The Boys of Summer Page 35

  “Do you still play ball?” I said.

  “He don’t even play catch,” said Chester.

  “Arm still hurt?”

  “It ain’t that. The Mets were after me when I had the store. Play in old-timers’ games. I figured, why? I got the store and I got to work at it, but once the Yankees was having one and Fern said, ‘Go ahead. See the guys you played with.’ I went. I put on spikes. I’d been off ‘em ten years. I rocked. I thought I was gonna fall over. I couldn’t walk on spikes. I made it to the outfield. Someone hit a little fly. I ain’t caught a fly in ten years. Son of a bitch, the ball looked as though it was six miles up. I said to myself, ‘See the old guys if you want to, but for Christ’s sakes, don’t do this no more. Don’t ever put on spikes again.’”

  The three young workers across the shack sat wide-eyed. “You got to watch out for yourself,” Furillo told them. “There was this guy on the team, Carl Erskine, and he was such a nice guy that when they ordered him to throw at a hitter, he’d throw ten feet over the man’s head. And he had arm trouble and he quit young and they put out stories that they were really looking after him. He was through in 1959, the year before I got hurt. I said to him, ‘Hey, is that right? The ball club treated you fair?’ He didn’t want no trouble, but I’ll never forget what he told me. He said, ‘Carl. Take care of Carl.’”

  Furillo puffed air and offered me more coffee. “If I really wanted to hit ‘em,” he said, “I’d have another suit. Two back operations. The bad leg had me walking funny and I had to have two operations for a ruptured disc. That come on account of the injury, but I figure, fuck it, I got to take care of myself and I can do it.” The young hard hats nodded vigorously.

  “Hey,” Furillo said, “what is it with the colored today? They got to get welfare? It’s tough, but was it easy for the Italians? Five dollars a week in the apple orchard, was that easy? Why should the colored have it easier than anybody?”

  More nods.

  “It isn’t the same,” I said. “You were playing ball and Robinson couldn’t.”

  “He wasn’t the only guy got thrown at.”

  “Ah, you’re talking like a hard hat.”

  “That’s what I fucking am. But when this building gets through, it’s in the barrel. I put the lid on this city, New York, where I had some good times, and Los Angeles, where I should never have gone, and back with Fern up around Reading and hunt and fish and take my pension. I’ll be fifty. Hey, I like a lot of colored. Campy and Joe Black, he was a nice guy. I don’t think they ought to have it easy, that’s all.”

  He does talk like a hard hat and he was a baseball Bolshevik. He fits no label. He is too human, too large, too variable, too much the independent. In one voice he talks against welfare, like a Buckley, and in another voice, which is the same, he talks about ball players’ rights and defies a system, like Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

  “Hey,” he shouted. “Who got a hammer? I need a hammer. Having trouble with a door.” He turned. “I got plenty tricks to learn,” he said. Someone found him the hammer and he began zipping into his winter clothes, gruff, cheerful and defiant of pity.

  “Come ‘round in spring,” Furillo said, slamming a yellow hard hat on his head. “In spring we’ll sit outside and you and me can take a little sun.”

  11

  ONE STAYED IN BROOKLYN

  The New York Mets were the worst team in the league during the days of Casey Stengel; their players were bitterly, hopelessly humiliated. When some of the youngsters showed signs of becoming first-rate professionals, Gil Hodges was named manager and the Mets became serious.

  CURT FLOOD (WITH RICHARD CARTER), The Way It Is

  Late spring is the time to see Gil Hodges work. Not summer. Then heat sits on the cylinder of Shea Stadium and a baseball season, like New York summer, grinds down strong men. Not September. The weather cools, but then the final pressures of a pennant race clamp Hodges into a vise. He manages the New York Mets, contenders like the Dodgers, but a generation younger than he, people playing the same game in a different time, and by September his face shows leather strain lines and his soft voice becomes ever more tightly controlled. But in late spring Hodges watches his ball club settle in. He almost relaxes. There are no baseball irrevocabilities in the month of May.

