by Dan Barry
The clubhouse manager, a teenager nicknamed “Hood,” doing laundry, preparing the visiting team’s postgame dinner, making sure each ballplayer has his Red Man or Levi Garrett or Beech-Nut chewing tobacco waiting for him at his locker, and, most of all, buffing each player’s cleats with Kiwi polish, buffing as though these shoes were about to grace ballroom marble and not infield dirt, careful, careful now, not to smudge any of the shoe’s white flourishes with black. Some ballplayers go ballistic over less.
The players, ambling into the salve-scented clubhouses, their home away from home away from home, to stretch and tape, to hit and field and loosen their arms with games of catch. The two participants rarely look each other in the eye, rarely talk, choosing instead to communicate through the call-and-answer thwock and thwock of the ball hitting the pockets of their leather gloves. Now and then, though, the players throw silent jokes designed to break the facial placidity: a chuckling knuckleball, a wisecracking slider.
Some of these ballplayers will laugh with the open-ended abandon of youth. They are twenty, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and they have made it to Triple-A, the fields of the almost-there. They are unworldly farm boys from the South and just-glad-to-be-here boys from the Midwest and athletic middle-class boys from Southern California and hungry but homesick boys from Latin America. They are young, and gifted, and close, and so they laugh in the quiet, comforting presence of time—as if now could never be then.
Other ballplayers will laugh as well. Not with the same full-throated glee, but with a hesitancy rooted in wondering whether they have finally become the punch line to clubhouse jokes of: There’s the door, what’s your hurry? They are twenty-six now, and twenty-seven, and even twenty-eight—men, not boys, who have spent a swirl of summers toiling in dirt-and-grass patches in Elmira, New York, and Bristol, Connecticut, and Bluefield, West Virginia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, slipping work gloves over their hands, swinging bats like axes. Many have wives and children. A few have even made brief appearances in the major leagues. But they cannot go on like this forever. Time, once a quiet comfort, is now impatient, and clearing its throat.
Every one of these players, young and not so, will move on, but Ben Mondor, the seen-it-all owner of the Pawtucket Red Sox, will still be here, taking his position outside the box office, as he did tonight, to thank the fans for their support. At fifty-six, he has the assured bearing of one who grew up Depression poor, saw action in World War II, and worked hard to make his millions; a short man, he seems tall. The rhythm and phrasing of his words telegraph his roots to the Rhode Island ear: Woonsocket, by way of Quebec. Married and with no children of his own, he keeps souvenir trinkets and packs of baseball cards in his pockets for kids who catch his eye, who hide behind their parents, who greet this wounded stadium, so in need of repair, as a palace of wonder. With tinted glasses and a tight mustache, he is the no-nonsense Santa Claus of the tough Blackstone Valley.
On and on down the line, the people at McCoy assumed their roles, all in the service of a ball game. From Mondor’s young assistants—general manager Mike Tamburro and communications director Lou Schwechheimer, who, as usual, did everything short of lacing the ballplayers’ cleats—down to the batboy, Billy Broadbent, who swept the bits of yesterday’s game from the dugout, helped with the laundry, shagged fly balls during batting practice, and played pepper with Pawtucket’s ritual-driven third baseman, Wade Boggs.
Billy lives close by, with his mother, his brother, and his father’s absence. He is sixteen, and such a trembling reed of boyish anxiety that one of the Pawtucket pitchers has burdened him with the nickname “Panic.” Once a goof who loitered at the ballpark’s chain-link borders—like some POW of the chaotic world, seeking refuge in baseball’s order—he now stands inside the fence, at baseball’s employ. Wearing white polyester baseball pants with red-blue-red elastic around the waist, a long-sleeve blue undershirt, and an oversized Red Sox jersey from Doyle’s Sporting Goods that hangs from his frame like laundry on a clothesline, he is the guardian of the bats, responsible for arranging them by player—Gedman’s bats here, Walker’s bats here, Bowen’s bats here—at the end of the dugout.
