Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  The wintry weather of Rochester in April has cut into opportunities for the batting practice that Ripken thinks he desperately needs. He doesn’t feel comfortable at the plate yet, even when facing the batting practice pitches of Rochester’s middle-aged manager, Doc Edwards. So he and Sugar Bear Rayford have been arriving early to the ballpark, taking turns pitching to each other, taking as many as a hundred swings in a row, drilling line drives into the Rochester outfield’s frozen expanse. It seems to be helping.

  Consider all these pressures, uncertainties, and mixed messages. The truth is, Cal Ripken is just a big kid, still struggling to manage the competing feelings of elation, anger, and insecurity. In fact, the boyish exuberance that he couples with his strong competitive streak can sometimes wear thin. He loves to wrestle and to play pranks, but Tom Eaton, who is nearly six years his senior, is growing tired of being pinned to the floor and shoved into lockers. It’s not dignified, Eaton will tell him, though with big-brother affection. At the same time, Ripken’s white-hot desire to win, always, leaves little allowance for the inevitability of failure. He is quick to lose his temper—usually, but not always, with himself. A couple of years from now, after Ripken will have emerged as an up-and-coming major-league star, a veteran teammate, Ken Singleton, will show him a videotape of yet another Ripken fit; something thrown, something slammed. Embarrassed, Ripken will work hard from then on to contain his temper, to be a model of restrained passion, the message imparted by Singleton finding hold somewhere deep in his temporal lobe: “We don’t do that here.”

  But right now, as he waits for what comes next in Pawtucket, Cal Ripken Jr.—still learning to be something other than J.R.—has cleared his mind of everything but this at bat. Nothing else matters: not the cold, not the Baltimore Orioles, not the pinch-hitting slight from a couple of weeks ago, nothing but this at bat. He is not one to reassure himself that he is simply working through a slump; that he has to be patient; that he has time. No. He is hungry. Now.

  “Every at bat was the seventh game of the World Series to me,” Ripken will later say. “It seems that it was all about this moment.”

  After working the count to 3 and 2, Ripken sends a sharp grounder toward third base, where Boggs plays the violent hop so deftly that a sportswriter up in the press box circles the play. He rifles a throw to Dave Koza for the third out and the end to Rochester’s half of the inning. Ripken is out by three steps.

  As the Pawtucket players run off the field, Ripken halfheartedly rounds first base and stops at the infield’s outer lip, defeated. He yanks his red helmet off and, with the helmet still in the grip of one hand, slams it hard to the ground. Then he flips the helmet toward the visitors’ dugout in a gesture that signals complete disgust. Was he fooled by the pitch? Did he not follow through with the proper mechanics of his swing? Did his bat hit the pitch he dreams of a quarter inch too high, sending it chopping down into the grass, rather than rocketing into the outfield? Did Boggs rob him of a hit? It is just one out, one out in the 6th inning of a Triple-A game in Pawtucket, in the very beginning of the 1981 season. He is extraordinarily talented. He comes from royal baseball stock, Baltimore black and orange. Two innings from now, he will have another at bat.

  No matter. He’s not Cal Ripken Jr., not yet. He’s just J.R., he is twenty years old, and he has grounded out.

  Anywhere else but here, walks are recommended, both for the heart and for the alleviation of stress. In baseball, though, the sages know better. With gnarled fists jammed into warm-up jacket pockets, and bony asses somehow finding comfort on splintery wooden benches, these hoary diamond prophets will pause from spitting out another toothlike shell of a sunflower seed to growl again the game’s stay-off-the-moors equivalent:

  It’s the walks that kill you.

  The 7th inning has arrived, and Danny Parks has just walked Rochester’s leadoff batter, Mark Corey, which has led to another walk: that of Parks’s manager, Joe Morgan, now strolling toward the mound, and not for his health, or to take in the air. Time-out for a chat.

  Morgan, head down as if prepared to hear confession, runs a cleat over the mound. Parks, head bowed in contrition, then sweeps a cleat over what Morgan has just swept. Back and forth they go, gardening, muttering, engaged in a slow, self-conscious dance in which partners try not to look each other in the eye. Is Morgan thinking of pulling Parks from the game? Is Parks begging to stay in?

