Once Upon a Fastball

by Bob Mitchell

  “Jose!”

  Shortstop Pagan ranges to his right, backhands a grounder deep in the hole, throws to Cepeda for the out.

  “Jack!”

  Righty pitcher Sanford delivers a corker.

  “Billy!”

  Lefty pitcher O’Dell (or Pierce, take your pick) paints the corner.

  “Juan!”

  Seth can’t help himself and joins in on the action, his invisible body shadowing Simon’s physical one from behind, his movements replicating those of his father, as if the two were performing some weird baseball version of that virtuoso dance number between Gene Kelly and Jerry the Mouse in the 1945 film Anchors Aweigh.

  Two Juan Marichals show off their famous high leg kicks.

  “Don!”

  A pair of Don Larsens execute their no-windup deliveries.

  “Stu!”

  Stu Miller and his twin brother are blown off the mound.

  Sol gives up, Elsie breaks up, Simon cracks up, Seth wells up.

  Del Shannon is singing “Hats Off to Larry” on the stereo. Sol perks up, picks up his cap from the couch, winks at his son, and he and Simon do a vaudeville shtick Sol has concocted, a spirited dance step featuring the removal and violent shaking of their Giants caps. Chortling hysterically, the two hoofers disappear into the kitchen.

  The same routine he used to do with me, Seth thinks, his face flushed.

  When father and son return to the living room, Sol has something important to impart.

  “Now, Simaroo, I want to talk to you about hatred.”

  “Sol! You—”

  “Elsie,” Sol says, with a sweet sternness. “The boy needs to hear this.”

  A winking Papa Sol speaks in his familiar loving, mock-serious voice.

  “Well, son, you know I would never teach you to hate another human being, right?”

  “’Course not, Dad,” Simon says.

  “And you know that there’s a strict rule around this house: Love thy neighbor. Right?”

  “Right!” Simon agrees, winking at his mom.

  “Well, Simaroo, that’s still the rule, but every rule has an exception, and I’m gonna tell you right now what that exception is.”

  “And what might that be?” Simon, playing along, asks, with mock innocence.

  “The exception to Love thy neighbor is…It’s okay to hate the Yankees!”

  Simon smiles, but not quite as broadly as his son.

  “Now, let me make it perfectly clear that this is altogether different from hating a single person, which is not a good thing. On the contrary, this is about hating a team, the baddest, awfulest, terriblest, disgustingest team that ever lived. It’s about hating a team that has tortured, taunted, teased, and tormented our beloved Giants for lo these many years. Why, they beat us in the last four World Series they played us, in ’23, ’36, ’37, and ’51. And the one in ’23 was the very first of the nineteen they’ve won. The last time we beat them was all the way back in ’22, which was forty years ago! Even the Dodgers (we hate them, too!) beat those Yanks in the ’55 Series, just to rub our noses in it. And now, we’re playing those hated Yankees again in the Series, and they’re up three games to two and we simply cannot allow them to beat us again!”

  Papa Sol is spent from his mock vituperation but continues on, requiring an exclamation point to terminate his little fatherly diatribe.

  “So, Simon, my son, repeat after me: ‘I hate the Yankees, I hate the Yankees….’”

  Simon joins in the chorus, in this baseball rite of passage, and is officially endoctrinated into the OSYHAA, the Official Stein Yankee-Hating Association of America.

  Of which a glowing Seth has been a loyal and longtime member in good standing.

  Seth is taking it all in, thrilled to be back in the lap of History once again. On the heels of the ticket stub and the mustard stain from his last trip back in time, he thinks, maybe this is real. He rubs his eyes to wipe off the moisture…

  …then opens them to a postcard of a Northern California day, crisp, fogless, smogless, cloudless, deep blue skies, the comforting yet penetrating rays of a late afternoon sun. The kind of perfect baseball afternoon you’d imagine was in the back of Jack Norworth’s mind when, in 1908, he penned the innocent lyrics to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

  Seth is at another baseball park from bygone days, but it’s not the physical appearance, like at the Polo Grounds, that gives away its identity. Not the configuration, not the irregularity, not the dimensions or the clock or the scoreboard or the bull pens. No, it is the simple fact that on this particular afternoon, the sun is brilliant and it is seventy degrees with a humidity of 58 percent, yet nearly everyone in the stands is bundled up in jackets or parkas or some sort of outer protection from the swirling winds and the bitterly chill air.

