Waiting for Teddy Williams Read online

  “How is it,” E.A. said to his father as they sat on a log under a yellow birch and looked down the mountainside, “you come to know so much about ash trees?”

  “Oh,” Teddy said, “when I was staying with my great-uncle, old Peyton Williams, up in Lord Hollow, he cut ash trees for the bat factory down to the Common.”

  This was the first time Teddy had ever mentioned his family to E.A.

  “Teddy? How come you never talk about your people?”

  “My people?”

  “You know. Your folks.”

  Teddy shrugged. “I never really knew my people, Ethan. My ma, she passed on when I was little. I don’t hardly recollect her at all.”

  “Then what happened? After your ma died?”

  “Well, I got shifted around from one shirttail relation and foster home to the next. Finally I landed up with old man Williams.”

  “Was he good to you?”

  Teddy broke off a yellow birch twig and sucked on the wintergreen-flavored inner bark. “He weren’t nothing to me one way or the other. He weren’t mean when he was sober, and I learned pretty quick to steer clear of him when he was on a binge. I reckon I was a handful myself, Ethan.”

  “What happened to your great-uncle?”

  “He was old when I first went to stay with him, and a year or so after I got sent to jail, he up and died.”

  Ethan hesitated. Then he said, “What about your pa?”

  “What about him?”

  “You said your ma passed on when you were little. What became of your pa?”

  Teddy stood up. “He dropped out of the picture before I was born. I never knowed who he was.” He flipped the yellow birch twig at a nearby ash. “There, Ethan. That’s a better than average baseball-bat tree.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. Same’s you know how to throw a baseball. Let’s go get your pitching in.”

  Ethan knew from his geology lessons with Gypsy that a great glacial lake had once covered the entire Kingdom Valley from Lake Memphremagog’s south end all the way to the fixture site of Kingdom Common. Where Gran’s house and barn now sat there had been one hundred feet of water with melting icebergs drifting in it. As the Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet retreated, the lake gradually withdrew to its present location north of Gran’s, leaving the river and, in the adjacent fields, huge deposits of sandy soil.

  Trouble was, for a proper pitcher’s mound you needed something firmer than sand. Under Bill’s supervision Teddy and Ethan brought five wheelbarrow loads of clay from the riverbank to Fenway. They dug down three feet, removing the sandy loam that Gran’s Cannabis thrived in, and filled the hole with clay, heavy and blue-gray, the color of Allen Mountain on a cloudy November morning. Teddy built the new mound up as carefully as if he were burying a beloved hunting dog beneath it. He got out his tape and made sure that the distance to home plate was correct.

  Surveying the finished job, Teddy said, “Pitcher’s mound has to be just right, Ethan. An inch high will throw off your stride and cause the ball to rise up in the strike zone, where the hitter likes it. Hold the tape, will you, Bill?”

  Bill stood on the new rubber Teddy had lifted from the mound on the common and held the metal tag at the end of the Stanley tape, while Teddy started back toward the plate, unwinding the reel. He squinted and turned his head aside to avoid the smoke from his Lucky.

  “You ought to quit smoking,” E.A. said.

  “I ought to do a lot of things,” Teddy said.

  It was sixty feet six inches from the rubber to the back of the plate. E.A. wondered, Why the six inches?

  “That’s baseball is why,” Teddy said.

  “Baseball,” Bill said. “Run your legs off to get back where you commenced from no further ahead than before you started.”

  “Wrong,” Teddy said, straightening the plate. “You’re at least one run further ahead, Bill.”

  Teddy had borrowed the plate from the common, too.

  The Kingdom County nights were still cool. Some of the days, too. Teddy hung a round outdoor thermometer on the side of the barn, a green and blue and red affair that looked like a hex sign on a Pennsylvania barn. If the temperature was a degree under sixty he wouldn’t let E.A. pitch.

  Their routine was always the same. Teddy would stand behind the plate, his catcher’s glove belt-high. E.A. would stand twenty feet away and in line with the new mound. They’d start to toss. By degrees E.A. worked his way back. When he reached the mound, it seemed a long way from the plate.

  “It’ll get closer every year,” Teddy told him.