  The catcher and chaperone, Rich Gedman, stands nearby, the stadium lights glinting off his dark blue helmet. The third-base umpire, Jack Lietz, has his hands in his pockets to ward against the night’s cold. Somewhere a concessionaire inadvertently highlights the pivotal moment by yelping, “Heah! Heah!”

  Morgan walks without urgency back to the dugout, perhaps to buy a little more time for the relief pitcher, Luis Aponte, who is warming up in the half-light along the left-field sideline. Parks stays in the game. And the very next pitch he throws is smacked past him for a single into center field.

  Now, with runners on first and second, Chris Bourjos, the nephew of Otto “How’d you like to see Niagara Falls?” Denning, lines a single into left field, prompting a ghostly chorus of growling diamond prophets to sing it again: It’s the walks that kill you. The runner taking off from second base is the strong and speedy Mark Corey, whose image has appeared for the third year in a row on a Topps baseball card touting the “future stars” and “prospects” of the Baltimore Orioles. In truth, his major-league career is all but done. He has played in 49 games for Baltimore over the last two years, and has just 10 more big-league games left in his future. After this season, he will play four more years in the minor leagues, becoming a have-glove-will-travel guy who will set his suitcase down in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in El Paso, Texas; in Evansville, Indiana, and in Vancouver, British Columbia; in Jacksonville, Florida, and in Portland, Oregon, never to fulfill the promise conveyed on small rectangles of cardboard hoarded by children. Right now, though, he is still a cardboard prospect, and he is racing toward third base, two hundred pounds of determination, bound for home.

  The Pawtucket left fielder, Chico Walker, dashes to his left. He is powerful, compact, and, in many ways, an odd baseball fit. A young man from Chicago’s South Side, by way of Jackson, Mississippi, he grew up worshipping Stan the Man—not Stan Musial, the Baseball Hall of Fame star of the St. Louis Cardinals, but Stan Mikita, the Hockey Hall of Fame center for the Chicago Blackhawks. What’s more, he is a second baseman by nature, but this season the Red Sox moved him to the outfield to make room for the franchise’s second baseman of the future, Marty Barrett. Walker cannot say he is happy with the change, but if playing the outfield will get him back to the major leagues, just point him to left, center, or right.

  Last year he played for the Boston Red Sox as a September call-up, just long enough to convince him that he belongs in the major leagues, not in Pawtucket. Even so, he will never find complete welcome in Boston, and never know the reasons why. He will wonder whether he was so good at playing both the infield and the outfield that he was considered not quite good enough at either. He will wonder whether, as an African American, he was bumping up against an unspoken quota imposed by a Red Sox front office not known for its courage in matters of race. How could he not wonder these things as, for several years to come, he will bounce up to Boston and down to Pawtucket, up to Boston, down to Pawtucket. He will move up and down so often that a real estate company in Pawtucket will specialize in finding him apartments on sudden notice, as in 1984, when he will be the last player cut on the last day of Boston’s spring training camp. “It got frustrating after a while,” Walker will later say. “I’m going back to Pawtucket for what? I’m eligible to be the mayor of Pawtucket.”

  Walker will be accused in some quarters of allowing his discouragement to affect his play, just as the Red Sox will be accused in some quarters of not giving him a fair chance. But he will get his mind straight; he will prevail. His major-league career as a fill-in player will last well into
the 1990s, after most of the men around him tonight have retired and gone soft. As for playing the outfield, Chico Walker is a natural, as he demonstrates on this very play. He receives the ball on its first hop, a few yards in front of a billboard ad for Miller Beer asking if you’ve got the time, but he does not. Though his momentum pulls him toward center field, he manages to plant his left foot and hurl the ball toward home in an act counter to physical intuition. Morgan will later declare it to be “the best throw from left field I’ve ever seen in this stadium.”