  The stadium that lodges these 43,948 would-be skiers can be none other than the home to the San Francisco Giants, the ballpark that hosted the 1961 All-Star Game where a gust of wind blew Stu Miller off the mound, the venue nicknamed “North Pole” and “Cave of the Winds” and where during a Mets BP in ’63 another gust picked up the batting cage and dropped it sixty feet six inches away onto the mound, the park that witnessed both the Beatles’ final concert on 8/29/66 and the Loma Prieta 7.1 earthquake, which disrupted Game 3 of the ’89 Giants-A’s World Series, the enclosure named after the indigenous wading bird of the long-billed curlew family, the arena absolutely unfit for the playing of baseball games: Candlestick Park.

  The ’Stick!

  Seth is sitting in a box seat down the first-base line, right behind the dugout. To his left are his Papa Sol and his father.

  He is putting two and two together: Candlestick Park, windy autumn day in 1962, and look, the New York Yankees are on the field. There’s Clete Boyer 6, Tony Kubek 10, Bobby Richardson 1, and Moose Skowron 14 tossing grounders. On the outfield bluegrass are Tommy Tresh 15, Mickey Mantle 7, Roger Maris 9, left to right. Then Elston Howard 32 behind the dish and Ralph Terry 23 on the mound.

  His eyes scan the outfield scoreboard:

  N.Y. 000 010 000

  S.F. 000 000 00

  Yep, it’s the bottom of the ninth of one of the most thrilling World Series games ever, the deciding Game 7 of the ’62 Fall Classic between Alvin Dark’s Jints and Ralph Houk’s Bronx Bombers.

  “Papa Sol—,” Seth says, turning to his left, then realizing that the ability to communicate and be heard isn’t in his job description.

  The swirling wind compels Simon Stein to zip up his black-and-orange Giants jacket all the way.

  “Gettin’ chilly, are we now?” Sol asks.

  Proud Simon shakes his head and smiles. Proud Seth does the same.

  “Hey, getcha hot dogs, getcha franks right heah,” a young vendor shouts down the row of seats.

  Sol looks at Simon, who nods.

  “Two dogs right here, my man,” Sol shouts.

  Invisible Seth is famished and nearly yells out, “Make that three!” But by now he knows the drill.

  Bills are handed down the aisle, wieners and coins are passed up the aisle, and father and son happily munch.

  “Y’know, Simaroo, the great actor Humphrey Bogart, good ol’ Bogie, once said, ‘A hot dog at the ball game beats roast beef at the Ritz.’ Yessirree Bob, there’s nothing like it on God’s green earth.”

  Simon looks up. “What’s the Ritz, Dad?”

  “Oh, just some fancy-shmancy hotel.”

  Seth’s dad buys the explanation and stuffs his mouth with dog. A wayward clump of mustard dots the tip of his nose, and he and Papa Sol surrender to momentary hilarity.

  While Ralph Terry takes his final warm-up tosses on the mound, Seth takes in his surroundings. Unlike at the ’51 game, the historian senses a distinct feeling of positive energy. At ball games, he is thinking, there are certainly always passion, rooting, partisanship, raw emotions. But whereas in ’51 you could feel the animus and rawness right down to the fans’ viscera, here, there is something more mellow. Pa
rt of it has to do with being in California. Part of it is that then the Jints were playing the hated Dodgers, and now they are playing the somewhat less hated Yanks.

  But the biggest part is that despite the challenges and bad news of this past year—the U-2 incident, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil war in the Congo, racial tension in the South, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and the death of Marilyn Monroe—there is hope in the air at the start of this new decade. A young and vibrant JFK is in office, inspiring American youth and promising to put a man on the moon by decade’s end. John Glenn has orbited the earth. Americans don’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore. Technology has grown wings, producing innovations like Telstar 1, digitized voice circuits, the first computer game, and sugar-free soft drinks. This year has also witnessed new hope for baseball, with the birth of the first two National League expansion teams, the New York Mets and the Houston Colt .45s. So all in all, everyone’s happy to be here at this time and this place, all 43,948 of these carefree fans, and why not?

  The wind is whipping and swirling in from dead center instead of the usual left-center. The sun’s rays are beating down on Seth’s face and neck, reflecting the intensity of the action on the field. Feels to him like that scene on the beach in Camus’s L’Étranger where the merciless, glaring sun strikes the forehead of absurdist hero Meursault like a knife.