  Teddy was careful not to teach the boy too much at a time. E.A. had a naturally smooth, over-the-top delivery. He started with his right foot slightly slanted on the rubber and his left foot a few inches behind it. His wind-up was economical. He threw exactly the same way every time. Teddy didn’t let him throw too hard. He didn’t let him experiment with breaking balls.

  One morning a brand-new pair of size-eight spikes appeared on the mound. Inside each shoe was a new sweat sock. E.A. sat on the Packard seat to put them on.

  “Teach me something new today,” he wheedled.

  “All right,” Teddy said. “Wear them socks inside out the first few times.”

  E.A. looked at him.

  “Cuts down on blisters,” Teddy explained.

  E.A. turned the new socks inside out.

  After the boy’s arm was loose Teddy said, “Want to pitch an inning?”

  E.A. nodded.

  “You pick the team.”

  “’Fifty-two Yankees.”

  “All right.” Teddy squatted down behind the plate and turned his baseball cap backward. “First batter’s who?”

  “Phil Rizzuto.”

  “Book on him?”

  “Pitch him away. Work the corners.”

  He got Rizzuto in five pitches. Fanned Billy Martin, fanned Yogi, didn’t have to face DiMaggio. From that day on, Teddy let him pitch one or two simulated innings at every workout. Sometimes Gypsy and Gran watched from the dooryard, Gran disputing Teddy’s called strikes.

  At first Teddy was generous with his strike zone. If E.A. had Mickey Mantle down on the count, one ball, two strikes, and Teddy set up for the next one on the outside corner at the knees and E.A. missed wide by three or four inches, Teddy’d jump up and say, “Mantle swings and misses, strike three.”

  As the summer progressed Teddy’s strike zone shrank.

  E.A. began throwing three innings at a stretch. They went through the Yankees of 1960 with Mantle and Maris. The ’50 Cardinals with Musial and Mize. Sometimes, on a low pitch, Teddy’d say, “He swings and hits the ball back to the mound.” He’d throw a grounder, and E.A. would grab it and fire it back, Teddy stretching out like a first baseman. Or Teddy would flip the ball out of his glove along the third-base line, a surprise drag bunt, and E.A. would sprint off the mound and pounce on it and whirl and make as if to throw to first.

  Once, when Gypsy was watching, he began to throw harder.

  “Let up,” Teddy told him. “Accuracy first. Speed second.”

  If E.A. threw a pitch in the dirt, Teddy’d nod and say, “Better down there than up in Jackie Jensen’s wheelhouse.” Or, “Even Joe D won’t hurt you down there, Ethan.”

  The last day they threw that fall, Teddy squeezed him on a couple of pitches.

  E.A. stared in at him. “Sir,” he called. “Where was that last pitch?”

  Earl No Pearl was big on calling the umpire sir, then demanding to know where the pitch was.

  Teddy came partway out to the mound. “Don’t speak directly to the umpire, Ethan. It won’t help you. When your half of the inning’s over, have your catcher say to the ump, quiet-like, ‘My pitcher’s got a late-breaking curve’—or slider, or whatever—‘it catches the corner of the plate.’ You just pitch. Don’t show nothing in your face over a call. Don’t shake your head or slap at the ball with your glove when the catcher throws it back. Don’t stare in at the umpire. Just pitc
h.”

  “Good sportsmanship, right?”

  “Sportsmanship’s got nothing to do with it. You don’t want to break your concentration is all. Plus, you start getting into pissing contests with the umpire, he’ll always win. Even your catcher shouldn’t argue too much. I don’t much mind locking horns, but I don’t never lock horns with the umpire. I’ll speak to him quiet, once or twice a game at most. Maybe hold a pitch in my glove an extra half second, give him a good look.”

  “How come when I miss close you don’t jerk your glove quick back into the strike zone, like Cy does for Earl?”

  “Because that’s the surest way to get a good ump to give the pitch to the batter. The umpire isn’t stupid. Or blind, either.”

  “What if my catcher won’t speak to him at all? Or jerks his glove back into the zone? Or won’t call the right pitches?”

  Teddy shrugged. “Get a new catcher. I’m heading to Texas tomorrow, Ethan. Be back in the spring.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Can I do it? Go all the way as a pitcher.”