  Some 250 feet away, at home plate, Walker’s target looms: the Pawtucket catcher Rich Gedman, wearing glasses that he has no fear of breaking. He is thick-bodied, tough, and, at twenty-one, precociously gifted in coaxing the best performances from his pitchers. To find where Gedman comes from, just follow the nearby Blackstone River north-westward for forty miles, against its natural flow, through Pawtucket and past Woonsocket, past Whitinsville, past all the communities that for nearly two centuries used the Blackstone as a power source and industrial sewer. The textile mills would reward the river for its muscle by discharging dyes into its waters; the woodworking plants did the same with solvents and paints; the metalworking shops, heavy metals. Follow this tainted river to its origins, to Worcester, and there you will find Gedman’s working-class hometown. His father drove a brewery truck and his mother worked in a factory, but he played baseball well enough to escape similar drudgery, and, at seventeen, was drafted by the Red Sox.

  Last September, he was called up to Boston and in nine games batted a measly .208. He is back now in Pawtucket, eager to prove himself of major-league worth and acutely aware of the opportunity created by an off-season gaffe of historic measure, in which the Red Sox front office allowed their star catcher, Carlton Fisk, to slip into free agency and onto the payroll of the Chicago White Sox. But he is mature enough to know that he must block thoughts of the possible future from his mind, and focus on the now. He follows the advice that he will share with his own players, decades from now, as the manager of his hometown minor-league team, the Worcester Tornadoes: “One pitch. One out. One inning.”

  One play. Mark Corey rounds third base and charges toward home, intent on outracing the baseball sailing in fast from somewhere behind his left shoulder. Gedman plants his feet at the front of home plate, eyes on the approaching ball, yet fully aware of the man coming toward him at full speed. He must resist the natural impulse to face this threat, because right now the ball matters more than his own physical well-being. Corey begins his slide about six feet from the plate, his head and torso back, his left leg up and pointed out; he has become a human arrow. The ball bounces once to beat him to home, but it arrives three feet to the right, forcing Gedman to reach for the ball and swing his mitt back across the plate, just as the blur of Corey’s body sweeps past.

  With expressions nearly childlike in their naked search for approval, the two men look to the umpire, Denny Cregg, a square block of blue, who quickly extends his arms parallel to the ground, then jabs a finger at the plate, pointing to the phantom evidence of the truth he is about to share.

  Safe!

  The denizens of McCoy Stadium, less than 1,700 now, and filling fewer than a third of the seats, release a collective cry of “Naaaaaah!” at the realization of Rochester taking a 1–0 lead. Amid the unintelligible expressions of outrage that follow, one man’s call rises clearly above the rest, taking advantage of the acoustics created by the stadium’s many un-inhabited quarters to offer the umpire this Holy Saturday blessing:

  “You stink! Yeah, you! You stink!”

  Parks rushes up to invade Cregg’s personal space, his face distorted in fury, the peace he finds in the Lord momentarily set aside. He walks away, comes back to argue some more, walks away and comes back again, enraged but defeated. He knows that he is done for the night. Here comes Morgan, and soon after, the relief pitcher, Luis Aponte.

  Danny Parks flips the ball to Aponte, jogs off the mound, shares one more thought with the umpire that does not appear to be “And a pleasant good night to you, sir,” tugs at the bill of his cap, and disappears into the dugout. After next year, he will disappear from professional baseball altogether, convinced, former teammates say in agreement, that the Red Sox organization never gave him the big-league opportunity he had earned. In the years to come, the Pawtucket Red Sox will send word down to the Huntsville, Alabama, area that it would like its hard-luck workhorse back for this reunion or that celebration. No response will ever come.

  Now for the 7th-inning stretch, that strange custom in which fans at a ball game rise as one, as though simultaneously struck with the desire to use the facilities, shake off the pins and needles, sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and look at one another with expressions of mild surprise that say: Can you believe that we do this? To remain seated would breach a civic bond among strangers that is sealed by an admixture of mustard and beer. The custom’s origins are lost to generations of kicked-up infield dirt, which is perhaps as it should be. The preferred lore holds that during an Opening Day game in 1910, between the Philadelphia Athletics and the Washington Senators, the president best remembered as the heaviest, William Howard Taft, took pity on his seat and stood up in the 7th inning. Those around him rose as well, thinking that the country’s leader was preparing to leave. A few minutes later, though, Mr. Taft rescinded his presidential pardon of a seat, sat back down, and, supposedly, gave birth to a baseball ritual. Not true. The custom dates at least to 1869, when the baseball pioneer Harry Wright, the center fielder, manager, and organizer of what is considered to be the first truly professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, recorded in a letter the odd behavior that he had noticed by the fans: “The spectators all arise between halves of the seventh inning, extend their legs and arms and sometimes walk about. In so doing they enjoy the relief afforded by relaxation from a long posture upon hard benches.”

