Waiting for Teddy Williams (25 page)

E.A. threw out of the stretch for five minutes. Then Teddy stood up out of his crouch.

“Well?” he asked Stan.

Stan sighed. He drew in his breath through his teeth and shook his head. “Boy got some old-fashioned heat, him. He got a good enough down-breaking hook, nice tight spin on the ball. Fair slider. Ain't got no change is the whole trouble.”

“He learns quick enough, if I do say so,” Teddy said.

Stan snorted, a mirthless noise. “E.W., what you mean? I ever in my life see a young fella that already knowed everything, here he is in the flesh. I ain't surprised. Apple don't fall far from the tree. Got red hair besides. That a bad sign. That the worst. You wants the truth, I never knowed a redheaded pitcher keep his composure out there.”

Louisianne laughed. Everything her father said delighted her, and Gypsy seemed charmed by both Stan and his daughter. But E.A. couldn't tell whether Cajun Stan was kidding or serious. All he knew was that if he could learn something about pitching from the Baseball Man, he intended to.

 

They were sitting on the stoop, Teddy and E.A. and Stan and Louisianne, drinking ice-cold root beer. Gypsy and Gran were inside making Spam sandwiches on Wonder Bread. E.A. was showing Louisianne his baseball cards.

“So,” Teddy said to his old bud. “Will you work with him?”

“Oh, I work with him all right,” Stan said. “But they going to be a steep price. Know-all smart aleck like this young fella? I ain't studying no free teaching, no.”

“When you get him signed, take your cut,” Teddy suggested. “Fifteen percent.”

“I going to. I taking my full fifteen percent. Maybe twenty. Meantime, Louisianne and I need to live, us. Pass me that there cigar box, boy. Let's see what you got.”

E.A. handed him the box containing his baseball cards. Stan riffled through them, muttering criticisms of the players. “Ted Williams,” he said, holding up Ted's rookie card. “I strike him out in three pitches. Four at most.”

Stan examined E.A.'s Cy Young. “Winningest pitcher of all,” he read. “Huh. I take this. For payment.”

Thinking Stan meant Cy Young, E.A. reached for the cigar box. Stan yanked it away. “I take
this
,” he said, shaking the box. “Sell to a fella I knows down Shreveport, c'llects cards. In the meantime, my girl here hold on to it for me.”

Louisianne took the cigar box. “Let him keep one,” she said. She held the Cy Young out toward E.A. But when he reached for it, it vanished.

H
IS FULL NAME
was Stan T. Paige, no relation to Satchel, and he was from Tippytoe, Louisiana. He'd been orphaned at six and raised by an aunt, the madam of a local house of ill repute for whom he was, variously, an errand boy, general nuisance, and surrogate son. The aunt, retired now, was quite wealthy and entirely respectable. Louisianne, whose mother had run off with a voodoo band when her daughter was three, lived with her great-aunt during the winter and traveled with her father in the summer.

When Teddy met Cajun Stan, the Baseball Man was enjoying a three-to-five all-expenses-paid scholarship, courtesy of the state of Texas, for swindling the First National Bank of San Antonio out of $100,000. The money had been designated for a new American Legion baseball stadium. But Stan, in Las Vegas, had plunked it all down on a bet that San Antonio's double-A baseball team, for which he was pitching at the time, would win their league title. The fact that they did win was of little consolation to him when he was banned from the game for life and sent to prison for extortion.

Over the next several days, Stan showed E.A. a craftier pickoff move to first. He taught him how to push harder off the rubber with his right foot and demonstrated several different arm angles to come at the batter with. How to conceal the ball in his glove until the last possible moment, how to “cut” his fastball by positioning his top two fingers slightly off center on the outside of the ball so that the pitch ran away from righties and into lefties, how to surprise left-handed batters by throwing a back-door breaking pitch that started half a foot off the plate and then dived in to nip the outside corner at the last moment.

“How fast?” E.A. asked Stan, who was holding the radar gun, a week after his training started.

“Ninety-four,” Stan said. “Second time around the league—second time around the
lineup
maybe—they gone jump all over that heat.” Stan set down the gun and held out his hand for the ball. “Son,” he said, “fetch you hitting bat.”