  During August of 1968, Hodges suffered the forewarnings of a heart attack. The Mets were moving from ninth place to eighth amid dizzying waves of adulation. Hodges, the still point, smoked heavily and tried to bury tension within his large frame. On about September 19, 1968, he felt what he calls “pain like a drill boring into my chest.” It was not excruciating, but neither did it go away. For five days he ignored the boring, the way his old roommate Carl Furillo might have done, although the pain disrupted sleep and shattered concentration. “Did I know what it was?” Gil Hodges says. “I suppose so. Yes. Did I want to know what it was? No.” He continued managing for a week. Then, during the second inning of a night game at Atlanta on September 24, he excused himself from the dugout, walked into the dressing room and lay down on a training table. His skin was ashen and he felt chilly. “I got to rest,” he told Gus Mauch, chief trainer of the Mets, who had followed him inside.

  A local physician put a stethoscope to Hodges’ chest, and said he thought Gil could go home and check into a hospital the next morning. Mauch, who is not an M.D., was more cautious. He had suffered a heart attack himself. He urged Hodges to ride a taxi with him to Crawford W. Long Hospital, which is named for the man who first mastered the use of ether. By midnight Hodges lay under intensive care. He had suffered a myocardial infarct, a heart attack of so-called “mild” proportions. He had walked about for a week, hit fungoes, pitched batting practice, with a developing coronary. The strongest of the Dodgers was fortunate still to be alive at forty-four.

  As far as researchers can tell, six specific factors contribute to the heart attack that strikes a man in his mid-forties: poor diet, insufficient exercise, overweight, heredity, smoking and—catchall for most ills of modern man—stress. Only the last two considerations apply directly to Hodges. Still two out of six were enough. He built an outer barrier of calm, but he churned beneath the way the sea churns below a pale, rippled surface. “And the smoking got out of hand,” he says. “I knew I was smoking too much. Don’t write I’ve stopped. I sneak one every so often. But I’m fine. I do sit-ups, push-ups, run. I do everything I ever did except pitch batting practice. I’m perfect, if you can overlook a few mental hang-ups.”

  “Such as?”

  “You have one of those things, you don’t forget it.”

  Gil Hodges the ball player cast a sense of strength. He stood six feet two, and with no extra fat he weighed more than two hundred pounds. After playing cards once, he returned to his compartment on a train and found Dick Williams reading in the lower berth. “How did you do?” Williams asked.

  Hodges smiled faintly. Then he slipped both arms under Williams, 190 pounds himself, and lifted him into the upper bunk.

  He had the largest hands in baseball. “Gil wears a glove at first because it’s fashionable,” Pee Wee Reese said. “With those hands he doesn’t really need one.” People were always kidding about his physical powers.

  Hodges has to be the strongest human in baseball.

  What about Ted Kluszewski?

  If he’s stronger than Hodges, he ain’t human.

  Did you hear what went on after Hodges hit the beach at Okinawa?

  The Japs surrendered.

  Not only that. Half our Marines did, too.

  You know what happens when big Gil squeezes that bat?

  No. What?

  Instant sawdust.

  Beyond the jokes stood a large, quiet, intense man, somewhat surprised at his own success and damned to cringe before tough, righthanded pitching. Remembering Hodges against Sal Maglie or Allie Reynolds, I see a man hating to come to bat against such intimidating stuff and hating more the fact of his own fear.

  One’s response to a curve ball and its
illusion of impending concussion is almost reflex. One wants to duck. Some, like Billy Cox, conquer the reflex with comparative ease. Most do not. Athletes as heroic as Jim Thorpe never learned to control the reflex well enough to hit a good curve. Without precisely knowing—good hitting remains as mysterious as any other art—I suspect a mild phobia is at play. Mild, because batting is genuinely a high-risk occupation. It is normal for a hittter to be aware of the danger.

  Few of us are anxious to paint bridges; real risk exists and our sense of self-preservation asserts itself in distaste for high winds that keen through suspension cables. Conversely, the fearless bridge painter may himself be discomfited by tunnels or by ocean breakers. No one is a coward because he shuns suspension towers, or because he draws back from a baseball hurtling toward his head. Rather it is a measure of courage that Hodges fought his cringe reflex year after year. To taste fear as he did and to choke it down and make a fine career is a continuing act of bravery.

  Hodges hit 370 home runs, four in a single game. Swinging hard, he batted .273 across eighteen seasons. But his conflict, the reflex to duck contending with the desire to hit, almost snipped his career before he was thirty.

  On September 23, 1952, the day on which the Dodgers clinched a pennant, Hodges singled off Karl Drews, a Yankee reject who had joined the Phillies and threw hard sinkers. Hodges did not hit safely again that week. Humiliation came with the World Series. Hodges went to bat twenty-six times, and during these tense games, when men about him rose to the drama of the days, he suffered in a public impotence. He walked five times, but he made no hits in any of the seven Series games.

  The spring brought no relief. Hodges outran a ground ball for a single on opening day, but by the middle of May he was batting .187 and Charlie Dressen sent him to the bench. The fans of Brooklyn had warmed to the first baseman as he suffered his slump. A movement to save him rose from cement sidewalks and the roots of trampled Flatbush grass. More than thirty people a day wrote to Hodges. Packages arrived with rosary beads, rabbits’ feet, mezuzahs, scapulars. One man wrote that pure carrot juice would restore the batting eye. “Vitamin A,” he explained.

  Charlie Dressen knew what was wrong. He ground his teeth and swung his arms. “The trouble,” he said, “is they won’t let ya teach ‘em till they is real down.” Without telling Hodges, Dressen asked Barney Stein, the team photographer, to shoot hundreds of feet of movies. A few days after the benching, Dressen thought Hodges was ready to be taught and called him into his office, beside the clubhouse.

  In the most telling strip of Stein’s film, Hodges was hitting and Andy Seminick was catching for Cincinnati. As the ball approached, Hodges drew back his bat, and stepped toward the third-base dugout. His stride carried him away from home plate. He followed the pitch into Seminick’s glove, certain that it was outside. It was a strike. Had Hodges swung, his weight would have gone toward the safety of a dugout, while his arms and bat moved toward the ball. He was off balance. His timing suffered. He got neither weight nor accuracy into the swing. “See it, see it,” Dressen cried.

  “Mmmm,” Hodges said, for “yes.”

  “Now ya been stepping that way for a long time and maybe ya ain’t gonna stop,” Dressen said, “but I can fix it so a step like that don’t hurt ya, if you’re willing to listen.”

  “I’m listening right now, Charlie.”

  “Keep your front foot where it is, but move the back foot farther from the plate. See what I mean. Now when ya pull back, the way ya do, you’ll just be stepping into line. It won’t hurt ya so much, stepping outa the way like ya do, cuz ya won’t be really stepping out of the way, you’ll really be stepping into it. I wancha to overcompensate, or some word like that.”

  That season, 1953, Hodges batted .302. In the World Series of 1953 he led all the Dodger hitters with .364. His weakness persisted, but his career was saved.

  “I remember that slump very well,” Hodges said softly, as we left his house on Bedford Avenue near Avenue M. It is a large, unpretentious, comfortable home—the Hodges have four children—in a quiet neighborhood that has shown little outward change since the 1940s. We were going to drive from the house to Shea Stadium, where that night the Mets would play the Chicago Cubs. “Having had to fight slumps, does that help you manage?” I said, as we climbed into my car.

  “Not by itself,” Hodges said, “although I understand you can’t help a man until he’s willing to be helped. I probably would have understood that anyhow. Charlie’s way isn’t the same as mine. Take the man in the other dugout tonight, Leo Durocher; not in any way criticizing, he makes noise. I’m not built that way. I communicate through my coaches. I have rules that I want obeyed, but I keep the coach between myself and the player, which establishes a distance that I like and prevents arguments. You don’t want to be arguing with them yourself when you’re manager.”

  “How is it working with people of a different generation?”

  Hodges mused. “Go left up here,” he said. “We want to hit the Shore Parkway. Then into Van Wyck. That’ll take us in.”

  Silence. Hodges uses silences. He seems to enjoy them.

