The Boys of Summer Read online

  Rickey waited. Six eyes sought him. “Carl,” he said, “we won’t give you three thousand.” Pause. “We’re going to give you a bonus of three thousand, five hundred. What do you think of that?”

  Erskine thought that Branch Rickey was even a bigger man than he had heard.

  Erskine pitched nine games for Danville in the Three-Eye League, named from the states through which it spread: Illinois, Iowa, Indiana. He struck out fifty-two men in fifty innings—one strikeout an inning is a remarkable pace—and returned cheerfully to Anderson, where he was startled to find himself declared a free agent. Someone—Erskine suspects a Boston official—reported to Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, the Commissioner of Baseball, that Rickey had signed a serviceman, and Chandler invalidated the contract. Rickey protested, and then asked if the ruling meant that he could get back the $3,500 bonus from the Erskines. (He could not.)

  Four other teams sought Erskine. The Boston Red Sox offered $10,000. The Phillies offered $11,000. Still emotionally a Dodger, Erskine telephoned Feezle and said, whatever the other bids, he’d sign a new Brooklyn contract for $5,000.

  A quarter century later, Erskine laughed at himself. “I got the five thousand,” he said, “which makes me the only man in history to collect two bonuses from Branch Rickey, but what I didn’t know was that the second time, instead of settling for five thousand, I could have gotten thirty thousand.”

  “Did you have the great curve then?”

  “No. That came later. Let me ask you. How do you throw your curve?”

  “Break the wrist and snap the fingers.”

  “Snap,” Erskine ordered. “Which finger do you use? The middle one. But when you throw a curve, you snap it off the index finger. Most people do. I had a good year in Danville my second season there. I won nineteen and two more in the playoff. But Jack Onslow, who managed Waterloo and later the Chicago White Sox, explained that I was tipping the curve, by kind of tucking the ball against my index finger before I threw it. ‘I’m only telling you this ‘cause you’ll be out of this league next year,’ Onslow said. ‘But with that curve you got, you may not go all the way.’”

  In Havana, where he played winter baseball in 1948, Erskine began throwing a curve off his middle finger. For weeks he could get no speed on the ball, nor any significant break. Gradually over months, the new curve snapped off the middle finger, became faster and sharper. But whenever he pitched a game, he reverted to the relative safety of the old curve that had worked in high school and at Danville, Illinois.

  By February he came to a decision. He had to use his new curve in a game. He had to throw it in the first inning and every inning. It had to be his only curve. Otherwise, he would never rely on it and never become the pitcher he should be. Against a team called Almendares, Erskine mixed the new pitch with fast balls and pitched eight shutout innings. Then Dee Fondy, who later hit .300 in the major leagues, opened the ninth inning with a triple.

  Erskine paused. A shutout meant a $25 bonus and he was earning only $325 a month. He was ahead by two runs. His infield would play back for the out, rather than close, to prevent Fondy from scoring. The old curve still seemed harder and better than the new one. Erskine set his teeth and considered in the open privacy of the pitching mound. The question he decided was truth versus $25. He would not go back to the old curve. He threw five of the new curves in the next ten pitches and got his shutout, his $25 and the ball game. He never threw the old curve again.

  Wooden shutters stand open behind Erskine’s chair. Memories have poured, but night claws at the window. “Old Campy,” Erskine says. Nine hundred miles away, Roy Campanella is sitting in a motorized wheelchair, with shriveled arms and withered stumps for legs.

  “The worst thing I can imagine is what happened to Campy,” Erskine said. He gazed at the ceiling. “Real intimacy develops between catcher and pitcher. You work 120 pitches together every few days, after a while you think like one man.

  “All right. Campy is hurt over the winter of 1957–58. That’s the same winter the team moves to California. We start out playing in a football field, the Coliseum, with left real close, a China wall. You know how Campy used to hit high flies to left; as soon as I see the China wall, I think, ‘Son of a buck, if Campy was well, he’d break Ruth’s record, popping flies over that dinky screen.’

  “We start badly. We get to Philadelphia. I’m supposed to pitch. It rains. Campy was born in Philadelphia. Whatever, I start thinking about him with his broken spine and I don’t tell anybody anything, but I go to the station in the rain and take a train to New York. I find a cab and go to University Hospital. They say I can’t see him. I persist. At last, okay.

  “Now I’m the first person not family to visit, the first man who’s come from the team.

