Waiting for Teddy Williams (29 page)

“‘I
WANNA GO HOME
. I wanna go home. Oh, how I wanna go home.'”

The drunk in the black cowboy hat on the barstool to E.A.'s right had played Bobby Bare's classic “Detroit City” on the tavern jukebox six times. The same song Gypsy had sung on the water tank the day she'd told E.A. about Teddy racing the train. Now the drunk began to sing along.

 

“I wanna go home. I wanna go home.

Oh, how I wanna go home.”

 

E.A. knew exactly how the guy in the song felt. He, too, wanted to go home, home to the Green Mountains of Vermont. What's more, he wanted to stay there for the rest of his sorry life. Never mind that the Alien Man, sore arm and all, had come in and shut down New York for eight innings, until Sally's three-run homer in the ninth won the game and the Eastern Division championship for the Sox. Never mind that the entire city of Boston was now going crazy. For Ethan E.A. Allen, this was the worst night of his life. He'd gone from pitching a perfect inning to pitching like what he now knew he was, a hick woodchuck from the sticks who'd almost certainly never throw another ball off a major-league mound in his life.

‘“I wanna go home,”' the drunk started up again. “I wanna nother roun'. You ready for another roun', old buddy?”

Staring at the faded autographed pictures of old Red Sox stars over the bar—Earl Wilson, who in June of '63 was the first African American to pitch an American League no-hitter, Johnny Pesky, the great manager Dick Williams, and several dozen others—thinking that
his
picture would never be there, E.A. nodded.

“Ethan.”

He whirled around on the barstool. Somehow Teddy and Gypsy had located him in this alleyway dive off Boylston Street, wedged in between a pawnshop and a bail-bond office, a place so out of it that the only other customer, even on this night of all nights, was the singing drunk.

“Listen, Ethan,” Teddy said, slipping onto the stool to his left. “You might not think so, but you done fine out there tonight. You had a great inning your first time out. Then you had an off inning. That's all. That's baseball. Don't shake Sally off from now on.” Teddy grinned. “That's why he's catching for the Boston Red Sox and I'm running a lathe in a bat factory in Vermont.”

“Who's this guy?” the drunk in the hat said, leaning out around E.A. and staring at Teddy. “Some homeless? He looks like some homeless.”

“Ethan,” Gypsy said, giving him a hug. “Listen to your dad. He knows what he's talking about.”

E.A. had never heard Gypsy refer to Teddy as his dad before.

“Sweetie,” Gypsy said, taking a sip of his beer, “you know what I think you should do next time they start up with that woodchuck bullshit, pardon my language?”

E.A. was pretty sure there wouldn't
be
a next time. The next time he pitched a baseball game would probably be for the Outlaws, back in Kingdom Common.

But Gypsy said, “I'm going to tell you how to get an edge on the crowd, honey boy.”

“Hey,” the drunk said to E.A., “you drinking with me or talking with them?”

“I thought getting an edge on people was Teddy's department,” E.A. said.

“What you do, hon,” Gypsy continued, “next time that woodchuck business starts, you spit in their soup. That's what Gran used to tell me when kids at school ragged on me. You spit in their soup by enjoying it.”

“Enjoy having thousands of maniacs calling me a woodchuck?”

“How much wood could a woodchuck chuck,” Detroit City sang at the top of his lungs.

Teddy was staring straight into the mirror behind the bar at the drunk.

“Absolutely, baby doll,” Gypsy said. “Here's what you do. You remember who you are. You're Gypsy Lee Allen's boy, which makes you one-quarter Gran Allen's grandboy. That gives you twenty-five percent pure
WYSOTT
Allen meanness to draw on when you need it. Do you think Gran would care what the grandstand shouted at her?”

“She'd probably like it,” E.A. said.

“If woodshuck could shuck wood,” warbled the stumblebum. Teddy's eyes, the color of ice on an asphalt road, had not left the florid countenance of the singing drunk in the mirror.

“Gran would
definitely
like it,” Gypsy said. “She'd enjoy hearing those idiots holler at her and make fools out of themselves.”

“Who you calling fools and idiots?” the drunk said.

“Were you at that game tonight?” Gypsy said.

“ ‘Course I was,” the guy in the cowboy hat said.

“Were you calling my boy here a woodchuck?”

“'Course. Everybody was.”