This is a simple, almost mindless duty, yet Billy often stops his appointed rounds to grasp a Louisville Slugger by its tapered handle, where the sticky remnant of pine tar seals hand to wood—now a hard-ash Excalibur of the imagination. The ballplayer’s name stamped on each bat seems to give it personality. One day he tests a heavy Dave Koza bat, solid as the first baseman himself, and impossible to imagine swinging fast enough to rocket a 90-mile-an-hour fastball; the next day a lighter Marty Barrett, smart and buoyant, like the crafty second baseman himself. He holds each bat out and down, gives it a shake, as if measuring its worth in the clutch. He takes a half swing, then another, then another, submitting to the spells of a simple piece of wood.
While others at McCoy completed their various pregame rituals, the home plate umpire attended to the anointment of thirty-six fresh Official Wilson International League baseballs that come a dozen to a box. Sitting in front of his navy blue locker in the cubbyhole of an umpire’s room, chewing Carefree sugarless gum, he plucked one virgin baseball after another from the paper-tissue nests in which they rested, like Fabergé eggs, then rubbed each ball with a just-so dab of a strange dark salve that ties most every baseball game directly to the American clay. A salve called Lena Blackburne Rubbing Mud.
Russell Aubrey Blackburne, a.k.a. Slats Blackburne, a.k.a. Lena Blackburne, was a smart but inconsistent infielder who played on and off in the major leagues from 1910 to 1919, then returned in 1927 for one at bat—a run-scoring single—and again in 1929 to pitch one-third of an inning. He became a longtime major-league coach and manager who seemed destined to be remembered, if at all, as the Chicago White Sox skipper who engaged in two fistfights with the same player: Art Shires, a talented but truculent character whose nickname “Art the Great” reflected his relationship with modesty. In 1938, though, while coaching third base for the Philadelphia Athletics, Blackburne became intrigued by an umpire’s complaint that the applications normally used to remove the gloss from new baseballs—tobacco juice and muddied infield dirt, among them—either failed to cut the sheen or made the balls more susceptible to tampering. Later, while walking along the tributaries of the Delaware River, not far from his South Jersey home, Blackburne came upon the perfect ingredient: the mud along a certain stretch of Pennsauken Creek. A dollop of this muck seemed to dim the shine on a new baseball without compromising its white integrity. Word spread from the Philadelphia clubhouse to other American League teams that Lena had dug something up. Before long he was working the curious side job of providing major-league franchises with coffee cans of his special mud, sometimes called Magic Mud, a silky pudding that to this day enables umpires to discharge one of their many pregame duties, as detailed in the official rules of baseball: to “inspect the ball and remove its gloss.”
So this duty-bound umpire, Denny Cregg, sat, plucked, spat, and rubbed. If truth be known, he would have preferred a postponement tonight. Although a devoted baseball lifer, with major-league aspirations of his own, he had spent the day moving his family’s belongings out of a rented floor in a triple-decker and into their own house, their new home, in the Massachusetts town of Webster, an hour’s drive north. He was exhausted. Instead of standing for three hours in this nose-runny cold, shouting ball, strike, and out, wouldn’t it have been nice to cozy up to his pregnant wife and their three-year-old son tonight, enjoy the scent of fresh possibility in rooms awaiting the Cregg imprint, and start Easter Sunday with a nice big breakfast? Wouldn’t that have been nice?
But baseball waits for no one. Cregg packed up a ten-year-old nephew, eager for some baseball distraction, and drove down to a job in Pawtucket. His first order of business: preparing these thirty-six game balls. To him, the Lena Blackburne ritual is so solemn a duty that he rarely accepts any offer of help. He likes the feel of it, the control of it, this application of
mud without grit, this laying of hands. A chewing-gum spit to the palm. A finger scoop from the plastic bucket of mud. Not too much; not too little; just…so. A mixing of mud and spittle, and then a rub. There.
As the stubborn 6:30 sunset withdrew the last of the brightness, the fans waited and waited in the creeping darkness. The supposed game time of 7:30 gave way to 7:40, then 7:50. The public-address system could only share the obvious: delay due to lights in need of repair.
