Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  Back then, Hood was a twelve-year-old spit, the son of a city councilman, living on the third floor of a triple-decker and answering to his altar-boy name of Michael Kinch. He had a friend from Pond Street named Killer, whose first job at McCoy was to change the numbers by hand on the scoreboard in left field. (For no pay; Killer did it for the prestige.) One day an upheaval in the strange clubhouse hierarchy at McCoy led to Killer’s ascension to batboy in the home team’s dugout, which opened up a batboy position in the visitors’ dugout that Killer offered to his little friend from the neighborhood, Michael. Before long, all the Pawtucket players were calling this innocent but ever-present boy by the name of “Hood.” Does this kid have a home to go to, or does he live here year-round, in the locker room? What’s up with this kid, this hood?

  McCoy had no washer or dryer, so Hood and the others in the crew would begin every morning by piling duffel bags of laundry—all the uniforms and undershirts, the socks and towels—into several shopping carts that had been, um, borrowed from a local supermarket. With dimes and quarters jingling in their pockets, they’d wheel these malodorous carts in a caravan up Pond Street. Turn right at Kepler, then left onto Meadow, passing a few of the triple-deckers that make up nearly half the city’s housing stock, hovering at curbside, reminding everyone of the cheek-by-jowl days of mills and factories. Then right onto Summit Street, where they’d wash, dry, and fold the game-day uniforms at a coin-operated Laundromat that would someday become a place for the cleansing of soul and spirit: the Iglesia Metodista Luz y Esperanza, the Light and Hope Methodist Church.

  Then, a couple of hours before game time, Hood and another boy would hop on a bicycle and wheel through the same cluttered array of triple-deckers, bars, and quotidian businesses, weaving the quarter-mile path to their personal paradise, the House of Pizza, on Division Street, across from the Rainbow Bar. After collecting their order, Hood would balance himself on the handlebars while holding a dozen hot pizza boxes, and the two would return to the ballpark, rolling through the neighborhood like an act in search of a circus.

  And every three or four days, Killer’s mother would drive a couple of the kids to the Star Market, on Newport Avenue, to buy food for the postgame meals, and to Russo Brothers wholesalers, on Mineral Spring Avenue, to stock up on the little things that maintain an ordered exuberance on the ball field; in other words, the sugar and tobacco craved by the ballplayers. The Hershey bars and Snickers bars and Milky Way bars and lots and lots of Bazooka gum. The Copenhagen, and the Skoal dip; the Red Man, Levi Garrett, and Beech-Nut chew. Some ballplayers liked to work up some Bazooka, stretch it out, wrap it around a ball of tobacco, then pop it back into their mouths. Hood, Killer, and the others knew every ballplayer’s favorite brand of chocolate and chew, and would have these treats waiting for them at their respective lockers, just above their freshly polished cleats.

  Hood was still a boy, of course. After all his postgame chores, which sometimes occupied him until well past midnight, he would run up Pond Street, through the sprawling and night-spooky grounds of Memorial Hospital—established, naturally, through the beneficence of some turn-of-the-century textile industrialist—and emerge on Prospect Street to see his mother watching from a top window of the triple-decker they lived in, waiting for her son. Not Hood; Michael.

  But you cannot immerse an impressionable boy with a latent wiseass streak into the rowdy locker-room universe of young men and not expect him to be transformed. The ballplayers tested Hood, taunted him, teased him about his Rhode Island accent, an accent that is not quite the same as Boston’s; it is harsher somehow, inflected with a faint hint of New England otherness. But these ballplayers from Elsewhere, many of them nowhere near as sophisticated as they fancied themselves to be, didn’t know any better, so they’d deliver payback for generations of hick jokes by constantly telling him to pahk his cah in Hahvahd Yahd.

  Before long, here was Hood, Pawtucket through and through, speaking with a mint-and-julep southern drawl that magically lifted at the end of every baseball season. Here he was, fourteen years old, sitting in the locker room with cheek distended by some Red Man tobacco, spitting into a cup. Here he was, wisecracking with the ballplayers, giving it back to them, playing the occasional prank, often at some peril. He once gave such a hard time to Jim Rice, now starring in left field for Boston, that the muscular ballplayer bound him to a baseball bat with duct tape and dunked him in the hot tub, the way you might primitively parboil a chicken before putting it on the rotisserie spit. (As a kind of bookend to that story, one night a few years later, Hood forgot to defrost the poultry he needed for the postgame repast, so he simply improvised—to the alarm of a visiting ballplayer who found whole chickens bobbing in the clubhouse hot tub.)

  Seven years have passed. His family has moved into a single-family home of their own. His father will soon be elected mayor. And here is Hood, still, essential to McCoy’s operations, working yet another game between the Rochester Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox. He arrived at eight this morning to tackle his never-ending checklist of subservience. Doing the laundry (they have two washers and two dryers at McCoy now). Scraping the dirt from cleats with a wire brush and then polishing them. Mopping the floor. Laying out towels at every locker. Stocking up on candy, gum, tobacco, soda, and beer. Running to the supermarket to buy eight whole chickens to cut into sixty-four pieces. Cooking the postgame meal in the narrow new kitchen that shares space in the boiler room. Making sure to time his food preparation by the inning. After all, baseball measures time not by the second, but by the out.

  The chicken, seasoned with Shake ’n Bake, went into the oven at 400 degrees right around the 3rd inning. The Aunt Millie’s marinara sauce went onto the stove at a low flame in the seventh. The big vat of pasta started cooking in the eighth. Maybe now he can pause for a moment.

  Hood has seen and done as much as can be seen and done at an old ballpark in Pawtucket. But. And he knows this sounds crazy, but: This dream job of his—of working at a baseball stadium all day, befriending the future stars of Major League Baseball, earning decent tips—has grown tiresome. His teenage years are nearly gone, and when he does the math of his past, he realizes that he has missed proms, summers at the beach, and endless hours of blank childhood, all in the service of ballplayers who, honestly, can sometimes be insufferable, spoiled jerks. At nineteen, he is about the same age as some of these athletes who expect him to pick up their towels from the clubhouse floor. Maybe the time has come to set aside Hood, and return to being Michael.

  It will take this young man a couple of years, but he will find his niche in his home state of Rhode Island, where most everyone sounds just like him. He will leave the McCoy fold and flirt with careers in nursing and business before becoming a police officer in the Blackstone Valley town of Cumberland, a few miles north of Pawtucket. The kid once called Hood will one day become Deputy Police Chief Michael Kinch.

  Right now, though, he has to set the table with paper plates and plastic cutlery. Dig out the bottles of Wishbone salad dressings, French, Italian, and Blue Cheese. Then check on the pasta. These Rochester ballplayers are going to be walking in any minute, and they’ll be hungry, too.

  In the bottom of the 9th inning, with the visiting team up by one run, anything can happen. This is what we tell one another, because we are creatures wired to run toward the light, no matter how dim. The game’s vital signs might well be fading by the pitch, but even those who would wish flat-lining to this cold and spent game—all the Rochester players, the three umpires, and perhaps even a few Pawtucket players—understand that anything can happen. They know that, theoretically, just one at bat could last forever, with foul ball after foul ball spinning into infinity, like the never-ending decimal measure of pi.

  Yes, anything can happen. But it usually doesn’t. According to the baseball historian and researcher David W. Smith, a lead carried by a team into the 9th inning holds up 95 percent of the time.

  Three more outs and everyone can cal
l it a night. The home plate umpire, Denny Cregg, can sleep for the first time in his new home up in Webster. Those Pawtucket players so inclined can go to My Brother’s Pub and greet the resurrection with a cold one. The Rochester players can eat some of Hood’s buffet offerings and grab a quick beer in the bar at the Howard Johnson motor lodge. But no one’s going to get too crazy. The teams have another game to play, early tomorrow afternoon.

  Marty Barrett leads off in the bottom of the ninth. He has played all of two weeks in Triple-A, but already he has impressed his team-mates with his competitive disposition and high baseball IQ—meaning, of course, that he will forever be labeled “scrappy,” which also connotes shortness, no matter that he is listed at five feet ten. All right, maybe he’s five feet nine. A right-handed hitter, he scans the field for those barely perceptible clues that might provide advantage. How the pitcher, Larry Jones, holds the ball before beginning his windup, for example; he might be tipping the kind of pitch he’s about to throw. Or whether the infielders are shading left or right, in anticipation of the pitch they know is about to come. If the second baseman is cheating toward center field, it might mean fastball. Marty Barrett notices these things.