  Teddy looked up at the mountain, hazy in the fall mist. Long Tom seemed to hover about halfway between the mountaintop and Gran’s farm. “Time will tell.”

  He touched his cap with his index finger and was on his way.

  24

  THAT WINTER E.A. rigged up a plywood mound with a scrap of indoor-outdoor carpet nailed to it in the hayloft. He threw at the tire, into a strike-zone-size square of hay bales, imitating the all-time great pitchers—Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, Whitey Ford. He began teaching himself how to throw a knuckleball, a screwball, and a split-fingered fastball. Bundled up in his secondhand yard-sale parka, he resembled an Eskimo pitching. He didn’t care. Any baseball was better than no baseball.

  Pitching made the winter go faster, and so did his advanced algebra and Latin—he and Gypsy were now working their way through Cicero. He even had a couple of dates with Lori the waitress’s daughter, April May. One Saturday night at the hotel he won a ’58 Topps Ted Williams, in Mint condition, in a contest with Earl to see who could throw a card the farthest. At Christmas he got a postcard with an aerial view of the Lubbock State Penitentiary, with a baseball game in progress on the prison diamond. E.A. thought he could make out Teddy squatting behind the plate in his catcher’s gear. The card was signed, “Don’t wish you were here hows the throwing coming Yours in baseball Teddy.”

  “E.A.,” Earl said at the Outlaws’ first practice that spring, “you want to throw a little BP?”

  From then on he threw all their batting practice. At fifteen he could put nine out of ten pitches right down the pipe, hit the corner if that’s what the batter wanted, or put some mustard on the pitch. When the season began, Earl surprised him by starting him at short, moving the slower Moonface to second. Moon didn’t squawk. E.A. was the best infielder on the team, and curiously, now that he was training himself to pitch, he was hitting the cover off the ball. You couldn’t get a pitch by him. He drove fastballs into the gaps in the outfield, went with the curve balls and lined them between first and second, hardly ever swung at the first pitch, let anything outside the strike zone go by. Secretly he still believed he could go all the way as a hitter. At the same time he pestered Earl to let him pitch an inning in a game. Earl said when he was ready. In the meantime they needed his glove and arm at short.

  On the day of the Outlaws’ home game with a team of all-stars from Ticonderoga, New York, E.A. stopped to visit briefly with the Colonel, who was in an irascible mood from being out in an all-night rain two evenings before. After two centuries, he was taking the weather harder than he once had.

  “So what’s new with you?” the statue said after grumbling about his aches and pains.

  E.A. knew that the Colonel didn’t really expect a reply, that he was mainly making conversation. He looked down the common to where the Outlaws were beginning to arrive in their pickups. The team from Ticonderoga was taking infield and outfield in their new uniforms. They were college boys and ex-minor-leaguers and semipro standouts, paid to play for the big paper-mill team across Lake Champlain. They looked sharp, several cuts above any team Ethan had seen in the Border League. The infielders were just finishing, going around the horn taking a last ground ball, firing it in to the catcher, who tossed it back as the fielder sprinted toward home, scooped it up, and flipped it back to the catcher. Smooth.

  The Colonel agreed. “Them boys look trig,” he said. “Leave me a mitt, will you? So’s I’ll have something to protect myself with when they tee off on Earl.”

  The Outlaws were getting ready to take BP as Ethan trotted down to the diamond, his heart beating from the sheer happiness of knowing he’d be playing ball soon, pitching, even if it was only batting practice.

  He headed for the mound. But Cyrus the Great waved him in off the field. “Earl’s got him a bad right shoulder, E.A. All that skeet-shooting he done yesterday when he was drunk up to the rod and gun club. We was thinking we might have you go for us this afternoon. You up for it?”

  The Common watched attentively as E.A. loosened up with Cy along the third-base line. Judge Charlie K walked across the green from the courthouse with his umpire’s gear. Editor Jim K appeared with his notepad. Fletch and the old bat boys sat on the hotel porch; farmers and loggers and villagers filed toward the rickety grandstand and ranged around the common in their cars and pickups. Old Lady Benton was out in the green Adirondack chair on her second-story porch. And here, back from Texas, was E.W. Teddy Williams, watching from under the old elm behind the backstop. The tree was yellowing on top but still hanging on, much the way town ball itself hung on in the Common.

