Waiting for Teddy Williams (22 page)

E.A. nodded.

“Well,” Teddy said, “it's the same with a hitter. You can usually figure out his weakness. If you can't figure it out, you can create one. Keep him off balance. Get him guessing and make him guess wrong. Say the first two, three times you throw him your hook you drop down to three-quarters arm. Then in a critical situation, come at him from three-quarters with pure heat. Or come straight over the top, so he thinks it's heat, and throw your bender.

“Another way,” Teddy continued, “when you come to your set, watch for the split second when the hitter ain't quite ready for you to pitch. That's when to throw the ball. Don't take the same amount of time to get your sign, get set, and go into your motion with every pitch. Watch your batter a little. Let him get uneasy. Catch him off-guard.”

“How can I tell when he's off-guard?”

“Oh,” Teddy said, “he might move his hands different. Wave the bat a different way, shift his front foot, jerk his head. Watch his face. You'll sense it more than you'll know it. Every hitter has a weakness, Ethan. It's a hard proposition, hitting a baseball. A good pitcher makes it just a little harder. Once in a while, try to make eye contact with the hitter. The split second you catch his eye, pitch.”

“That sounds pretty hard,” E.A. said.

“Why, Ethan, don't you know how hard
all
this is? Baseball's the hardest game there is, man. Hard for the pitchers, hard for the fielders, hard for the hitters. Especially hard for the hitters. Hitting a baseball coming at you ninety miles an hour or more? That's the hardest thing there is to do.”

By the end of the summer, E.A. had a pitching record with the Outlaws of 9–1 and was throwing well over 80 mph. “Phenomenal” was the word Editor James Kinneson had used in the
Kingdom County Monitor
to describe his pitching.

One afternoon in early September E.A. pitched a no-hitter against Memphremagog, striking out twenty of the twenty-seven batters he faced and having some fun, too, by pitching the last inning like the New York Mets' twenty-game-winning submarine pitcher from Japan, Suzika Koyoto, scaring the opposing batters out of their socks with his sidewinding motion. Immediately after the game a heavyset man in a rumpled suit, with a florid face and a meaty handshake, introduced himself as a scout on retainer with the Red Sox. E.A. had seen him earlier, standing behind the screen with a hand-held radar gun.

“I clocked you at ninety-four on two, three pitches,” the big man said. “For a thousand dollars, I can get you a tryout.”

“My father's over there,” E.A. said, pointing at Teddy standing under the elm, watching.

“I'm not offering the tryout to your father, kid. I'm offering it to you. A thousand dollars gets you a real good look. I'll set it all up.”

How Teddy got there so fast was a mystery. One moment he was leaning against the elm tree, watching the man in the suit talk to E.A. The next he was between E.A. and that man.

“Hey,” the man who'd identified himself as a scout said. “Who the hell are you?”

“I'm his father,” Teddy said. “And he's sixteen years old. It's illegal for you to talk to him. What's more, you don't represent the Red Sox or anybody else. I ever see you around here again, or hear you've bothered my boy, I'll kick your ass back to whatever hole you crawled out of.”

“You and whose army?” the man sneered.

Teddy continued to stand between E.A. and the big man.

“So,” the man said to E.A., around Teddy. “We'll talk.”

E.A. shook his head. “No,” he said. And he headed up the common with Teddy.

“It's your career going south,” the man called after him.

“Don't you ever, never think of paying nobody a cent of money to play baseball, Ethan,” Teddy said to E.A. “Time's coming when people are going to be paying you to play. You just keep working like you have been. It'll all fall into place for you.”

 

 

 

 

STAN THE BASEBALL MAN

I
N THE MEANTIME
everything seemed to be falling into place for the Boston Red Sox. They had the pitching, including a four-time American League Cy Young Award winner. They had the American League batting champ, who was also a strong MVP candidate. They had a world-class veteran shortstop, and in Eduardo “Sally” Salvadore they had the best catcher in baseball. As usual, they did not have much speed on the base paths. But the entire Red Sox Nation agreed that the Legendary Spence was the finest manager “money couldn't buy,” as the
Globe
had once put it, since Spence had eternally endeared himself to the Nation by many times declining the opportunity to double or even triple his salary by jumping ship to New York or another less parsimonious club.