“What?”

“You a hitter, ain't you? Fetch you bat.”

E.A. got his bat. Cajun Stan took off his white hat and set it on the Packard seat. Louisianne helped him out of his jacket.

The Baseball Man walked out to the mound. “Stand in,” he said.

“Aren't you going to warm up?”

“I been warm up forty year. Step into that batter's box, you.”

As E.A. stepped up to the plate, Teddy squatted down behind him.

“Where's your gear?” E.A. asked him.

“Don't swing,” Teddy said. “Just watch.”

As delicate as a ballet dancer, Stan lifted his hands high over his head three times and pitched the ball. “Ninety-six,” Teddy said.

“No,” E.A. said.

“It's coming again,” Teddy said. “Same place, right over the heart of the plate. Swing.”

E.A. swung when the ball was in Teddy's glove.

“Swing again,” Teddy said. “Now that you've seen it.”

Again, Stan's hands rose over his head three times. His right arm came snapping down like a cobra striking. E.A. stepped out onto his front foot and started to swing, tried to hold back and couldn't. For the first time in his life he fell down in the batter's box.

Clap, clap, clap
.

From the stoop, over slow, sarcastic applause, Gran said, “He's ready at last. That's a stunt the Sox'll pay millions for. Look out, Boston. Here comes Ethan Allen.”

Worse yet, Louisianne was making her palms-up stage gesture toward him, sitting on his ass in the batter's box, and Gypsy was laughing.

E.A. looked out toward the mound. “What in hell was that pitch?” he said.

“That,” Teddy said, “was a straight change. That's your ticket to the top, son. If you can learn it.”

M
AYNARD E. FLYNN JUNIOR
sat in his office overlooking the diamond. He was, at last, very close to completing his doctoral degree through the Pacific Northwest Internet Correspondence Program, in which he had matriculated sixteen years before. Better yet, he was even closer to disposing of the Boston Red Sox franchise. As the
Globe
had discovered, and published in this morning's edition to the consternation and outrage of all New England, for several months he had been negotiating secretly to sell the club to a consortium of Hollywood luminaries and political activists who planned to move the team to Beverly Hills.

A local group headed up by several former Sox players had also made a bid. In fact, a somewhat higher one. But the big lummox had no intention of selling the club to them.

Working his hand flexer frenetically, Maynard grinned. He loved thinking that he would be remembered as the man who, by eviscerating the Sox and then packing the whole kit and caboodle off to the far side of the continent, had with one bold stroke exorcised the curse that had hung over the team since the sale of Babe Ruth. Now the Nation would never again have to confront their great fear, that the Sox might actually win a Series and leave them with nothing to hope for. At the end of the season the team and their fans would go out in a blaze of defeat, leaving the people of New England happy losers for all time to come.

True, the Sox were somehow currently head-to-head with the Yankees in a battle for the lead in the Eastern Division race, largely because of the Legendary Spence's brilliant managing. Through a stroke of evil genius, Maynard had brought up Ted Williams's son, John Henry, who had played several undistinguished innings in a minor-league game in Florida, and insisted that Spence start him in left field. After a long session with Spence in the batting cage before the game, John Henry went 4–5 and belted two balls over the Green Monster. Thus far, that was the way the summer was going. The manager used every Spencerian trick for which he was famous and some no one had ever seen before. To enrage crowds at away games and whip up his own players, he'd patrol the perimeter of the diamond carrying a stick with a nail in the end. The boos descended on him along with the debris thrown out of the stands. “We do not need Mr. Spencer to pick up after the fans of Comiskey Park,” the
Sun-Times
wrote. Never one to go by the book, Spence signaled notoriously slow runners to steal home, called for the double steal with two outs, started coaching third base himself, and routinely gave runners the green light to try to stretch singles into doubles and doubles into triples, often catching his opponents flat-footed.

Late one afternoon before a night game at the Fen with New York, a tall man, graying at the temples, walked into the clubhouse office carrying a thick book called
Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the Mechanics of Pitching
, of which he was the author.

