and I went down in sections, my heart in my throat. The crazy bastard was trying to kill me! So I jumped up and gave him a look. By this time I’d established myself as a guy who could take care of himself and never backed down from anybody, but Greer didn’t give a damn if I was King Kong, and the crazy sonofabitch was grinning at me. He had these fangs. Christ, what a mug!

     Well, I started to go after him and their catcher snagged me from behind. “Don’t go out there, Franklin,” he said. “Bear’s crazy. He’s not like other people. He’s from the hills. He doesn’t abide by normal rules of combat.”

     “I don’t give a damn,” I told him. “I’m not gonna be target practice for that sonofabitch.”

     “Listen to me, kid,” he said. “Bear knows he can’t get you out. We’ve tried everything all year and nothing works. If he can’t get you out, he doesn’t want you to around. That’s how Bear thinks. It’s not personal. He’d probably like you if he got to know you. You seem like a pretty good guy.”

     “To hell with him. Nobody knocks me down twice without a fight.”

     “Kid, you go out there and Bear’ll dehorn you.” I looked out there. Greer was in front of the mound, still flipping the ball, grinning at me with those fangs, a dark person. “I heard you just got married to a beautiful gal,” the catcher told me. “You’re a helluva player, got a big future with Detroit, leading the league in hitting. Don’t throw it away. You go out there after Bear, he’ll tee off from two feet and plant that ball right in your kisser and hair-lip you. Stay here.”

     I stayed. Bear dusted me two more times, one ball a yard behind me. When I walked to first he kept his eye on me, grinning, flipping that ball. Later that year I ran into Bear Tracks at an all star game. We were on the same team and he was scheduled to start the game. When I got to the clubhouse he was drunk, had a jug of whiskey, came right over and gave me a big hug, wanted me to take a slug of the rotgut. Christ, he had his arm around me like he wanted to kiss me.

     “I like you, Franklin,” he told me. “Nice college boy. I’m glad you didn’t come after me, cuz I didn’t wanna kill you or make you ugly. Shit, I can’t get you out. What am I supposed to do? I see you up there again, I’m gonna stick one in your ear, even if I do like you.”

     Tracks never made it to the mound, never made it out of the clubhouse. They tried to get that jug away from him, but they couldn’t, so they waited until he passed out on the training table, and they still couldn’t get that jug out of his grip.

     (Next installment: Big Moe finishes in style)