Disrepair at McCoy is common. The old ballpark, a concrete mass of infrastructural aches and bruises, belongs not to the Pawtucket Red Sox but to the financially strapped City of Pawtucket. This is why the stadium often has the feel of a glorified public works garage: here, a duffel bag filled with batting practice balls; there, a malodorous dump truck; and come winter, mounds of sand and salt everywhere, courtesy of the highway department. This is also why Pawtucket Red Sox officials dispatched a couple of city workers, including one nicknamed “Killer,” to the Light Room, within the McCoy labyrinth, to coax another night of brightness from those cranky pieces of city property, the stadium lights.
With hidden city workers flicking switches, literally, hopefully, fans could do little more than consider the larger meaning of the lights and shadows confusing the field, or thumb through the ninety-cent official Pawtucket Red Sox program, a jumble of statistics, advertisements, and photographs that provides indisputable proof of the death and burial of 1980, a dismal year in Rhode Island. The team lost fifteen more games than it won to finish in seventh place, and the state backed the losing incumbent, Jimmy Carter, in the presidential election. But this is a new season, a new administration. Forget that outfielder and fan favorite Sam Bowen hit only .229; he’ll be back! And forget that first baseman and power hitter Dave Koza hit only 13 home runs; he’s again swinging for the fences! If Bowen and Koza reach their potential, and if Boggs at third base has another good year, and if the pitchers—Ojeda and Hurst, Smithson and Parks—stay healthy, who knows what might happen? Maybe the Pawtucket Red Sox will win the International League playoffs to earn the coveted Governors’ Cup; maybe some of these Pawtucket ballplayers will emerge as the Boston stars of tomorrow. The next Tiant. The next Yastrzemski. The next—dare we say it—Ted Williams.
If you doubt this possibility, just turn to page 43 in your program to see the posed photograph of five Pawtucket players, hitchhiking in their uniforms, caps, and cleats at the Interstate 95 entrance ramp, their right thumbs pointing north, toward Boston. One of them holds a handwritten sign that reads, “Fenway Park.” These ballplayers, Rich Gedman, Chico Walker, Julio Valdez, Luis Aponte, and Keith MacWhorter, played briefly for Boston last season, and are hoping to return to that magical place where someone else carries your luggage.
“On their way to Fenway,” the caption reads.
Nearly thirty years later, the photo will come to memorialize for MacWhorter what might have been. Of those five hitchhiking players, he wound up with the shortest major-league career; a six-foot-four right-hander, he appeared in 14 games in 1980 for the Boston Red Sox, gave up 26 earned runs, finished with an 0–3 record, and never returned. “I never won a game,” he will say, looming large in his small office in East Providence, where he works as an investment consultant. “That’s my bitterness.”
But every month, MacWhorter, a Rhode Island boy who readily acknowledges that he was a two-pitch pitcher lacking that career-saving third, will receive a pension check from Major League Baseball for about $85. Every month, then, he will be reminded at least of this: However briefly, Keith MacWhorter is among the very few to have played in the major leagues.
That black-and-white photograph—of five uniformed baseball players looking to hitch a ride north—sums up the Pawtucket Red Sox, the International League, the 1981 season, tonight’s game. Buy your lottery tickets at the Li’l Peach convenience store, the program suggests. Bank at the Pawtucket Credit Union. Use the fine writing instruments of Cross. Dine at the Mei-King Restaurant, enjoy Hendrie’s ice cream, savor a drink at the Blarney Stone Pub.
Hope.
Finally, at eight o’clock, a half hour late, the umpires determine that the faulty stadium lights are blanketing the field with sufficient brightness. The dedicated switch flipping of Killer and his City of Pawtucket colleagues has succeeded—though the stadium tower in left-center still refuses to release its light.
Please rise.
The twilight’s last gleam has vanished, and beyond center field the broad stripes and bright stars blow straight in. An umpire who would rather be home adds two more words to the opening anthem, two commanding words of release that tell a pitcher, who will never know the big leagues, to ready himself on the mound; that sends a catcher, who will play in the big leagues for thirteen years, into a coiled squat; and prompts a hitter in his last baseball spring to dig a fleeting foothold in the batter’s box dirt.
