Waiting for Teddy Williams Page 23

  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.

  40

  MUCH 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 wa
s 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.

  For the third game, in Shea Stadium, the Mets had saved their best pitcher, who had pitched the first, fourth, and part of the seventh game in their National League championship series against Atlanta. All-Star Mario “Pancho” Vila was the most unorthodox pitcher in major-league baseball. During the regular season he had compiled a record of 32–4.

  Villa hailed from Mexico City and had grown up watching tapes of Luis Tiant and Fernando Valenzuela. Like Tiant, he spun around and looked at the center-field wall, tipping his chin skyward, leaning back nearly parallel to the ground, throwing his glove straight up and his left elbow out toward the batter and releasing his humming fastballs and sinking off-speed deliveries (it was said he had eight distinct breaking pitches) from no one knew exactly where. His release point was one of the great mysteries of baseball.

  Pancho Villa, E.A. discovered, was difficult to imitate. He seemed to be part baseball pitcher and part prima ballerina, but that wasn’t the tough part. The tough part was that he was also part illusionist. At some point during the Mexican hurler’s serpentine gyrations, the hitter lost track not just of the baseball but of Villa’s throwing hand, so that the ball seemed to come at them sometimes from the scoreboard, sometimes out of Villa’s left spike, but more often than not out of thin air about halfway to the plate. While E.A. rendered a fair approximation of Villa’s motion at BP during the Sox off-day practice at Shea Stadium, and again the next morning before the game, what he couldn’t duplicate was Villa’s release point.

  VEAH STYMEES sox Moon’s headline read the morning after the Mets took game three 6–0 behind Villa’s three-hitter and Miller Jacks’s two home runs and four RBIs. But the Alien won again the next night in New York, 7–4, and Boston now had three opportunities to win the one remaining game they needed to become World Champions.

  The following night at Shea the Sox started where they’d left off the night before, taking a 4–1 lead into the bottom of the fifth inning behind a young pitcher named Sullivan, who had played at Boston College and started the year at Bristol. That was as far as they got, though. Jacks homered again in the fifth with two men on, then doubled in a run in the eighth, giving the Mets a 5–4 win. Sullivan, for his part, pulled a groin muscle in the last of the eighth and was out for the rest of the Series.

  Back at Fenway in game six, Spence used two journeymen minor-league pitchers who had helped the team in August and September but were no match for the Mets’ powerful lineup. Jacks, who was hitting .640 in the Series, was, if anything, inspired by the cascading boos from the Fenway Faithful each time he came to the plate. He blasted three home runs and knocked in seven runs, and the Mets won 18–2 behind Koyoto, with Villa scheduled to pitch the seventh game against the Alien, whose arm had been on ice for three days.

  Having come so close that he could nearly taste the champagne (not that he liked it), the Legendary Spence appeared to have lost his last shot to win a championship and keep the Sox in Boston.

  41

  IN KINGDOM COMMON the morning of the seventh game of the World Series dawned bright and sunny, with the wind backing around out of the southeast. The wind snapped and popped the red-and-white bunting on the hotel railing and the second-story porches of the brick shopping block and the streamers on the Colonel’s sword and hat and the huge, rippling banner on the bat factory saying, go sox. Teddy and Gypsy, leaving for Fenway in the Late Great Patsy Cline as the sun rose, were pushed all over the southbound lane of I-91 by the hard-gusting fall wind.

  Across the state line, in the mountains of New Hampshire, the colors had peaked a week and a half before, then held there, the fall foliage more brilliant than anyone could remember, and the little towns along the interstate were colorful with bunting and with huge placards hanging outside businesses that said BOSTON RED SOX, NEXT WORLD CHAMPS. Closer to Boston, biplanes and crop-dusters trailed huge letters across the cloudless blue sky proclaiming BOSTON RED SOX WORLD CHAMPIONS. And every other car and pickup sported bumper stickers depicting the Curse of the Bambino saying BOSTON, NUMBER ONE. Life-size stuffed macaws in Sox uniforms, right down to bright red socks, were the most popular souvenir item throughout New England.

  Outside Fenway the line of spectators waiting to get into the stadium stretched all the way down Boylston past Kenmore Square. People without tickets had packed into Lansdowne Street in hopes of acquiring a home-run ball.

