Waiting for Teddy Williams Read online

  “Charlie? How far could Ethan go with his baseball? I’m afraid his heart’ll be broken.”

  “Nobody knows the answer to that question, Gypsy. Only time will tell. But what about you? How do you feel about Teddy?”

  “Well,” Gypsy said, “let’s look at it this way. I got a couple of real good songs out of the son of a bitch.”

  And right there in the judge’s chambers, with E.A. listening at the door, she belted out the chorus of “Knocked Up in Knoxville.”

  27

  THE RAIN DRUMMED on the barn roof. It beat down hard, puddling up at home plate and around the feed-sack bases at Fenway. On the mountaintop it began to freeze into sleet, glazing over Long Tom. Then it changed into snow. A snowstorm in July.

  Teddy stood in the entranceway of the barn, the huge sliding door open to let in light, and watched as E.A. gave the treadless tire off Earl’s eighteen-wheeler a push to start it swinging from the thick rope attached to the overhead hayfork rail. E.A. went back to the entrance. As the truck tire continued to swing back and forth, he went into his wind-up, calculating where the tire would be when the ball arrived, like a hunter leading a flushing grouse. He pitched. The baseball sped through the center of the swinging tire, into the backstop of hay bales. Three times E.A. threw. Three times he split the center of the tire.

  He glanced at Teddy, standing behind him, the cold rain sweeping in and spattering his old suit jacket and shoes.

  “How long did it take you to learn that?” Teddy asked.

  E.A. shrugged. “A long time.”

  Teddy nodded. That was all. But the next time he appeared he had with him a folded square of heavy brown canvas tarpaulin and a paper grocery bag. It was a hot day, a good day for throwing off the mound at Fenway, the heat fine for keeping a pitcher’s arm loose. Instead, Teddy jerked his head toward the barn.

  Inside the hayloft a million dust motes danced in the sunlight streaming through the entryway. The air smelled hot, like haying time. Teddy unfolded the tarp on the barn floor. It was about the size and shape of one of the kitchen windows in Gran’s farmhouse. From the paper bag he removed, one by one, ten paintbrushes and ten pint cans of bright-colored paint: apple red, orange, light green and dark green, lemon yellow, pale blue, ocean blue, grape purple, cotton-candy pink, and black. He shook the little cans of paint. With his jackknife blade he pried off the lids, then took a photograph out of his shirt pocket. E.A. recognized it immediately. It was a photo of Ted Williams’s strike-zone chart, which they’d seen in Cooperstown: a frame the size of the strike zone, filled with colored baseballs, each inscribed with a batting average in sharp black numerals. The number on each ball represented the average the great Teddy Ballgame estimated he hit when he swung at a pitch in that part of the zone, from the blue ball on the low, outside corner, inscribed with .250, to the red ball that read .450 in the heart of the frame.

  With great concentration, Teddy began painting colored baseballs on the canvas tarp. As he worked he talked to E.A. “See, Ethan, what a pitcher wants to do, he wants to throw strikes. But he don’t want to be wild in the strike zone.”

  “What’s wild in the strike zone?”

  “Throwing too many pitches belt-high out over the heart of the plate. Even if you’re quick and mix up your pitches, the better hitters’ll get to you if you let ’em see too many good pitches. This’ll teach you how to nick the comers, move the ball in and out, up and down. But”—he rounded out the orange ball, in on the fists of a righty—“mainly you want to keep the ball low. You’ll see why when the colors dry here, and we take and paint in the averages in black. The lower down in the zone you throw, the harder the pitch is to hit.”

  The dust motes danced in the sunlight. The air smelled like old hay and paint and a faint hint of manure. Overhead in the cupola, pigeons muttered and cooed. Teddy frowned, made a few finicky brush strokes to round out a light blue ball, grinned at his son. Later, after they’d inscribed the averages and hung the canvas from the top bale of the makeshift backstop, Teddy presented E.A. with two dozen brand-new baseballs to throw at the simulated strike zone.

  Well before the end of the summer E.A. could hit any individual spot on the canvas more often than not. But he never felt any better than he had when Teddy looked up from the canvas with the baseballs painted on it and grinned at him. That was a moment he’d remember forever.

  “Ethan.”

  Teddy stood up and headed out toward the mound at Fenway. It was midsummer, and he was working out with Ethan every evening that the boy didn’t have a town-team game.

  “Remember what I told you about getting an edge on that pitcher? Old Ichabod? Finding his weakness?”

  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

  28

  IN 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.