  “I get to his room. I’m still thinking of the short fence and Ruth’s record. I open the door and there’s a shrunken body strapped to a frame. I stand a long time staring. He looks back. He doesn’t see just me. He sees the team. He starts to cry. I cry myself. He cries for ten minutes, but he’s the one who recovers first. ‘Ersk,’ Campy says, ‘you’re player representative. Get better major medical for the guys. This cost me. Eight thousand dollars for just the first two days.’

  “I say, ‘Sure, Campy.’

  “ ‘Ersk,’ he says, ‘you know what I’m going to do tomorrow? I’m working with weights and I’m going to lift five pounds.’

  “I go there thinking of him breaking Babe Ruth’s record, he’s thinking of lifting five pounds. But he’s enthusiastic. He starts to sound like the old Campy. He wants to know when I’m going to pitch. He’s got some kind of setup where they turn the frame and he can watch TV. I’m going the next day in Philly if it doesn’t rain, and he gets real excited. They’ll be televising that one back to New York. ‘I’ll be watching you, Ersk,’ he says. ‘Make it a good one.’

  “I get out of there. By this time I’m pitchin’ with a broken arm, but this one I got to win. I got to win it—I don’t care if it sounds like a corny movie—for Roy.

  “The next day I go out with my broken wing. I pitch a nohitter for five innings. I end up with a two-hitter. I win it for Campy. That was the last complete game I ever pitched in the major leagues.

  “I could look back and say I should have pitched a few more years. My arm doesn’t hurt now. The game looks easy on television. But in 1959 I walked into the office of Buzzy Bavasi and told him I’d had enough. I was thirty-two years old and my arm was 110. It ached every day. Some of the time I could barely reach the plate. Buzzy said he’d put me on the voluntary retired list, and he went out to get his secretary to draw up the papers.

  “I thought, ‘This is it.’ And all of a sudden in Buzzy’s office in Los Angeles I’m seeing myself in the Kenmore Hotel room with Branch Rickey thirteen years before. I can see it clear as my hand. I can see my Navy bell-bottoms. I see Rickey puffing smoke. I see the way Dad looked. I hear the sound of Rickey’s voice. That’s the beginning. And here, I think, in Buzzy’s office is the end.

  “I say to myself, ‘Wait! I don’t want this to end. Shouldn’t I go for one more start?’ And then I say, ‘No. I don’t want one more start. I’ve given myself every opportunity. At thirty-two, after 335 games, I’m worn-out.’

  “I say to myself, ‘Remember the way you feel. Burn this in your mind. Strong! Five years from now when you’re back in Indiana and you start saying, the way all old ball players start saying, I could play another year, conjure up this feeling you have now.’”

  “Have you had to do that, Carl?” I said.

  “Only about five hundred times.”

  Erskine turned out the lights. He went upstairs and looked into Jimmy’s room. The little boy breathed noisily in sleep.

  6

  THE SANDWICH MAN

  Gentlemen, we have just traded for the pennant.

  Anonymous Dodger official after acquiring Andy Pafko on June 15, 1951

  On the telephone, Andy Pafko said that it would be nic
e to get together, but that he didn’t belong in a book about the team. “I wasn’t in Brooklyn long enough,” he said. “I don’t rate being with Snider and Furillo. I wasn’t in that class.”

  Across seventeen major league seasons, Andy Pafko batted .285, hit 213 home runs and fired every throw and ran out each pop fly with the full measure of his strength. Certain athletes who grew up in the Great Depression played that way, the mongrels of poverty tearing at their calves.

  Pafko is proud to have been a good, hard-working ball player, but he regards his year and a half with the Dodgers as a failure. The season in which he came to Brooklyn as pennant insurance reached its climax with Pafko positioned at the left-field wall of the Polo Grounds, shoulders pressed against cement, wanting to run deeper, but helpless, a spectator in uniform as Bobby Thomson’s home run carried the pennant to the New York Giants.

  The roads north from Anderson run straight and flat. State Route 32, and Federal Highway 41, among trees, farms and near Noblesville, Indiana, a town of 8,500, pass the anomaly of a Rolls-Royce dealer on the plain. Two Dodgers, Pafko and Joe Black, have settled in Chicago. Like Shuba, Pafko descends from Middle Europeans who made their way in the American Middle West. “But we’re Lutherans,” he said, “not Catholic, and we were farm people. I still get out in the country. I scout for the Montreal Expos. Look”—the thick voice lightens—“put me in, but don’t make it a big thing. I never felt I was a Dodger star.”

  Before lunch, he waited in the parking lot of a Skokie steak house called Henrici’s, standing straight and rather stiffly, his hair still thick and black.

  I told the captain, “Reservation for two.” He stared at Pafko and said, “Don’t I know you?”

  “Andy Pafko.”

  “Milwaukee Braves,” the captain cried. He seated us in a booth and sent for drinks.

  “You see,” Pafko said. “They don’t really know me any more and if they do, they think I was a Milwaukee player. Nobody remembers I was a Dodger.”

  I remember how he hit Dodger pitching. He was one of those few ball players—Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were others—who made the playing area of Ebbets Field seem too small. He hit line drives against or over all the walls and with Chicago in 1950, when he hit thirty-six home runs, he was always beating the Dodgers out of games they should have won. A year later, Buzzy Bavasi sent the Cubs Joe Hatten, an outfielder, an infielder and Bruce Edwards, a catcher who couldn’t throw, for the contracts of Johnny Schmitz, Rube Walker, the catcher, Wayne Terwilliger and Pafko. Terwilliger, a skinny second baseman, played thirty-seven games for the Dodgers, but had his moment. In Philadelphia a frog-voiced fan called out Dodger names from his scorecard, with a pointed basso comment for each one. “Aaargh,” he roared, “I can see it now. Yer name in lights. A lotta lights. Wayne Terwilliger.” The deal was for Pafko, an all-star outfielder who could play third.

  “This is gonna sound crazy,” Pafko said, “but even though it looked like the Dodgers was gonna win the pennant, I was disappointed to be traded. My home was here. Chicago. I had five years with the Cubs. I could hit .300. That wasn’t bad for a kid from the farms up north.

  “Funny about the Cubs. I got in a World Series with ‘em in 1945, but after that they didn’t win. Hell, they got Durocher and they still don’t win. But I belonged. The day before the trade, Don Newcombe beat us at Wrigley Field. I went home and at six o’clock the phone rang and Wid Matthews, the general manager, said, ‘Andy, I am sorry to have to inform you that we have traded you to the Dodgers.’ I didn’t have a winter to adjust. Next day it was the same ride, only to the other side of Wrigley Field.

  “I got my belongings and moved them over to the visiting clubhouse. Preacher Roe came over and said, ‘Andy, we’re glad to have ya.’ Still I was a stranger. All right. You bounce around in baseball and that day I hit a home run, but they beat us, 4 to 3.”

  “Who’s us?”

  “The Dodgers.”

  “The ‘us’ changes that quickly.”

  “Your team is who you’re playing for. The Dodgers get thirteen games ahead, but we started to lose the lead. The trade made it a bad year. I have this feeling something worse is going to happen. In the first game of the play-off I hit a home run first time up. But Jim Hearn won for the Giants. The next day I’m noticing Labine. I’m really noticing. He’s got a great curve. Thomson couldn’t hit it with a fan. My wife Ellen is staying back in Chicago.

  “Last game we’re ahead in the ninth. They get some hits. A run in. They tell me Sukeforth said Branca was throwing good. But I was wondering. Why not Labine? Branca walked by me in left field. I hit him in the back. ‘Go get ‘em, Ralph.’ But I was doubting. Branca threw a ball. Then came this shot. I started back. In Ebbets Field I might have gotten it. In the Polo Grounds it was gone. Give him credit. It was my biggest letdown ever.

  “Back in Chicago, Ellen has a taxi waiting to take her to the station. She hears the hit on the radio and calls out the door, ‘I’m not going.’

  “The cabbie says, ‘What do you mean?’

  “Ellen says, ‘Just forget it.’

  “Then she cried. Forget it? That’s one year I’ll never forget. I have to leave the Cubs. I lose the play-off. Ellen loses the trip.

  “The three biggest disappointments of my life. Well, that was the worst. Ever since things have been getting better.”

  During 1919, the Pafkos came from Bratislava, peasant farmers, and settled with relatives in Minneapolis. By the time Andy was born in 1921, Michael and Susan Pafko had borrowed money, bought a dairy farm near Boyceville, close to a fork of the Hay River in northwestern Wisconsin. They kept chickens, and hogs, and grew alfalfa and oats. Andy, called Pruschka, was the third of six brothers. As late as 1942, his third season in professional baseball, he was still helping pay off the family farm.

  “Ol’ Handy Andy Pafko,” Red Barber used to say. “Pow’ful wrists. He strengthened them as a boy milking cows on his daddy’s farm.”

  “Sure,” Pafko said over a club sandwich, “I milked the cows. And not only that. I chopped wood. I fetched well water. You had to be strong, and you had to take discomfort, too, if you know what I mean.”

  “What?”

  “No plumbing. In the winters it hit thirty below. Some fun going to the outhouse.” The large, square face split in a smile.

  “Ted Williams was my idol. He played for the Minneapolis Millers. It was 1938. He was skinny, but he must have hit forty homers. They called him ‘The Splendid Splinter.’ Later Joe D. was my idol, but then it was Ted. Some coaches encouraged me and my brother John encouraged me and I heard there was gonna be a tryout down in Eau Claire and I went, but my mother didn’t want me to. She wanted all of us to stay together. My mother said she would be happy if when we grew up, all of us lived within fifty miles of Boyceville.

  “I went to the camp anyway. They signed me and a while later sent me home. It was cut-down time and they had no place for me. I asked Ivy Griffin, the man who signed me, ‘Hey, what should I do?’

  “ ‘When you go home,’ he said, ‘play as much ball as you can.’

  “I went back to the farm and did what Ivy told me. I played Softball once a week. But I was twenty years old then and I was thinking it had been some crazy dream, Pruschka Pafko playing with Ted Williams and Joe D.

  “Now there was only a month left in the season. It was harvest time. A shiny car pulls up. My mother thinks it must be someone selling tractors. But the man says, ‘Where’s Andy?’

  “ ‘He’s workin’ in the field.’

  “ ‘I want to talk to him.’

  “Someone at Eau Claire had gotten hurt. It was Ivy Griffin in the car. They needed me. The hell with the harvest. I got signed for seventy-five dollars a month. Four years later in the major leagues, I was able to buy a car myself.”

  Pafko sipped beer and shook his head. “Baseball was a tough life. I didn’t hit much in Eau Claire but then a good year at Green Bay. Then down in the Sally League, I tied Enos Slaught
er’s record with eighteen triples. Then to the Pacific Coast League. I won the batting championship with .356. Then, in ‘44, I had my first year with the Cubs.

  “Telling it here doesn’t make it sound hard, but it was hard. I never had played baseball, only softball, but there wasn’t a guy, not one, who helped me. Nobody helped anybody. The minors was a jungle. Other guys were jealous. I had to figure everything out for myself. I started standing way back from the plate and stepping in. As I moved up, I had to crowd the plate. The higher you get, the better outside curves you see.

  “After the Cubs won in ‘45, they started downhill, but now my life was getting easier. I liked Chicago. They knew me everywhere. I played the outfield, third. I was liked. I was crowding the plate, getting my hits.

  “Wham. Over to Brooklyn. Now every time I come up, somebody’s throwing at my ear. Day after day, those pitchers flattened me. I’d been brushed, but I never knew what it meant really being thrown. You know what Durocher says. ‘Don’t stir up weak teams.’ Nobody bothered me with the Cubs. But Brooklyn had this murderers’ row. Hodges. Campanella. Snider. Furillo. Someone ahead of me hits a homer. The next pitch comes at my head. That wasn’t fun. Those Dodger-Giant games weren’t baseball. They were civil war.”

  He had downed the sandwich. He said he didn’t want more beer. “Ginger ale,” he told the waitress.

  “You remember when Robinson was signed?”

  “It didn’t bother me none. There was a great pitcher on the Cubs, Claude Passeau. He came from Mississippi. He’d get on Robinson. Throw at him. So would some other guys. Now it’s 1948, and I’m new at third and Robinson hits a triple and bowls me over. I always had a good glove, but I was feeling my way as an infielder. He really crashed me. I thought, ‘Next time—there’ll be a next time—I’ll get even.’

  “Sure enough that same game he hits another line drive and here he comes again. I get the relay and tag him pretty good. I give him the ball and some fist and the left elbow. He gets up and looks. He starts walking off, looking back, challenging. I don’t want to fight, but I’m ready. I look higher. All I saw in the stands was black. I thought, ‘Uh-oh. I don’t want to start a race riot.’ But I admired him, you know what I mean?