  As E.A. warmed up he heard Teddy’s voice in his mind, in that same place just behind his upper forehead where the Colonel talked. “Throw the ball, Ethan. Don’t aim it, throw it. Ignore the batter. He don’t exist. It’s just you and your catcher. Go right at them with your best pitch. Nothing fancy.” He wished Teddy were going to catch him. Cyrus was fine, he was as wide as the upright freezer over at the hotel kitchen, and if he couldn’t catch a ball he’d fall on it. But he wasn’t Teddy.

  E.A.’s arm felt good. He looked in at Cy, flipped his glove over to indicate a curve coming, and broke off a neat off-speed bender. “You got her working good today,” Cy said. “Put that down around the knees on the outside comer, E.A., it’ll do you some good.”

  Ethan remembered the first time his curve broke for him. It was a cool, sunny morning last August, the sky over Allen Mountain a deep Canadian blue, Long Tom on the mountaintop resembling a huge silver rocket. “Hold the ball gentle in your fingers, E.A.,” Teddy’d told him. “Same way you’d hold your galfriend’s titty. Snap your fingers and wrist down, like this. A good hook, see, it drops more than it swerves. The bottom falls out of it.”

  E.A., flushing at the thought of touching April May, had tried a few, holding the seams of the ball loosely with his first two fingers close together, snapping his wrist, without noticing anything different about the way the ball behaved. On his fifth or sixth attempt, as the pitch approached the plate, he saw it dip a little, like a swallow skimming over the river dipping to pick a bug off the surface.

  That had been a great moment, seeing the ball break as if it had a life of its own. As much as he loved baseball, he hadn’t known that anything about it could make him feel that good. He knew Teddy wouldn’t compliment him, though. Teddy’d seen thousands of curve balls.

  “Ethan,” E.A. heard Teddy’s voice say in his head, “start your curve lower so’s it drops from the belt to the knees instead of from the letters to the belt.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Bend your back a little more and release it from your hand a tad later. Not much.”

  “Go get ’em, E.A.,” the Outlaws encouraged him. “You let us help you now, E.A. Don’t try to do everything all by yourself. You don’t have to strike ’em all out.”

  Gran clanged her cowbell, horns honked, and
the grandstand cheered. E.A. Allen took the mound for the top of the first, pitching for his town for the first time. He did not feel intimidated. Not with Teddy here and Gypsy in the stands and even Gran hunched in her wheelchair beside the bleachers. At fifteen, Joe Nuxhall had pitched in the majors.

  Ticonderoga’s leadoff hitter, watching E.A. throw his warmup pitches off the mound, smirked out at him. E.A. stared back. The guy was their shortstop, not tall but built rugged. Ethan had noticed that during BP he’d hit two balls into the street in front of the shopping block, and done it from the backstop.

  “Play ball, gentlemen,” Judge Charlie K called out.

  Cy lumbered out to the mound. “Just relax, E.A. You’ll do fine. Let your fastball and curve do the talking for you. Start him off with a curve. He’ll be looking for a first-pitch fastball.”

  The leadoff hitter stepped in, crowding the plate. E.A. looked in for the sign. Years ago Cy had lost his index finger to a ripsaw at the bat factory, so he flipped his middle finger and ring finger down for the curve.

  E.A. shook off Cy’s first sign, and the catcher signaled for a fastball. There was a lot of horn honking. A kid ran up to the Late Great Patsy Cline, nosed against the common in deep left-center field, reached in and gave a blast on the ooga horn, jolting Old Bill out of a sound sleep. Throw, don't aim, E.A. heard Teddy say in his head. He threw, and the hitter drove his best fastball deep into the gap between left and center. Barefoot Porter Kittredge caught the line drive over his shoulder going away, but the leadoff man had tagged it hard, and for a moment E.A. wondered if he was cut out to be a pitcher after all.

  Cy was already on his way out to the mound. “Don’t let that bother you, E.A. That’s a long out, that’s what that is.”