  More than a century after bewhiskered Harry Wright chronicled the need of fans to find relief from protracted relaxation, McCoy’s shivering hundreds rise, their numbers shrinking by the dozens with each passing inning, to share a collective stretch and yawn before the sleep they expect will soon come. After all, it’s the 7th inning; just 2 innings to go.

  Gary Levin, nineteen, stands behind the visitors’ dugout on the first-base side with his girlfriend Lisa, the two of them fresh from a Seder at his aunt’s house on Pawtucket’s Fowler Avenue, close to the Seekonk River. His relationship with Lisa won’t last, but his memories of this night will: honoring his Jewish faith with shank bone and matzo ball soup in a carpeted basement, then breaking Passover with hot dogs and hot chocolate at a concrete ballpark.

  Meanwhile, somewhere among the right-field seats there stands Bob Brex, twenty-nine, a communications specialist for the state energy office. Since he does not attend church with any regularity, his Easter ceremony tomorrow will be at the Barrington home of his Italian grandmother, a retired bridal gown maker (She did Paul Anka’s wedding!) who, every year, thrives on serving as the hostess of an Easter Sunday feast: breaded veal cutlets; homemade ravioli with turkey-and-herb filling; and that delicious custard, made with Marsala wine, called zabaglione. Brex will arrive early to perform the chore that has become his Easter ritual, the ceremonial pounding of the veal strips before they are breaded, and then he will join other family members for a meal of generational love. But this night is his alone; he stands and surrenders all responsibility to the ritual and stretch of the 7th inning.

  And many rows down, in front of Brex, stand Ron and Danny Card, father-and-son season ticket holders who are as at home at McCoy as they are in their rented first-floor apartment on Providence’s East Side. Ron, of proud Pawtucket stock, is a self-employed computer programmer in his mid-thirties, with dark brown hair, a mustache, and a bit of a gut. He wears a flannel shirt under a sleeveless winter vest and has a cigarette burning, another cigarette, always another cigarette. Danny, his skinny, PawSox–obsessed son, has sandy hair floppin
g over his forehead, and is wearing sneakers, dungarees, and a jacket too thin for the night. Triple-A baseball enthralls Danny. Yes, his father is sort of a McCoy mucky-muck, a first among fans who chats regularly with the guys in Pawtucket’s front office—Hey, Ben!—and then imparts the inside information he has gleaned to those seated around him: So-and-so might get called up to Boston. But Danny cares less about those who make it to the major leagues than those who haven’t yet, or won’t. Even at the age of nine, he appreciates the long odds playing out before him; he even has a used Dave Koza glove. And before every game, he joins other kids who place pens and papers inside the carved-out bellies of their plastic milk jugs, tie strings around the handles, and bob them before the dugout like lures of promised fame, in hopes of a bite.

  Danny knows that he should go to bed early tonight; tomorrow is Easter. But a nascent sense of obligation—of honoring the unspoken contract between player and true fan—has convinced him that he and his father should never leave a ball game until the last out is recorded. In fact, the two Cards recently agreed on a pact for all baseball games, beginning with tonight’s: We stay until the end.

  So they rise: father and son and hundreds of others, as the April winds blow and the barrel fires burn and a baseball game takes pause. They rise and look about this place called McCoy. With the drab gray rafters above their heads complementing the drab gray concrete at their feet, the stadium has the permanent feel of a natural formation, carved by time from the industrial-residential landscape of Pawtucket. And yet, especially under these lights, the place also seems dreamlike, transitory—a mirage that fans and players have overtaken somehow and now share with its ghosts: