Waiting for Teddy Williams Read online

  And Ethan, warming up along the right-field sideline, just beyond first base, was excited by the presence of Gypsy Lee and Teddy, just up the third-base line and five rows back. What was a bit unsettling was that the Sox’s owner, Maynard Junior, was sitting in a box several rows in back of first, in a section known in Fenway as the “posse”—a cadre of several hundred hard-core Red Sox rooters notorious for being as tough on Sox players who made miscues as on their opponents.

  E.A. couldn’t help feeling nervous. But he did not doubt that he could throw his 21st-Century Limited fastball past the Yankee hitters, at least for several innings, and he only wished that Stan and Louisianne could be here to see him.

  He loved the steady rumbling and buzzing from the stands, which he knew would rise to a thundering crescendo once the game began, punctuated by the sharp cries of the vendors—pop-corrn, cold bee-ah hee-ah—and the shouted advice and criticism from the posse. Nearby, in the Sox dugout, the Alien was explaining the physics of a breaking baseball to the macaw, who listened attentively. Spence was patrolling the perimeter of the outfield with his trash stick and a black plastic bag.

  E.A. flipped over his glove hand to indicate to his warm-up catcher that a curve was coming. Hold it gentle, the way you’d hold your galfriend’s titty, he heard Teddy say in his mind. The spinning breaking pitch dropped straight down six inches. With the Limited to set it up, that should do the trick.

  “E.A., E.A., E.A.” Earl and the boys were chanting his name from the bleachers in deep center field. The whole Outlaw team was on hand, all but Moonface, who had refused to leave his post atop the factory. Though he knew he wouldn’t be able to hear them once the game began, Ethan was glad to have the boys here. As game time approached, he’d have been glad to have Gran and Old Lady Benton in the stands.

  His fastball was popping, his curve was sharp, his arm was loose. The Alien ambled out of the dugout, watched him for a minute, nodded approvingly.

  The applause when Ethan was announced as starting pitcher was polite. But as he trotted out to the mound, it rose to a prolonged ovation, and he understood that the fans were trying to help him. Psych him up. Suddenly he was scared. What if he couldn’t find the strike zone? Or New York’s leadoff man blasted a home run off him? A host of devastating possibilities raced through his head. Quickly he looked up at the grandstand and found Teddy, who touched his Sox cap. E.A. touched his cap back, and then threw his first warm-up pitch, as the Yankees’ great leadoff hitter, a Cuban who got down the line to first like Willie Mays, walked out to the on-deck circle swinging two bats.

  So far this season, New York’s leadoff man had been hit by a pitch sixteen times. Tonight he crowded the plate even more than usual. E.A. was tempted to put one right under his chin. But while he’d have loved to establish with his first pitch that he couldn’t be intimidated into giving up one square inch of the strike zone to an aggressive batter, he didn’t want to risk putting the top base stealer in the American League on first just to make a point. What had Teddy told him when he’d pitched to the Yankee lineup in their imaginary games at home? “Their number-one man will crowd the plate, Ethan. But don’t hit him early in the game. He’ll be taking the first pitch anyway. He always makes the pitcher throw him a strike before he swings. Throw him a fastball right down the middle. The bat’ll never leave his shoulder.”

  As the cheering intensified, E.A. put his right foot on the rubber and looked in at Sally for his sign. Sally signaled for the fastball.

  E.A. went into his compact wind-up, rocked back, and exploded forward, just the way Teddy and Stan had taught him, to the screaming of nearly forty thousand people. Sally’s glove never moved as the ball slammed into it like a stick of dynamite exploding. Up shot the umpire’s right hand. The radar reading on the scoreboard flashed 96 mph.

  “A fine way to start a big-league pitching career,” the Voice of the Sox said, straining not to sound too excited, while up in Kingdom Common, Late and Early exchanged glances and Fletch looked straight ahead, and in the right-field bleachers at Fenway Earl and the boys, already two sheets to the wind, leaped up and hollered as if the Sox had won the world championship.

  Then something magical happened. Ethan E.A. Allen, standing alone on the pitcher’s mound, the top of the world when things are going well, the loneliest place imaginable when they aren’t, forgot all about the crowd. He forgot about the umpire. He forgot about the up-again, down-again Red Sox tradition and saw only the crimson bull’s-eye in the middle of Sally’s black glove, framed by the catcher’s fluorescent orange chest and leg protectors. He could have been pitching at home in the meadow. Or inside Gran’s barn, throwing to his tire or Ted Williams’s strike zone. Sally asked for a low curve on the outside comer, and the Yankees’ leadoff hitter bounced out weakly to first.

  The roar from the crowd rose higher, but E.A., breaking a few steps to his left in case he needed to cover the bag, was amazed by how fast the runner had gotten down the line and how close he made the play. As Stan had warned him, this was a different ball game from any he’d played before.

  It was a new experience for the hitters, too, to face a pitcher who consistently threw over ninety-five miles an hour and could spot the ball on a dime. New York’s two hitter, the best contact man in the major leagues, went down swinging on three straight fastballs, bringing the entire park to its feet.

  E.A. got up 0–2 on the number-three batter. Sally signaled for him to waste a fastball up at eye level, hoping the guy might swing anyway, as his predecessor had. But E.A. shook Sally off until he came back with the slider out; the hitter swung four inches over it, and the Fenway ovation lasted for thirty seconds after E.A. hit the dugout.

  “How’s your arm feel, kid?”

  “It feels like pitching nine innings.”

  “Now he wants to manage the team,” Spence told the macaw. To E.A. he started to say, “I’ll decide how long—”

  Suddenly Spence lunged up out of the dugout, shouting “Go! Go, go, go!” The Sox leadoff hitter had cracked the first pitch of the inning on a line over the center-fielder’s head.