Not only did Spence's team win the American League Eastern Division by eight games that season, posting the best record in baseball, they walked through the playoffs, and, on a sunny day in October, with the World Series tied at three games apiece, found themselves taking a one-run lead over the Chicago Cubs into the ninth inning at Fenway Park.

Earlier that afternoon, before the game, Spence had sat alone in his clubhouse office, staring at the photograph on the wall of the longtime Sox owner, Maynard E. Flynn Senior. Spence was wearing his uniform pants, spikes, red socks, and an old-fashioned strap undershirt. The man in the photograph, old Flynn, wore a three-piece suit and a Red Sox cap, and he was standing on a marina dock beside a gigantic blue marlin hanging from a block and tackle. The old man had sent the photo to Spence just before the All-Star break, and he'd scrawled across the bottom, “Wish you could be here, Maynard.”

There were no baseball memorabilia in the clubhouse office. No signed balls, no pictures of Spence's three previous American League pennant-winning teams, no photos of the manager with his numerous All-Star players. Just the faded picture of the old man and his enormous fish and, on the corner of Spence's battered, secondhand metal desk, the red, blue, yellow, and green macaw that Sally Salvadore had purchased for Spence some years ago from a Venezuelan fruit-boat captain. Sally had named the bird Curse of the Bambino and trained it to say, among other things, “New York Yankees, number one.”

“Chalk it up to bad luck,” Spence was telling the macaw on this afternoon of all afternoons in the city of Boston. “Set it down to pure misfortune, nothing more, nothing less, that this old baseball whore never got his Serious ring. But all that's about to change, my feathered friend. As of late this afternoon, Boston will be the new World Champions, and then I intend to cash it in, and I and you will strike straight for the Sunshine State. Spend our well-earned retirement persecuting them big blue fish like the one Maynard there claims he caught. This is the year, Curse.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” the macaw said.

Spence shot the bird a look. But even though the Boston manager was a born optimist who had endured twenty years and more of managing the Red Sox to reach this day, and the team was healthy, with arguably the best pitching, hitting, and defense in major-league baseball, in his heart he shared the bird's skepticism.

The old man in the photograph, who even now was probably ensconced in his skybox high above the stadium, waiting for the game to start, glared at Spence, who glared back. The Big Manager Upstairs (as Spence thought of God) knew that Maynard Flynn Senior had dug deep into his pockets to put together a contending team. Despite more than two decades of barging into the clubhouse to hector Spence after a loss, despite the recriminating telephone calls late at night when the team was on the road, Flynn already shouting into the phone when Spence groggily picked up, railing at him at the top of his lungs for laying down a failed squeeze or using or not using the hit-and-run or lifting or not lifting a pitcher at the first sign of trouble, despite the two times the old man had actually fired Spence—once in October after losing the Series to Cincinnati, rehiring him in time for spring training, the second time at the end of a bad losing season, actually making him sit out the entire year before bringing him back—despite these abuses of his power and many, many others that Spence could not bear to think of at this moment, he and Flynn had always had a special understanding and, Spence had long believed, a shared goal: winning the Series.

To give the old man his due, it was Maynard who had broken the detestable color barrier that had lingered on for so many years in Boston. Not, of course, from any commitment to equality, other than Flynn's equal and unmitigated contempt for all baseball players everywhere regardless of race or creed. But Maynard had worked hard to make Boston a perennial contender, and a perennial contender the Sox under Spence had been. Complaining, criticizing, sometimes literally howling, the old man had nonetheless consistently brought good and even great players to Boston. Just never quite enough of them, in Spence's opinion, to make the Sox World Champions.

For the Legendary Spence, who had won more major-league baseball games than any other active manager, and won every last one of them in a Red Sox uniform, believed something else, too. He believed that despite what he had just told the talking macaw about bad luck, luck had little to do with the fact that a championship banner had not flown over Fenway Park since 1918. On the bottom line, the misfortune and curses and seeming hexes—Dent's pop-fly home run in '78, Buckner's fateful miscue in '86, Harry Frazee's trading Babe Ruth to New York back in 1920—would not wash as explanations. The bottom line, the reason Boston had not won a major-league championship in three-quarters of a century, was that they had never, at least until now, been the best team in the majors.