“Well, then I'm calling you an asshole.” Gypsy turned back to E.A. “Red Sox fans are all as mad as hatters, Ethan. I've always suspected it, but I never truly realized it until today. Turning on their own players. Shouting derogatory epithets. Even we
WYSOTT
Allens don't do that to our own. If the Sox ever should win the Series, hon, their fans will burn this city down. I really believe they will, the crazy sons of bitches.”

“Who you callin' sons bitches?” the drunk said. “You callin' the goo' people of Boston sons bitches?”

Teddy leaned out around E.A. and gave the drunk a hard, direct look.

“What you staring at?” the drunk said to Teddy. “What you staring at, mister? You don't like my hat? Why don' you try knock it off?”

The drunk grabbed a fistful of E.A.'s shirt and said, “Drink up, Slick.” As Teddy started to stand up, Gypsy yanked the drunk off his stool. He swung at her wildly and missed, and she knocked him cold with an uppercut to the jaw.

The barkeep reached for the phone. But Teddy laid a twenty-dollar bill beside E.A.'s beer glass and said they were gone.

On the way out, E.A. said to Teddy, “Well, you going to pump me sober?”

“Nope,” Teddy said. “Way I figure, son, after a night like the one you've had, a man deserves a few beers if it'll make him feel any better.”

Then Teddy and Gypsy and E.A. headed out into the packed streets of the celebrating city, whose team not even the most devoted members of the Red Sox Nation could have predicted would beat the Yankees and reach the playoffs.

M
UCH LESS
the World Series. Yet magically, miraculously, incredibly, that is exactly where the Red Sox found themselves in mid-October. Up in Vermont, over coffee at the Common Hotel early on the morning that Moon made it official by putting up on the Green Monster the words
SOX TAKE SEVENTH GAME FROM TWINS, WIN PENENT
, Judge Charlie Kinneson told his brother the editor and Prof Benton and the elderly bat boys that yes, Boston was on the most remarkable roll he could remember. But the preponderance of the evidence led him to only one conclusion: no team in baseball was going to win four of seven games from Boston's opponent in the Series that fall, the New York Mets. The Mets, who had taken three of four games from the Sox back in early July during interleague play, were loaded with talent and depth. For starters, they had the best pitcher in baseball, Mario “Pancho” Villa. In addition, they had two other twenty-game winners on their pitching staff, the fearsome Japanese submarine pitcher, Suzika Koyoto, and the fastest pitcher in the National League, Doc Sweetwater Jones, who consistently threw 98 mph and patterned himself on Sal “the Barber” Maglie, throwing on the fists, grazing the hitter's chin, knocking his knees out from under him, and then, when he moved off the plate, spotting the ball on the outside corner where he couldn't have reached it with a mop handle. And they had a tall, pinch-faced long-ball hitter and Gold Glove first baseman named Miller Jacks.

Jacks had played briefly for the Sox six years before. Spence had personally run him off the field during a night game with the Orioles in Camden Yards for not hustling out a comebacker to the pitcher. Jacks had just stood at the plate, disgusted, while the pitcher threw him out, and Spence had flown out of the dugout and grabbed him by the neck and the seat of his uniform pants and charged into the tunnel with him, hurling him into the dressing room and trading him to New York the next morning. The old man had backed Spence one hundred percent, even paying the manager's hefty league fine for attacking one of his own players. Afterward, as they watched the tape of Spence giving Miller Jacks the bum's rush in front of fifty thousand delighted Baltimore fans, the old man repeatedly pumped Spence's hand and said it was his finest moment in baseball. As far as Spence was concerned, not running out a ground ball was a cardinal sin, tantamount to, say, badmouthing Willie Nelson. Though it was about what he'd expect from a fella who had a last name for a first name and a first name, or something close to it, for a last name. Spence was greatly looking forward to taking Jacks and the Mets to school in the Series and then cashing in his baseball career forever and going fishing.

 

Late on the Friday night before the opening game of the Series, E.A., who since his debacle against the Yankees had been relegated to throwing BP again, lay in bed in his hotel room listening to Sally snore and thinking about baseball. How he'd run on the village green in the evenings to build up his legs when he was just a tyke. Gotten the game-winning hit off the four-eyed schoolteacher in the championship game against Pond in the Sky. And thrown all those no-hitters against the Outlaws' rivals. Sometimes in the late innings, when a game was in the bag, he'd pitched like Dazzy Vance of the old Brooklyn Dodgers, tipping way back and shutting his eyes and hiding the ball behind his leg so it seemed to come at the hitter out of deep center field. Or like Walter Johnson, who came from the side faster than anyone but Feller had ever come over the top. He could kick his leg higher than Juan Marichal, spin around like the great El Tiante, and throw an eephus pitch like Rip Sewell's or the Alien's, up, up, and up, then right down over the plate, a perfect strike, while the batter watched with his mouth open. And that's when the inspiration came to him.

 

“I ain't about to be badgered, not today of all days,” Spence told E.A. the next morning, just before the Sox were set to take the field for BP. “If you're here to badger me about pitching, kid, we've been over all that before. Like I said, you've got a future with the game. But not this year. You need a season at Bristol, then one at Providence, working on getting that fourth pitch. Now skedaddle. I got to get the boys ready for that underhanded pitcher going against us.”

“I can help with that.”

“You're a hitting coach now?” Spence said.

“No,” E.A. said. “But I can pitch BP just like Koyoto.”

Spence's face turned the shade of a cooked lobster. Just before he blew, E.A. said, “Watch and see for yourself.”

Then he left, fast, before something really unfortunate happened.

E.A. told the groundskeepers he'd throw BP off the mound that morning, and he asked them to roll the batting cage up to home plate. As Sally stood in to take his raps, E.A. stepped toward third base, swung his arm in an arc with his fingers nearly brushing the dirt and his arm sweeping underhanded across his body so that the pitch appeared to shoot
up
toward the plate from out of the grass somewhere between the mound and third. Sally was so surprised that he let the ball go by, belt-high over the heart of the plate. Then he grinned and slammed the next one and the next one and the next one deep into the outfield gaps.

From the stands, a few early arrivers, members of the Fenway posse, called out something about woodchucks. E.A. thought of Gran, smiled, and pitched like Koyoto, duplicating the swinging arm and wicked sidewinding upshoot, and when the game started the Sox hitters jumped all over Koyoto and sent him to the showers in the top of the third inning.

SOX TAKE SERIES OPENER AT FENWAY
10–4
BEHIND ALIAN MAN
, read the sign on the bat mill in Kingdom Common early the following morning.

“No small thanks to our boy,” Earl No Pearl was saying over his first cup of coffee at the hotel. “According to the Voice of the Sox, yesterday old E.A. give the boys BP just like that Jap fella. I imagine he'll do it again today. Only it'll be Sweetwater, not Koyoto.”

“E.A. can do Sweetwater?''Judge Charlie K said.

“Hell, yes, he can do Sweetwater,” Earl said. “Here down to Woodsville one afternoon a year ago, E.A. thrown like Doc Sweetwater for two, three innings. Them New Hampshire boys couldn't touch him.”

Sweetwater Jones stood six feet eight inches tall and weighed two hundred and fifty-five pounds. Besides leading Arkansas to a Division One National Championship in the College Baseball World Series, he'd caught more TD passes than any other player in the Razorbacks' history. He threw 98, 99, and occasionally 100 mph, coming straight over the top, with a peculiar hitch at the apex that disconcerted opposing hitters nearly as much as the fact that in the off-season he practiced dental surgery in Little Rock. Something about a dental surgeon who could make the ball sing like a high-powered dental drill as it hurded toward the plate scared the daylights out of hitters. In his four seasons with the White Sox before going over to the Mets two years before, Doc Sweetwater had lost to Boston only once.

E.A. naturally came straight over the top himself, and he'd practiced Doc Sweetwater's idiosyncratic hitch, which was actually a very calculated hesitation—analogous, perhaps, to checking to be sure that the drill bit was positioned exactly where he wanted it before ratcheting it up to full bore. BP pitchers had tried, unsuccessfully, to mimic Sweetwater's hitch before, but E.A. had him down perfectly, and on the last six or eight pitches of each hitter's raps, he threw his 21st-Century Limited to help them fine-tune their timing.

Sweetwater's change was only moderately effective—he had never mastered the technique of maintaining the same arm speed that he used for his fastball—and the second game of the World Series began with the Sox leadoff hitter taking the former Razorback's first pitch high over the Green Monster. For Boston the game got better and better. In the meantime E.A. fumed silently in the dugout. He'd helped the Sox get their 3–0, 6–2, and 8–3 leads and their 8–5 win. Yet he still hadn't thrown a single pitch in a post-season game.