  Less than three hours ago, he was so cold that he was practically sending telepathic messages to those malfunctioning stadium lights, willing them to remain broken so that the game would be postponed. Now he fights for this dying game’s continuance. His thirty-three-inch bat is at the ready, his eyes hunting.

  Barrett swings at the first pitch, sending a ground ball to the second baseman. He runs because you never know; anything can happen.

  Anything doesn’t. One out.

  With opportunity diminished by a third, the pressure of preserving life falls to Chico Walker, easygoing, card-playing, and anxious to get the hell out of Pawtucket. Unlike most of his teammates, he harbors no uncertainty: he knows that he is major-league material. And if anyone doubts this, well then, here: a double driven into deep center field. The sudden and faint possibility of Chico, the team’s most popular player, stirs the thousand or so remaining fans.

  The Rochester manager, Doc Edwards, emerges from the dugout and starts for the mound, where he plans to have a little chat with his pitcher, Jonesy. In some ways, every step that draws them closer only widens the gulf between them. Here is Experience, a forty-three-yearold former backup catcher who could afford to lose a few pounds, coming to explain the world to Expectation, a twenty-five-year-old fastball pitcher who often gets teased about his likeness to Jim Palmer. If only he had a modicum of Palmer’s control.

  Still, Edwards knows some things. He grew up in the coal country of West Virginia, where his father promised to break his legs if he followed him into the mines. The old man played catcher in the local amateur and semipro leagues, and the son noticed how his father seemed to be the captain of the field, yelling it up, positioning players, having a good time. Sensing a way out of rural Appalachia, the boy reached for a catcher’s mitt that almost immediately defined who and what he was—a catcher. After serving as a navy corpsman in the marines, an experience that earned him his nickname, he played professional base-ball in places like North Platte, Nebraska, and Selma, Alabama, before landing with the Cleveland Indians in 1962. He bounced around long enough to play for the New York Yankees during that once-great team’s inglorious swoon in 1965, but a .190 batting average ensured his return to the minor leagues, where the pride in knowing Mickey Mantle did little to ease the grind of seasons in the backwaters.

  He may have a bit of a belly now, and his hair may be flecked with gray, but Edwards is quite familiar with the insecurities that nag his players. He hasn’t forgotten those night whispers of doubt. Just fourteen years ago, for example, in 1967, he sat in the lobby of a players’ dormitory in Cocoa, Florida, just hoping to land a job with the Houston Astros. At twenty-nine, he was a good-fielding catcher with a low batting average who needed just one more year in the major leagues to be eligible for a pension. He was working construction in the off-season, one of his four children had a hip problem that might require surgery—and he just needed the job. “I know I can handle the glove,” he told the reporter from the Sporting News sitting beside him. “I feel like I’m as good as or better than any receiver in camp.”

  He did not get the job. Back down to the minors, to the Oklahoma City 89ers.

  Three years later, though, Edwards received a godsend of a baseball gift. He was in his early thirties, done as a player, and minding his own business as a bullpen coach for the Philadelphia Phillies. One day the team’s two catchers broke their hands in the same game. Then their two replacements got hurt. Suddenly, the Phillies had no choice but to promote their all but retired bullpen catcher to the big leagues. Old Doc Edwards responded with 21 hits and a .269 batting average in 35 blessed, unexpected games.

  So this man approaching the mound, a former major-league player who has caught the likes of Whitey Ford and Jim Bunning, a baseball lifer who hasn’t even reached the halfway point of a career that will last more than a half century, knows some things. And he’s coming to impart some of his hard-earned wisdom.

  But the pitcher, Jonesy, thinks he knows a few things, too. He thinks that Doc is a cover-your-ass manager who favors veteran ballplayers and doesn’t work hard enough to develop and promote the younger players. Jonesy isn’t alone in his assessment. Similar sentiments have found their way into the Rochester newspapers, which has irked Edwards, not least because the public airing of dissatisfaction violates old-school clubhouse protocol.