  Solomon Stein and Simon Stein take synchronous chomps out of their hot dogs. Papa Sol takes a gulp of his Bud, leans back in his seat, chants under his breath, “I hate the Yankees….” Simon joins in, also sotto voce.

  So far, there has not been much for either Solomon or Simon Stein to get hopped up about, except for Willie McCovey’s triple in the seventh. But the lad is still tickled to be here, and Papa Sol has taught him well. Taught him that even if you don’t score runs, a game can still be exciting, because it’s close and anything can happen. Speaking of which, this is the last of the ninth of the deciding game of a World Series with Terry pitching, the very same Terry who blew it in the last of the ninth of the deciding Series game exactly two years ago by giving up that gopher ball to Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski and would he do it again or be the hero this time?

  Seth is also tickled to be here and to witness History once again and to see his very own father having such a swell time with his Papa Sol.

  Yanks catcher Howard pegs the ball to shortstop Kubek, and Seth’s eyes wander back to the scoreboard. Eight and a half innings played, one run scored in the entire game (innocuously, courtesy of a double play), and Terry’s throwing a shutout and is still in there. Seth is struck by how baseball has changed in the pitching department over the past five decades. He is thinking about how back then, in the fifties and sixties, men were men and the game, like this game he’s observing, was dominated by the very human being who initiates the action.

  About how the major leagues’ leading pitchers of that era, men of toughness and stamina and hurling gravitas, read like a Hall of Fame roll call: Raschi, Reynolds, Lopat, Ford, Lemon, Feller, Wynn, Garcia, Pierce, Trucks, Shantz, Garver, Ramos, Pascual, Bunning, Kaat, McLain, Lolich, Hunter, Lonborg, Chance, Palmer, McNally, Cuellar, and then Roberts, Simmons, Black, Newcombe, Roe, Labine, Erskine, Loes, Podres, Drysdale, Koufax, Maglie, Jansen, Hearn, Antonelli, Gomez, Marichal, Spahn, Sain, Burdette, Blackwell, Dickson, Haddix, Friend, Nuxhall, Gibson, Bunning, Perry, Jenkins, Seaver…About how today’s specialist firefighters, the relief pitchers who come in for an inning or even an out and make multimillions to do so, have altered the game, by transmogrifying those wonderful, old-fashioned, blue-collar, bite-your-lip-and-hang-in-there-till-the-bitter-end starters into dinosaurs.

  The pride of going the distance and toughing it out is an aspect of the game Seth really misses. Hearing about guys like old Warren Spahn, a workhorse who had twenty or more complete games in twelve different seasons, 382 in his career.

  Three hundred eighty-two!

  He recalls Papa Sol’s recounting to him once or twice that incredible game of May 26, 1959, when the Pirates’ Harvey Haddix pitched twelve perfect innings against the Milwaukee Braves, only to lose it in the thirteenth on the Braves’ only hit, a homer (technically ruled a double) by Joe Adcock. And the Kitten was beaten by Lew Burdette, who himself pitched a complete game! The two starters totaled an inconceivable twenty-five and two-thirds innings pitched, only one walk, and zero earned runs.

  You start something, you finish it, Papa Sol used to say.

  His grandfather also used to regale him with the story of the heroic pitching duel between Juan Marichal and Warren Spahn on July 2, 1963, right here at the ’Stick, in which each pitcher toiled for fifteen scoreless innings…apiece! When the Say Hey Kid hit a dinger off Spahnie in the bottom of the sixteenth, each hurler had thrown over two hundred pitches. Sol enjoyed comparing both pitching warriors to the heroes of Greek mythology who toiled in battle against monsters: Bellerophon, Hercules, Perseus, Theseus.

  “Are the Giants gonna score now, Dad?” Simon inquires.

  “I hope so, Simaroo. This is their last chance, but, yeah, I think we’re due, you just watch. In fact, I give you my word they’ll score two now and win the game.”

  “Yay! And beat the damn Yankees?”

  Papa Sol nods.

  It is indeed the Giants’ last chance and here’s Matty Alou pinch-hitting for reliever Billy O’Dell and Sol and Simon are both crossing their fingers like mad and Seth isn’t because he already knows the outcome and reliable Matty beats out a gorgeous drag bunt just to the right of the mound. (It is 1962, Seth notes, well before the bunt became extinct.)

  It’s only the third hit off Terry, who’s been pitching a masterpiece. Simon draws over the line from home to first on the little diamond in his scorecard. Papa Sol smiles approvingly and pats his son on the top of the head.

  Sol points out the base path between first and second, tells Simon about how they named it “Maury’s Lake,” because when the Giants played the Dodgers and their premium base stealer Maury Wills, the grounds crew would drench the dirt there so he couldn’t run as fast.

  So there stands Matty Alou at first and up comes his big brother, Felipe. Like Newk in the ’51 pennant game, Terry is on the hill throwing smoke, gas, heaters, darts, bullets, pills, pellets, aspirin tablets, cheese, the old Pepper, plus he’s pulling the string and making ol’ Uncle Charlie drop off the table, so even the solid Felipe doesn’t stand a chance and whiffs.

  Simon pouts and writes a K in the middle of the scorecard diamond.

  And here comes weak-hitting Chuck Hiller. Terry delivers an aspirin tablet and the attendees at Candlestick expel a collective oooooh as dirt that has been lying caked and fallow inside Ellie Howard’s catcher’s mitt explodes in all directions when the ball makes impact, like dust shooting out of a Persian rug that has just been spanked by a batwing beater. Howard winces and fires the ball back to Terry and Papa Sol is getting mighty nervous. And before you know it, Hiller is down on strikes, too, and Seth’s dad sadly writes in another K and now there are two gone and the Giants are down to their final out in this deciding game of the 1962 World Series.

  But hope springs eternal for Giants fans, who still remember what happened with Bobby Thomson against Ralph Branca when all seemed lost eleven years ago.

  Papa Sol looks at the scorecard and licks his chops, knowing full well that his hero, Willie Mays, will be coming up, with the menacing McCovey on deck and the dangerous Cepeda in the hole.

  “Just you watch, Simaroo. These next three guys may be the most powerful hitting tandem in baseball history, maybe even more explosive than the Yankees’ 1927 Murderers’ Row of Ruth, Gehrig, Meusel, and Lazzeri.”

  Simon licks his chops, too.

  “Now batting for the Giants, number twenty-four, the center fielder, Willie Mays,” the PA announcer bellows.

  Bedlam.

  Seth sees the hope flicker in his grandfather’s eyes as the announcement is made, because the game now rests upon th
e shoulders of the hero of Papa Sol and, by heredity, of Simon and Seth, too. With one stroke of Willie’s bat, one flick of his powerful wrists, the game will be History.

  Willie!

  Willie, Mickey, and the Duke? Fuhgeddaboudit! Tallulah Bankhead was right: “There have been only two geniuses in the world. Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.” And like his Elizabethan predecessor, Willie could sure make plays.

  Willie!

  A real artist up there, innovative, thrilling to watch, inimitable. After he was born, the mold became smithereens. Has a sixth sense and a flair for drama, whether it is baserunning, his unique basket catch, sliding and losing his cap, making unforgettable catches and throws, getting a quick jump on a fly ball, or producing runs at the critical juncture of a game.

  Willie!

  This year alone, the producer of forty-nine homers and 141 ribbies. And the one guy in the solar system you’d want up there swinging for the fences with the tilt on the line.

  Willie!

  Six hundred sixty career dingers when he finally retired as a Met, and one right here and right now would be just what the carpenter ordered.

  Willie!

  Sensing blood, Sol’s nostrils twitch in the chill mid-October air. Seth watches his grandfather and imagines him and his finely tuned baseball mind thinking things through, like an international chess grandmaster anticipating the next three moves.

  “Now just watch ol’ Willie do his thing, Simaroo. If anyone can come through, he’s your man.”

  Right on cue, Willie doesn’t disappoint. He grips his bat with that trademark right thumb pointing straight up to the heavens and does that familiar hip wiggle and takes that wide stance and digs in at the plate.

  Smack!

  Terry’s heater is rifled down the right-field line, ball exiting batter’s box even more rapidly than when it entered. Alou glides into third, Mays chugs around to second, but what goes unnoticed, perhaps to all but historian Seth, is what Roger Maris is doing out there in the right-field corner, which is nothing short of saving the game and the Series. He is playing the carom perfectly and throwing a strike to cutoff man Richardson and holding Alou, the potential tying run, at third.