  Around noon E.A. started throwing BP. The wind in Fenway had dropped somewhat, and already several thousand fans were on hand to watch him pitch like Pancho Villa. Miller Jacks watched E.A.’s contortions from the sideline and sneered. So did the big lummox, sitting behind the Sox dugout with the wax effigy of his father, Maynard Senior, beside him.

  E.A. had never heard anything like the tremendous rumbling of the crowd thronging into the stadium for game seven. It sounded like the ocean during a huge storm. Or like a hurricane approaching.

  “Welcome to Fenway Park, folks, on a warm and very windy fall afternoon. A good afternoon for baseball, Red Sox fans,” said the Voice of the Sox. “And what a day it is as the Boston Red Sox take the field against one of the most feared teams in recent baseball history, the National League Champion New York Mets, in the seventh game of the World Series . . .”

  The waves of applause seemed to extend out into Boston and beyond, where Red Sox fans by the hundreds and thousands were watching or listening to this last hurrah. From the deep conifer forests of northern Maine to the seashore villages of Cape Cod to the resort towns of the White Mountains, New England looked half abandoned. Everyone who wasn’t at the game was in front of a television screen or next to a radio.

  The Gloucester fishing fleet was watching the game on small portable TVs. Bars were packed. Town halls and fire stations were showing the game on large-screen sets, and through the worn old speakers of the Philco, Gran could see the big tubes pulsing green and gold and red and silver. The colors reminded her of Christmas, a detestable time of year, in her estimation, when everyone except her pretended to be cheerful and generous.

  “. . . here in Fenway, as the Alien Man prepares to take the mound against Mario Villa, the mood can only be described as electric . . .”

  Bucky Dent leaped up onto the warm, curved wooden top of Gran’s old console and got ready for a long catnap, while back in Boston the PA announcer boomed out, “And managing the Red Sox, the one, the only, the Legendary—Spence.”

  Out of the dugout, cap already off for the national anthem, came the winningest active manager in baseball, and cheers shook the hallowed old ball park to its foundation.

  In and out, up and down the ladder, from more different angles than the Faithful had seen since the days of Luis Tiant, the Alien mixed his 75-mph fastball, his incomparable slider, his curve, and his change, pitching less with his throbbing arm than with his heart and simply outfoxing the Mets over the first three innings. By the time he set down the ninth hitter, the Fenway crowd was on its feet for every pitch, screaming as if that would be the pitch to bring them their championship.

  Pancho Villa was as sharp as ever. E.A. imagined he could hear Villa’s fastball humming all the way from the bullpen, where Spence had sent him to watch the game. Traveling from the pitche
r’s hand to the plate in just over a second, the baseball was a pale blur. Despite the BP session with Ethan that morning, the Sox hitters were unable to touch him. Going through their order for the first time, Villa struck out eight and got the ninth on a weak grounder to short. Even Sally was unable to muster anything more than a long foul ball against him.

  The Mets left two men on base in the top of the fourth but failed to score. In the bottom of the inning, the Sox leadoff hitter walked. On a 2–1 count to the number-two hitter, a good contact man, Spence, coaching third, played one of his hunches by starting the runner. The two hitter got a fastball on the outside of the plate and drove it into the gap in right center, not far from where E.A. was standing in the bullpen. The crowd was up and thundering. New York’s right-fielder chased down the rolling ball, his back still to the plate, as the lead runner rounded second. Spence never hesitated. Windmilling his arms, shouting, “Go go go,” he waved the man around third, running a few steps beside him in foul territory. The throw came in to the Mets’ second baseman in shallow center, who relayed it to the catcher, and the runner slid tinder the tag to score. Villa came back and struck out the next three Sox hitters, but the way the Alien was pitching today, E.A. thought one run might well be enough.

  In the top of the fifth, with two outs, Miller Jacks doubled into left center but was stranded when the Alien struck out the next hitter on a sky-high eephus pitch that brought down the house.

  Spence went out to the third-base coaching box to yet another thunderous ovation. No more than half of the fans at Fenway could have known what a brilliant call he’d made on the hit-and-run that had gotten them their lead. But they all knew their team was ahead by a run, with the game half over.

  They knew, too, when Villa struck out the side again, that a single run might have to suffice.