He opened this tome to chapter five. “Did you know, Spence, that if we could attain enough speed, we could go back to 'seventy-eight?”

“What the deuce for?” Spence said.

“To play that winner-take-all game with New York over again. Throw Dent something else, an eephus pitch maybe. Or,” the tall man continued, “back to 1920 and persuade Frazee to hold on to Ruth.”

“I'd have to rename my parrot here,” Spence said. “There wouldn't be any Curse of the Bambino.”

“Macaw,” the bird said indignantly. “Not parrot.”

“With a little time travel,” the author said, “think of the team we could put together. Myself, Yaz, Teddy Ballgame. In the meantime, Stan sent me down to help you out.”

“I like the team we're putting together, Alien. I'm glad to see you. You feel like killing some Yankees tonight?”

That night the Alien Man, having come out of retirement after more than a decade, beat New York 8–4, throwing a five-hitter.

The lummox wasn't about to panic. He'd seen the Sox on the brink of success before, and he knew it would come to a screeching halt with the turn of the season and the first cool days and nights of fall. The boys of October the Red Sox were not. Nor had they been since 1918. Nor would they ever be, world without end, amen. Maynard E. Flynn Junior, B.A., M.A., and soon-to-be Ph.D., would see to that.

But shipping the team off to Hollywood was not all the lummox had in mind. By the time the snow flew, as his father used to say, he would have another surprise for the good people of Boston. Because immediately after the last game of the season at Fenway, the new owner intended to convert their “lyric little bandbox” to a museum dedicated to the abject failures of the Sox to win a Series.

In the foyer of this unique sports edifice would be, of course, a life-size effigy of Bucky Dent slapping his three-run homer off feckless Mike Torrez. The rest of the museum would consist of a replica of Fenway Park. Around this diamond the paying public—and if the lummox knew Boston, there would be no shortage of people willing to pay through the nose to see the Red Sox Century of Failure and Despair Museum—could stroll at their leisure. The tall figure of Bill Buckner would be off the grass at first base, stooped low, but not low enough, as the ground ball that should have ended the '86 Series with a championship for Boston scooted between his sore, aging legs. That this had actually happened in Shea Stadium was not a problem to the lummox; a little magic realism would not hurt the tableau he had in mind. From that same fateful Series he'd have young Calvin Schiraldi on the mound, glove on top of his head, an eternal, agonized wince on his face, having just given up a third consecutive base hit with victory one unattainable out away. And who was this but Teddy Ballgame, frozen in transparent blue-green ice inside a cryogenic tank in the on-deck circle, making an ungracious gesture at the press box. Don Zimmer, one foot on the dugout steps, rubbed the gleaming metal plate in his head that doubtless contributed to his decision to leave Torrez in to get shelled even after Dent's homer. The psychologically challenged Jimmy Piersall capered buck-naked in the outfield, his fingers wagging from his ears. Yaz stood at the plate, eternally popping out weakly to end everything in '78. And there would be more, much more, including a darkened night scene of the four-time Cy Young Award winner, All-Star shortstop, American League MVP, and Triple Crown-winning left-fielder, in tatters and chains, being ferried in a skiff along a dark stream by two evil-looking men in Confederate military caps, entitled
SOLD DOWN THE RIVER
.

The
pièce de resistance
was already completed. It stood a few feet away from the lummox's desk, covered with a white sheet. Maynard could scarcely wait to reveal it to Spence, whose clacking spikes he could hear, even now, approaching the door.

 

Spence gave his cheery shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits knock and stepped inside, the Curse on his shoulder. Maynard pretended to be hard at work on his ever-evolving thesis.

“Well, Junior,” the manager said. “Still studying, I see.”

“A student studies,” the lummox said. “It's what we do. And kindly don't call me Junior. I believe that we've discussed that on prior occasions.”

The lummox worked his hand flexer and gave Spence and the Curse of the Bambino his fishy stare. Spence wondered what the boy had concealed under the white sheet. Some new weightlifting apparatus, no doubt. He wished the lummox would quit knuckle-punching him and his players in the arm. Awkward though he was, he had a nasty way of catching you right on the muscle, making it smart like a bumblebee sting for twenty minutes afterward.