The Boys of Summer Read online

  “Tell us about it, Pee Wee,” Snider said. He turned away, losing interest.

  “I never realized that,” I said.

  “What do you think happens around second base?” Reese said. “They come at you and come at you and the spikes are not made of rubber.” Reese leaned back. The chair made a grinding noise. “I remember when I used to think that playing baseball was the easiest thing in the world. I don’t think so any more.”

  “When you were a kid,” I said, “you dreamed about this?”

  “No, sir,” Reese said. “I did not dream about the lights. There were never any night games in my dreams. I’m thirty-three years old and after a night game I’m all worked up—hell, you don’t calm down right away—and I have trouble falling asleep and the next day I dread the game. I ought to run before I play, to get my legs loose. Sometimes I hit a bleeder first time up and I have to break from the plate in a hurry. You can pull a muscle if you haven’t loosened up, but if you’re tired enough, you won’t run before a game because you have to save your strength. So maybe you pull a muscle. Fuckit.” He got up and began putting on his pants.

  Dressen sent Labine to St. Paul for several weeks to pitch his arm back into shape, and Labine gathered his possessions shortly after dawn and left without saying good-bye to anyone. He felt humiliated. Robinson was worried about his wife. She had to undergo surgery for a growth which proved benign. Three days later Robinson, still overwrought, protested an umpire’s call by kicking his glove thirty feet.

  “Yer outa here, Robinson,” bawled Augie Guglielmo. Dressen moved Bobby Morgan to third and sent Billy Cox to replace Robinson at second. “He was right to do what he did,” Cox muttered.

  “What was that?” Guglielmo said.

  “I said, ‘Fuckit.’”

  “Yer outa here, too, Cox. Git outa here.”

  Still the team won.

  Campanella was hitting poorly. He had chipped a bone when his throwing hand struck a bat as he tried to pick a man off third. The lead reached eight games. Dressen drove the team, and in the rage of summer, geniality began to fade.

  On August 15, Robin Roberts of Philadelphia won his nineteenth game, beating the Dodgers, 8 to 3, at Ebbets Field. The Dodgers smacked flies to the base of the wall in left field, long drives that center fielder Richie Ashburn caught in stride, and numerous two-out singles. Roberts controlled a game without appearing to dominate it. Recounting this frustrating evening, I wrote:

  The Dodgers got their final run in the eighth inning when George Shuba hit his fifth homer of the year. But indicative of the “fighting” spirit this hot night was the fact that after Shuba circled the bases and got the customary handshake from Andy Pafko, he walked to the water cooler and sat down in the dugout, untroubled by further handshaking, or by back-slapping and applause from his teammates.

  Campanella waited in the clubhouse the next day. “Hey,” he shouted. “I saw what you wrote. I can’t clap. My hand’s broke.”

  “I didn’t mean just you,” I said.

  A number of heads turned. Snider looked on curiously. Shotgun Shuba laced a shoe.

  “What do you want me to do?” Campanella said. “Jump up when he hits one and knock my head against the top of the dugout? Is that what you want?”

  “That’s not what I want.”

  “How can you, sitting up there,” Campanella shouted, “see if we got spirit down here?”

  “Roy,” I said. “Would you do me a favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stop reading the Tribune. Try the Times.”

  “I would,” Campanella said, “ ‘cept the Tribune is the onliest paper I can get delivered in time for me to read it in the shithouse in the morning.”

  “I’ll remember that when I write about you.”

  “Sheet,” Campanella roared, and paraded naked and stately to the trainers’ room, where he would soak his sore hand in a whirlpool bath.

  Reese was grinning from the swivel chair. Hodges gazed solemnly into his locker. Across the corridor, Preacher Roe sat cross-legged puffing a corncob pipe. No one spoke. I was the only man wearing street clothes, the only civilian, in the Dodger clubhouse. I retreated.

  Later on the field, Robinson motioned to me. “What you wrote,” he said, “was silly. Some guys thought it was anti. But you were right to stand up to Campanella.” A few hours later the story was forgotten. The Dodger fighting spirit came around nicely. The team defeated the Phillies, 15 to 0.

  “You shouldn’t rile Campy,” Dressen suggested over drinks. “He’s worried about himself.”

  “Well, I’d figured that he’s an intelligent guy who’d respect my right to write.”

  “What? What’s that? What’s that word? Starts with a ‘I.’”

  “Intelligent.”

  “Yup. That’s it. All ball players is dumb.”

  “All?”

  “And outfielders is the dumbest.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I wisht they was all Reese and Robi’son. But that Shuba, that Snider, that Furiller. That Furiller. He can’t even bunt.”

  Carl Furillo was suffering a frightful season. Grit lodged in a cornea restricted his vision, which no one knew, and he listened to a variety of useless suggestions from Dressen without heeding them. “Skoonj,” they called him, and Skoonj, good year or bad, was a ball player who walked his own way. “How’m I gonna bunt if I can’t bunt?” he said. “Anybody ever ask fucking Dressen that?”

  To bring Furillo into the Brooklyn organization, Larry MacPhail purchased the franchise at Reading in the Interstate League following the 1941 season. War had made the franchise inoperative. “Worthless,” MacPhail explained, “except for two assets. A bus in good condition and Carl Furillo.”

  During my seasons with the team, Furillo had a mean batting average of about .300. The first year he hit .247. The second year, after eye surgery, he hit .344. He was solid, handsome, dark, with short curly hair, and a Roman nose that had been broken many times. Women who saw him in dungarees and T-shirt were stirred. Some men felt envy.

  Furillo’s responses to people and situations were intuitive. He sized me up, carefully, when I joined the club, considered my 140 pounds and quickly named me “Meat.” By August he had decided to trust me with his thoughts. “Hey, Meat,” he said. “You know what I’m gonna do when I’m all through? Open an Italian restaurant in Vero Beach.”

  “You really think that would work?”

  “Look, Meat. You give good food, spaghetti, it’s gotta work.”

  “But I don’t think there are many people around Vero in August.”

  “You give good food,” Furillo said, “it don’t matter where you are. People will come.”

  “But why Vero? Why not a bigger town?”

  “Look, Meat,” Furillo said. “When I open this place, you come down to Vero and you’ll get a free meal. On the house. And that’s a promise.”

  “Well, thank you, Carl,” I said.

  For mysterious reasons, he felt antipathetic toward Bill Roeder. “That Roeder thinks he’s smart,” Furillo said.

  “Well, he is pretty smart,” I said.

  “Yeah, but he don’t know everything. Nobody knows everything, except Him.” Furillo jerked a thumb upward, signifying God. “Hey. How many feet in an acre?”

  “I think it’s two hundred by two hundred.”

  “Let’s ask Roeder, Meat. He’ll get it wrong, and that’ll show you. He ain’t as fucking smart as he thinks.”

  Furillo liked to fish and work with his hands. In right field, in front of the short wall and tall screen, he was an emperor. He knew the angles of the wall and the scoreboard that jutted out and how a ball would carom. No one ruled that field as he did. He threw out dozens of runners at second before people stopped challenging him. Charging apparent singles, he was said to have thrown out a half dozen men at first. “This man,” wrote Roscoe McGowen of the Times, “is armed.”

  Once in Boston Sid Gordon, then wi
th the Braves, slapped a long line single to right. Ed Mathews, a swift rookie, broke from first. Furillo ran toward the foul line from right center, caught the ball on a bounce, whirled and loosed his throw. For a remarkable instant you could see the baseball and Mathews racing on converging paths. The ball bounced fifteen feet from third base, as Mathews dipped into a slide. The ball accelerated with the bounce, spin biting dirt, and skipped low over Mathews’ legs. Cox whipped the Whelan’s glove and in one motion caught the ball and made a tag. Furillo trotted to the dugout, apparently unimpressed by his own play, seemingly emotionless.

  I saw the other side in the clubhouse. One hot afternoon Bob Rush of the Chicago Cubs threw an inside fast ball and Furillo could not duck. He threw up his left hand and the ball glanced off his knuckles and smashed into the bridge of the Roman nose. Furillo fell, without a sound, and lay without moving. He was borne from the field on a stretcher.