  With the runner safely on third and no outs, Spence turned back to E.A. “Next inning, I don’t want you shaking Sally off no more. You leave him to call the pitches.”

  “I never shake off my catcher more than three or four times an inning,” E.A. said.

  “WELL, THAT IS THREE OR FOUR TIMES AN INNING TOO MANY!” Spence roared, his fiery face an inch away from E.A.’s. “NO MORE SHAKING SALLY OFF. PERIOD.”

  The Sox’s two and three hitters both struck out, bringing Sally to the plate with the runner still on third and two outs. On the fourth pitch, up on the count 2–1, Sally blasted a line drive twenty feet up the Green Monster. The Yankees’ left-fielder played the carom expertly, holding Sally to a single, so what would have been a two-run homer in any other baseball park resulted in only one run. Boston’s five hitter grounded out, ending the inning. But there was E.A.’s lead, and it looked like the Sox had their hitting shoes on today.

  E.A. couldn’t remember what he’d done with his glove. As he searched for it, he felt, in between the bone and the muscle on his upper right arm, a stinging blow. “Good job out there,” said the lummox, who’d slipped into the dugout while Spence had his back turned. “Very nice job out there, sonny boy. Keep it up.” And before E.A. knew it, Maynard Junior had knuckle-punched him again, hard, right in the same place.

  E.A.’s arm was still sore from where the thirty-eight-year-old boy owner had punched it. But the Yankees’ leadoff hitter in the top of the second was far behind his first two pitches, and although Sally wanted him to waste a pitch, Ethan was sure he could strike him out with a slider on the corner. He threw the slider, and the hitter waved at it and missed. Caught by surprise, Sally didn’t get his glove down, and by the time he caught up with the passed third strike, the runner was on first.

  E.A. was unsettled. Not because of the runner, but because he realized that if he’d been determine
d to throw the slider instead of Sally’s high fastball, he should have shaken off the catcher’s signal and let him know what was coming. Not only had he disobeyed Spence, now glaring at him from the top step of the dugout, he’d done it in the worst possible way. Instead of one down and the bases empty, he had a runner on first and no outs. The crowd was buzzing. They were still on his side. But they wanted a strikeout or a double play, and this being Fenway, they fully expected one or the other.

  The Yankees’ number-five man batted from the left side of the plate. He quite frequently struck out, but he was popular in New York for his tremendous arm from center field and for his tape-measure home runs, one of which had recently struck the façade on top of the upper deck in right field at Yankee Stadium, near the spot where, many years before, Mickey Mantle’s record home run had hit. As he stepped into the batter’s box, Sally called time and came out to the mound.

  “Look, kid,” he said. “You want to shake me off, go ahead. Just make sure I know what’s coming.” Without waiting for a reply, the All-Star catcher said, “Now, this next guy got very quick hands. We don’t want to let her see two fastballs in a row. So we going to mix it up. Maybe get her to bounce into a double play.”

  Sally went back to the plate. E.A. glanced around at his infielders, back at double-play depth. Then he went into his set position and leaned in for his sign. Sally wanted heat on the fists. E.A. checked the runner, not usually a threat to steal, and threw the ball right where Sally held his glove, up and in, 98 mph. The lefty fouled it straight back into the screen.

  Sally called for the curve on the knees on the outside corner. But Teddy’s motto had always been go right at the hitter with your best pitch. Challenge the man. If that meant going to the batter’s strength, so be it. E.A. shook off Sally until he came around with the fastball again, Sally’s finger hesitating before it went down, and he threw the same pitch as before except that this one tailed back toward the center of the plate and New York’s five hitter did what no batter had ever done before in the history of baseball in Boston. He hit a fair ball out of Fenway Park in right field.

  Ethan had seen mighty home runs before and had even had a few hit off him. But never anything like this. The ball was twenty feet high when it traveled over the red-painted seat more than five hundred feet from home plate where Ted Williams’s record homer had crushed the straw hat of a fan. It cleared the façade with feet to spare.

  Spence never moved. He just stared at E.A. from the top step of the dugout, continuing to stand there and stare as, shades of Calvin Schiraldi in that fateful game against the Mets, E.A. gave up two more hits to the next two batters, a hard ground ball between third and short and a line drive up the middle. The crowd was now booing and hollering for Spence to get him out of there. E.A. had lost it. In front of his parents, his hometown baseball team, thirty-six thousand live fans, and millions of TV viewers, he’d gone from untouchable to unable to get an out. He walked the next batter on four pitches, his arm throbbing steadily from where the lummox had knuckle-punched it, but that didn’t excuse shaking Sally off. And now, down on the count 2–1, with the bases loaded and no outs, here came Spence, tapping his right arm for the aging Alien in the bullpen, the great Yankee-killer, who had a sore arm himself. Meanwhile the crowd screamed bloody murder, enraged with E.A., enraged with Spence for starting him, enraged with the hideous, unspeakable, inevitable bad luck of the Boston Red Sox.

  “Back to Vermont, woodchuck!” he heard the lummox holler. That was when the chant started. First the lummox, then a few of the nearby posse, then the entire section behind first base, spreading out and up through the stadium like a barn fire whooshing through dry hay, thousands upon thousands of voices lifted in derision.

  “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck,

  If a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

  Over and over, the entire stadium up and chanting. Spence, his face as grim as E.A. had ever seen a man’s face in his life, held out his hand for the ball. E.A. handed it to him and, head hanging, walked off the field to thousands of fans chanting that hateful woodchuck verse and showering him with debris. In all of his baseball fantasies at home in Kingdom County, he’d never dreamed of anything like this.

  39

  “‘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 Gr
an 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?”