Play ball.
Strike one.
Hallelujah.
Now here comes the second pitch of the night from the starting pitcher for the Pawtucket Red Sox, Danny Parks, a devout Christian from Alabama who so hates to fly that he keeps his nose buried in a Bible from takeoff to landing. A sinker-ball pitcher who tries to induce batters into hitting ground balls, he scoffs at the stereotype of born-again ballplayers being as meek as lambs. But he has become the tough-luck anchor of his team, a master at losing ball games by one run. He is twenty-six, married, and in his sixth minor-league year, the doubts about his baseball future intensifying. He begins his economical windup, raising his glove from waist to head, as if offering the ball up to God, then pushes off the mound’s rubber hyphen to thrust his six-foot, 185-pound body forward. The pitch.
Waiting for it is the leadoff batter for the Rochester Red Wings, the sure-handed second baseman Tom Eaton. The clump of Red Man chew distending his right cheek is as essential to his at bat as the Louisville Slugger in his hands; he believes that this tug of toxic brown stuff adds extra weight, extra power, to his wiry frame. He, too, is twenty-six, and is now just starting his first year in Triple-A, but already the confidence of the pitchers at this level is doing little for his. In particular, their paralyzing curveballs—often threatening him with bodily harm before changing course at the last moment—haunt his dreams, yet clarify his mind. Although indirect by nature, they tell him to his face that he is a talented minor-league ballplayer, period. Intellectually, he has known this from the moment he signed with the Baltimore Orioles organization four years ago for $1,000, a modest amount that signaled he was less a major-league prospect than a good person to have on a team—a fill-in who allows management to focus on more talented players. Emotionally, though, Tom Eaton has hope. He has been underestimated before. And he has that Red Man tucked in his cheek, an extra something. Who knows.
The pitched ball tails away to hit Eaton on the instep of his right foot. It stings, but he would never let on to his manager. Best to shake it off. Besides, how long can a 9-inning baseball game last? Three hours at most? He hustles gamely to first base, mouth shut. Years later, people will see this errant pitch as a harbinger of what is to follow: a divine message, delivered at the expense of Tom Eaton’s right foot, saying that you’re in for it now, ladies and gentlemen.
The rest of the half inning suggests the opposite: fly out to left; routine groundout; called third strike. Bang, bang, bang.
From the unheated press box above, Bob Drew, the general manager cum play-by-play announcer for the Red Wings, describes the McCoy scene for his thousands of listeners back in far-off Rochester. He has no Pawtucket counterpart; no radio station carries the PawSox games because, quite frankly, few in Rhode Island care. So his words alone paint the night for those not present, save for the sporadic observations of his sidekick, Pete Torrez, and the steady muttering hum of the modest crowd beneath him, a hum occasionally punctured by the faint calls of roaming vendors with foreign New England accents.
Pawpcawn heah! Pawpcawn….
Drew has read aloud the lineu
ps with all the enthusiasm he could muster, though it still sounds like a recitation of the unimaginative specials from a diner’s menu: “Tommy Eaton will lead it off for the Wings; Dallas Williams will bat second; Cal Ripken will bat third; Mark Corey will be the cleanup hitter; Dan Logan will bat fifth; Chris Bourjos will be batting sixth; Drungo Hazewood seventh; Bob Bonner will hit eighth; and Dave Huppert, making his second start of the year, will do the catching. He will bat ninth….
“For Pawtucket, Lee Graham will lead it off; Marty Barrett will be second; Chico Walker will hit third; Russ Laribee will be in as the DH, he’ll be the cleanup hitter; Dave Koza will be at first, batting fifth; Wade Boggs, the third baseman, will bat sixth; Sam Bowen, the right fielder, will bat seventh; Rich Gedman, the catcher, will bat eighth; and Julio Valdez, the shortstop, will bat ninth.”