  Edwards wants to manage in the major leagues someday. Jones wants to pitch in the major leagues someday; someday soon. Theirs is not a father-and-son relationship. Now they are standing together on the mound, discussing how to end this cold and miserable night that possesses them both.

  Edwards tells his young pitcher: With the way the wind is blowing in, the only thing that can hurt us is if you screw up somehow. Then he walks off the mound. And on the next pitch, Jonesy bounces a curveball past the catcher, allowing Walker to take third.

  Russ Laribee, the pride of Southington, Connecticut, and the designated hitter for the Pawtucket Red Sox, waits with heavy bat in hand. A large man, with a retro mustache that conjures the dead-ball era and muscular legs that give him what he calls light-tower power, he stands in the center of a night so difficult for him that this one game will come to define his professional baseball career. He went 0 for 11? And struck out how many times? Seven? In one game? How is that even possible?

  No single day characterizes a person; no single game defines an athlete. But if such a false measure is applied, the entirety of this night must be considered: the before, the after, and this at bat, now.

  As with so many men on the field, baseball has provided Laribee with a way to help his parents envision a better life for their son. His father is a retired corrections officer; his mother is a secretary at a state school for juvenile delinquents. And Russell works as a baseball player, always has, often to the detriment of his social development. In high school, for example, he was the three-sport star athlete who dreamed of becoming a meteorologist and who did not attend his senior prom. He likes to say that he was so devoted to baseball that he couldn’t be bothered with girls, but in truth he was so shy that being in close proximity to the opposite sex rendered him mute.

  A powerful hitter with a strong arm and good speed, he excelled at every step up the ladder: Southington High School, the University of Connecticut, the Cape Cod League, all the way up to the Boston Red Sox organization’s Double-A team in Bristol, Connecticut, where, for two years, he enjoyed the elevated status of the homer-launching hometown hero. Laribee strongly suspects that Red Sox officials no longer see him as a prospect, though, and he resents what he imagines they say about him: subpar outfielder with occasional hitting clout—a designated hitter. He loves Ben Mondor and the other guys in the front office, but he has no rapport with his manager, Joe Morgan, whom he regards as a savvy baseball man with little
interest in player development—a familiar minor-league lament. He likes many of his teammates, but he is taken aback by the team’s lack of cohesiveness. At times it seems to be less a team than a collection of cliques. The Feeling Sorry for Themselves Clique. The Drinking and Partying at the Expense of Their Talent Clique. The Clique That Mistakes Cruelty for Humor, intent on finding a teammate’s psychic weakness and picking at it, picking at it, until the teammate crumbles in a heap. Russ Laribee is beginning to wonder whether he belongs here.

  One morning three months from now, sometime before dawn, Laribee will telephone Joe Morgan at home to break the news that he would not be taking the team bus for the airport, where the PawSox were to catch a flight for Tidewater, Virginia. The very idea of giving up a baseball career will stun Morgan. He will urge his designated hitter to stick out the rest of the season (there’s only a month left!), attempt to understand the young man’s explanations, then slam the phone down. But Laribee, aware of his many strikeouts yet confident that he can hit major-league pitching, will have his reasons. Nearly twenty-five years old, and clearly not a Red Sox prospect. Time for a time-out to decide whether it’s time.

  After a fantastic year of playing baseball in Italy, where he will be hailed as the Babe Ruth of Nettuno, Russ Laribee will end his career and become a door-to-door salesman of Electrolux vacuums. His analytical mind, which once had teammates saying he thought too much about each at bat, coupled with his improved social skills, will serve him well in management and sales. Eventually, he will become a sports handicapper, working from his home in southern Connecticut. “Mr. East,” he will call himself. Thirty years after losing his gamble to play major-league baseball, he will advise paying clients on how to make smarter bets on the game: There are twenty-two of thirty teams that average more runs scored per game versus righties than lefties. Overall thru May 11, that has led to the unders prevailing to a 157–122 mark if at least 1 left-hand pitcher starts the game, or 56.3 percent of the time, a decided winning advantage….