Third-best or fourth-best, frequently. Second-best, once or twice. But not
the
best. They had not been as good as St. Louis in '67 or Cincinnati in '75 or the Yankees in '78 or the Mets in '86. No. On Spence's watch and before, they had always lacked one or two key players. And deep in his heart Spence feared that this year might be no different. It was almost as if, in his own shriveled heart, Maynard Flynn Senior did not really
want
the Sox to walk away in October with those elusive rings. As though, along with much of the rest of the downtrodden yet ever hopeful Red Sox Nation, from Rhode Island to northernmost Maine, Maynard would rather lose and hope to win another year than give Spence everything he needed to take his team all the way.

“And this afternoon may not be no different, Curse,” Spence said to the macaw, heaving himself out of the spring-shot office chair into which the former journeyman minor-league catcher was just able to wedge his five-foot-eleven, two-hundred-and-sixty-five-pound person, and struggling into his uniform shirt. “I hope the boys prove me wrong. But I wouldn't bet the ranch on it.”

The Curse of the Bambino fixed him with its yellow eye. “New York Yankees, number one,” it croaked.

“Not this year they ain't,” Spence said as the bird hopped onto his shoulder. “I just ain't all that sure we are, either.”

Then the two old friends headed up the tunnel toward the rumbling thunder of the most loyal, long-suffering fans in baseballdom, to see if, at last, they could bring that banner back to Boston.

 

Now, in the top of the ninth, with the Red Sox ahead by one run and Chicago runners on second and third and two outs, Boston's Cy Young shoo-in had just enticed the Cubs' number-nine hitter to pop up to center. That is when Maynard Flynn Senior found himself becoming emotional. He actually leaned forward in his skybox to see the catch that would bring Boston its first baseball championship since 1918.

“Look at this, will you?” he said to his grown son, Maynard Junior. But the big lummox, as his father and nearly everyone else in Boston referred to the boy, who at thirty-eight had been a fulltime graduate student for sixteen years, did not so much as glance up from the book he was reading.

The game-ending pop-up floated high over the playing field. Like a big scoop of vanilla ice cream in the drugstore sodas Maynard Senior had loved to order as a lad growing up in Revere. The Sox Gold Glove-winning center-fielder jogged in several steps. And at exactly that moment, Maynard E. Flynn Senior felt fulfilled. Over the years he had known everybody who was anybody in Boston baseball circles, from the great Teddy Ballgame to such illustrious fans as Honey Fitz and old Joe Kennedy. He'd seen Ted hit a home run in his last major-league at-bat, seen Fisk's shot heard round the world in '75. True, his only child, the lummox, had turned out to be a major-league disappointment, a mama's boy with no interest in baseball whatsoever. But the old man understood that in this world you couldn't have everything. And he suddenly realized that however he might have felt in the past, he infinitely preferred to bring Boston its first world championship since 1918 than to have a son he was proud of.

Maynard Flynn leaned forward a little more. He watched the fielder camp under the ball, now at the apex of its high parabola, white as snow against the bright blue New England fall sky. As a boy, the son of a loom operator at Revere Textiles and Woolens, Inc., the old man had played some twilight-league ball. Once, in an exhibition game against the Sox B team, he'd smacked an opposite-field ground-rule double off Lefty Grove. Until now that had been the highlight of his life, even better than the pennants his team had won or his purchase of the cable television station that carried, besides the Sox, the Bruins and the Patriots and that was now worth nearly as much as the franchise itself.

The old man thought fleetingly of that hit he'd gotten off the great Sox southpaw as his fielder waited for the ball. The runner on third had already crossed the plate. The man from second was rounding third. None of that mattered, though. Neither run would count. The fielder whacked his glove twice with his fist, and then he lost the descending baseball in the sun. He threw up his hands wildly, and the ball bounced off his forehead onto the outfield grass at exactly the same moment that the second runner plated what turned out to be the winning run for Chicago, the Sox going down one, two, three in the last of the ninth. But that didn't matter to the old man. By then nothing mattered to Maynard Flynn Senior. Because before the ball lost in the sun had rolled to a stop, he'd dropped dead in his skybox of what was later diagnosed as a massive coronary but which the entire Red Sox Nation, from the Legendary Spence to old Fletch in Kingdom Common, knew to have been sheer, ultimate disappointment.