  “Is it tough working with kids?” I said.

  “Oh,” Hodges said. “That’s right. You had a question in there, didn’t you? No. I haven’t found it all that tough.”

  “Your background is different from theirs. You came out of the mines.”

  “No. I was never down in the mines. My father never would let me go down in the mines.”

  “Mining country.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Well, you came out of hard times, and when you broke in, the game was all-white. Now you’re managing men who’ve gotten good money to sign, and they’re black and white.”

  Hodges looked over oncoming traffic as we pulled onto the Shore Parkway. “I can honestly say that color was never a problem to me,” he said. “It wasn’t to Pee Wee or the others either. And it isn’t now.” He puffed his lips in a faint sigh and began to talk easily about his background.

  Princeton, his hometown, lies below the White River in the southwestern corner of Indiana. You can make a triangle from Anderson to Princeton to Louisville—Erskine, Hodges and Reese—and plot the Dodgers from the Middle Border. Princeton was coal country, and (as Gil remembers) his father rode down to deep veins in order to support his family and died slowly, one part of his body at a time. An accident cost an eye. Another cost some toes. At fifty-four he injured a knee and as Big Charlie Hodges lay in a hospital recovering from surgery, an embolism stopped his heart in 1952.

  “Did you want to go down into the mines?” I said, as we drove beside the foul blue waters of Jamaica Bay.

  “I didn’t want to go down,” Hodges said. “I didn’t want to ever work down there.”

  Charlie Hodges had two sons, Gil, called “Bud,” and Bob. Both were big and well coordinated and Charlie taught them what he knew about playing ball. If he could not escape the mines himself, at least he’d show the boys a better way. After high school they went to St. Joseph’s College near Indianapolis. Bob, fourteen months older than Gil, entered the Army in 1942. Gil, who ran track, and played football, basketball and baseball, caught the attention of Stanley Feezle, the scout and sporting goods man who signed Carl Erskine. Feezle sent Hodges to a tryout camp at Olean, New York. From there Hodges went to Brooklyn, for personal examination by Branch Rickey. He was, as someone has said, “the kind of prospect who secures a scout’s job for life.”

  Over three morning workouts, Rickey moved Hodges through eight positions, every one but pitcher. “You ever think of catching, young man?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You have a little hitch in your throw at shortstop. Catching would be a marvelous opportunity.”

  Hodges signed for a $500 bonus and joined the 1943 Dodgers, a team of Durocher, Luis Olmo, Mickey Owen, Billy Herman and a waning Dolph Camilli. Hodges played one game—at third. He walked once, stole a base and struck out twice. Then he was drafted
into the Marines, where he spent the next twenty-nine months. Whatever heroics he may have worked, he keeps to himself. He says only that he started smoking “to have something to do sitting in those holes in Okinawa.”

  Bob Hodges’ baseball career ended with a bad arm in the low minors. Then he went to work for the U.S. Rubber Company. When Gil returned to baseball, Rickey gave him another $500, and sent him to Newport News to master catching. A year later Hodges leaped to Brooklyn and became catcher number three.

  The next season, 1948, the outlines of the team began to show. Billy Cox took over third. Jackie Robinson moved to second base. Snider and Shuba appeared in the outfield. Roy Campanella caught and Hodges, handed Robinson’s discarded mitt, was assigned to first.

  He had to struggle. That season he batted .249. But he hit twenty-three home runs for the pennant winners of 1949 and led the league in fielding. In 1951 he hit forty homers, the second highest total in baseball. He seemed to have arrived. Then the slump seized him.

  “With me,” he said, as we parked close to the players’ entrance at Shea Stadium, “it was a battle. I always had trouble with the outside pitch. Some don’t. I did.” He shrugged.

  We walked through the Mets’ dressing room, carpeted and empty, into Hodges’ office, a large underground room without windows. “Did you plan on managing?” I said.

  “How can you plan on getting a job that may not be offered? I suppose I hoped, but when George Selkirk asked me to take over Washington, I didn’t jump. I called some people. Talked to my wife, Joan.”