  In the trainers’ room, I found him on a white table, supine and still. Dr. Harold Wendler, an osteopath, had placed an ice pack on his face. It ran from brow to nostril and covered both eyes.

  “How is he?” I whispered.

  “Severe impact,” Wendler said. “We’ll need X-rays.”

  I took Furillo by the hand. “Hey, Carl. It’s me. Meat. Doc Wendler says you’re going to be fine.”

  The palm was curiously soft. Furillo clutched my hand weakly, like a child.

  “Meat?” he said in a small voice. “Who’s that?”

  I said my name.

  “Rog,” Furillo said, as he lay in darkness. “Am I gonna be okay?”

  “Sure, Carl, sure. You’re doing fine.” My own voice was not strong. I was shocked at the anomaly of a man in a full Dodger uniform—they had not even taken off his spiked shoes—so terribly stricken.

  “You wouldn’t lie to me?” Furillo said.

  “Shit, no. You’re fine.”

  “Hey,” he said, pulling at my hand. “Tell me the truth? Am I blind?”

  I saw Dressen later. “You gonna tell Joe Black to get Rush?” I said.

  “Aaah,” Dressen said. “Fuckin’ dumb outfielder.”

  “What?”

  “Furiller shoulda ducked. An’ Snider is just as dumb.”

  Watching Duke Snider turned Bill Roeder sardonic. The Duke could run and throw and leap. His swing was classic; enormous and fluid, a swing of violence that seemed a swing of ease. “But do you notice when he’s happiest?” Roeder complained. “When he walks. Watch how he throws the bat away. He’s glad.” Roeder would have liked to have Snider’s skills, he conceded. If he had, he believed he would have used them with more ferocity. Snider was living Roeder’s dream, and so abusing it.

  Edwin Donald Snider was the full name, but Duke suited. His hair had started graying when he was twenty-five, but his body bespoke supple youth. As Duke moved in his long-striding way, one saw the quarterback, the basketball captain, the Olympian. Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it. “If’ was a perfect poem for the Duker. He and Kipling would have been to one another’s taste.

  While trying to become a man, Snider suffered periodic sulks. His legs were not really steel springs; they ached sometimes like anybody else’s. His model swing was useless when he lunged at a bad pitch. In a hurt boyish way, he saw forecasts of his golden future as pressure. Why can’t I be ordinary? he said. When his hitting wavered, he brooded and fielded sloppily. Portnoy’s hero was an only child. A confrontation with Dressen was inevitable and fierce.

  The final Western trip began with a train ride to Cincinnati on Sunday night, August 17. I decided to fly and remember packing two books. I was having difficulty finishing Crime and Punishment. I had seen notices for Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, a mysterious account of a flaming, gifted ball player, a super-Snider, who came to a bad end. “What The Natural demonstrates,” John Hutchens wrote in the Herald Tribune, “is problematical, except that Mr. Malamud is quite a card and nothing seems safe any more, nothing at all.”

  I was starting a story on the real Snider, who was slumping, that Monday when a call came from the Dodger office to report that Dressen had decided on a benching. “Indefinitely,” said Frank Graham, Jr., the publicity man. “This is Snider’s first benching since he became a regular in 1949. He’s gone twelve games without a homer and he has only nine hits in his last forty-six times at bat.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You miss the game yesterday?”

  “I was off.”

  “There was a short fly to center. Some of the fellers say he should have had it but he loafed.”

  “Well, Duke says Dressen ripped him in front of everyone the other day.”

  “Is that right?”

  I compounded the elements into a story, in which I tried to balance objections. Snider had a point. The stronger argument was Dressen’s.

  At twilight Tuesday, after a three-hour flight, I walked onto Crosley Field in Cincinnati and someone went, “Pssst.” Snider was standing by himself in a corner of the dugout, while the rest of the team worked out. His long face was somber and white.

  “Hiya, Duke. Sorry.”

  “It probably won’t do any good,” he said, “but if either Mike Gaven or Dick Young comes on the field tonight, I’m gonna punch him in the mouth.”

  “Well, it won’t do any good. I can tell you that.”

  “They got no right to write what they did.”

  “Duke, the club announced yesterday that you were benched. Everybody had to write it. It was news, and because there was no game, it was big news.”

  “Maybe I should be benched. It’s okay to write that. But Young did a whole piece saying that I was a crybaby and Gaven said my salary was gonna be cut by 25 percent no matter what I did from now on.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because Beverly called me up from Bay Ridge and read me the stories. She was crying.”

  After a while, I said, “Okay, but don’t start hitting people. You outweigh Young by fifty pounds, and Gaven’s an old guy. You might kill him.”

  “Where you going?”

  “To the press room. Let me see what I can do.”

  “They won’t listen,” Snider said. “They’re too busy lapping up the sauce.”

  Gaven, a porky man with great jowls, was eating. “I can write anything I want,” he insisted without interrupting the rhythm of his chewing. “Maybe I got private information you don’t have that his salary will be cut.”

  “Well, if you go on the field, he says he’ll hit you.”

  The chewing stopped. “He better not,” Gaven cried. “If he does, every Hearst newspaper in the United States will be on him.” But Gaven stayed off the field.

  Talking to Young, who arrived later, I watched the jet eyes harden. “As if I fuckin’ benched him,” Young said. “As if I fuckin’ loafed on that fly ball.” After the game, Young sought out Snider in a bar and said, talking quickly, “Hit baseballs, Duke, not writers. Then I’ll be able to write good things about you.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Don’t get down on yourself.”

  “I was sore, Dick. Maybe your story was okay.” Young turned away. Snider sipped at a Canadian whisky and ginger ale. His eyes became enormous and sad. “Stop thinking so much, Duke,” I said.

  Three days later Snider was back and for the rest of the season he played brilliantly. Dressen’s impersonal brutality worked. I don’t know what was more disturbing, that or the way Snider, while hitting at a .400 pace, continued to discard his bat jubilantly when walked, joyous, as Roeder had observed, not to have to face another challenge.

  Malamud’s first novel downed quickly. One of the pitchers saw me with it as we were leaving Cincinnati for St. Louis and I lent it to him. “I like that book,” he said, the next day, “as far as I got. I liked it when he screwed that brunette and they describe her muff.”

  “Well, stay with it because he’s gonna make it with a blonde and redhead and Malamud describes the pubic hair ea
ch time.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I left your son of a buck of a book on the fucking train.”

  Without thinking, I bore Crime and Punishment into the St. Louis dugout, along with my scorebook. “Hey-yup,” Dressen cried. “What you doing with that book?”

  “It’s a helluva book, Charlie,” I said.

  The ferret face softened. “Ya know something? I never read a book in my whole life.”

  “Not even in school?”

  “I only went a few years. But I can read good. Newspapers and magazines and them. But I never read a book. Ya think I should?”

  I was instant ambassador from culture to the dugout. They were all behind me as I stood on the old boards, Shakespeare and Southey, Dante and Hardy, Olga Kahn, Shelley, Hemingway, Housman and, in my right hand, Dostoyevsky. “Sure, Charlie,” I said on behalf of literature. “It would help your vocabulary. You’d learn new words. You’d make better speeches and all.” I was addressing a major league manager as one might speak to a truant boy of ten.

  “Ah, fuck,” Dressen said. “I got this far without readin’ a book. I ain’t gonna start now.”

  We flew from Chicago, with the team seven games in front, on a flight that ended in a literary way. One of Harold Rosenthal’s favorite jokes consisted of composing the headline and the story that would appear in the Tribune if a plane carrying the Dodgers crashed. He prepared rough drafts, after which Allan Roth and I made suggestions. The result looked like this:

  ALL PERISH AS DODGER PLANE HITS ALLEGHENY PEAK

  REESE, ROBINSON, DRESSEN VICTIMS

  TEAM HAD JUST COMPLETED 7-AND-3

  WESTERN TRIP; PITCHING IMPROVED

  BRADFORD, Pa., September 1 (AP)—The entire Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team was killed tonight in the flaming pyre of a United Airlines DC-4, which crashed into a hillside four miles west of this northern Pennsylvania town. Tomorrow’s scheduled game against the Braves has been postponed.