Switch Pitchers

by Norman German

  Bobby felt like he was in a comic horror movie. When he came to, he walked quickly to the hotel entrance, burst through the thick-glassed double doors, and glanced to his left down the sidewalk.

  Empty.

  When he looked right, he saw the last scrap of a plaid skirt disappearing around the corner. He ran to the intersection, saw the girl crossing to the other side of the street, and hurried after her.

  Twenty feet from the girl, Bobby realized he didn’t have a line. He slowed to match her pace until he could think of something. At the next corner, he came alongside her and stared blankly at the “Don’t Walk” sign flashing at them from across the street. The girl felt his presence and looked at him the instant he looked at her. Startled, she jerked her head back.

  “Wow,” she said. “You’re fast.”

  Bobby looked down the street for traffic, trying to think of a witty comeback, but couldn’t come up with anything. He had the strange sensation of watching himself in a movie and heard his mouth blurt out, “What did all those signals mean?”

  The girl looked at Bobby and smiled, red lipstick against clear skin bare of other makeup.

  “Back there,” Bobby said, jerking a hitchhiker’s thumb over his shoulder.

  The girl looked across the street, hoping to be rescued by the “Walk” sign. As if by magic, the light changed and the two started across. In the middle of the crossing, she said, “Steal, I think.”

  Bobby gave this some thought, the clack-clack of the girl’s high heels reminding him of cleats on clubhouse concrete. When they reached the other side, Bobby grabbed the girl’s arm and spun her toward him in a dance move. Mildly surprised, she gave Bobby a hundred-dollar smile and a surge of confidence.

  “Babydoll,” he said, looking right into her green eyes, “the only thing I wanna steal is your softly beating heart.”

  The girl stepped back and frowned, then laughed. “You sure are the bold one. Maybe I’m already spoken for.”

  Bobby’s eyes searched deeply into hers. “If that’s so, now’s the time to start speaking for yourself.”

  The girl’s hand shaded her eyes and her frown relaxed. Before she spoke, she honestly didn’t know what she would say. “Lucky for you we broke up just this week.”

  “Then why don’t you come to the game tonight?”

  “Are you pitching?”

  “No, I pitched last night.”

  “Yes, I saw. A shutout. If you’re that good, why don’t they pitch you every night?”

  Instinctively, Bobby rubbed his left shoulder. “It deadens your arm for a few days. We’re on a four-man rotation in Class-B. In the Big Leagues, they give their pitchers more rest.”

  “When you going to the Big Leagues?”

  “Oh, I’d say a year.” Bobby looked down the street. “Maybe two.” He returned his eyes to the girl. “But I’ll likely get called up to Triple-A sometime this season. Little Rock.”

  The girl looked down the sidewalk. “That’s not so far.”

  “Not so far for what?” Bobby fished.

  The girl ignored his question. “What’s the point of going to the game if you’re not pitching?”

  Bobby smiled. “My thoughts exactly. Why don’t we go to that carnival setting up in the hayfield on old man Martin’s farm?”

  The girl’s eyes grew big. “You’d skip the game? Won’t your coach miss you?”

  “Not as much as I’ll miss those green eyes if you say no.”

  The girl looked away shyly.

  “So what do you say? Is it a deal?”

  “Sure,” the girl said. “Deal.”

  Bobby held out his hand. “Shake on it.”

  She shook his hand quickly, then turned and started up the sidewalk.

  “Wait,” Bobby said, reaching toward her. “Where should I pick you up?”

  The girl continued to walk. “Ha! Fat chance of that,” she said over her shoulder, her hair bouncing from side to side. “Meet me at the Ferris wheel at nine.”

  “Say,” Bobby called out. “What’s your name? I don’t even know your name.”

  The girl whirled, flaring her skirt out. “Irene,” she said. “Irene Martin.”

  PART THREE

  Spring

  Chapter 7

  May 1952

  THE Double-A Lake Charles Lunkers were in the middle of the race for the Gulf Coast League title—the dead middle of an eight-team league, tied for fourth with the new Laredo Jackrabbits. There was nothing exciting in Bobby German’s life, but there were no terrible surprises, either. And that was the way he liked it.

  In the clubhouse before the game, Harry Chozen had given a general introduction of Roberto to the team, then told his players that the fans deserved at least one victory from a three-game home stand. They had lost the previous two to the Galveston Whitecaps, who were squatting on top of the last place Crowley Cajuns.

  When the coaches turned in their lineup cards to the umpire, there were as many seats empty as occupied in the two-thousand capacity Legion Field. The fans would trickle in until the fourth inning, and by the sixth when the lights came on, the crowd would start to dwindle whether Lake Charles was losing or not. The citizens liked their mid-ranking team, but not enough to lose an hour’s sleep on a work night.

  Bobby sat on the bench next to Cyrus “Peanut Butter” Vance, a right-hander who had broken into Triple-A with him five years before.

  “Man,” Cyrus said as they watched Roberto throw his last few warm-ups. “That Cuban son of a bitch is fast.”

  Bobby kept his thoughts to himself.

  The crowd response grew as Roberto dispensed with each batter. When he ran off the field, his new fan base gave him a standing ovation. In the dugout, he was as happy as a kid and didn’t know who to share his feelings with, so he sat next to Chozen while he unbuckled his equipment and prepared to bat.

  “What you think of that, Mr. Harry Chozen? I face my first three batters in American baseball and I get tres ponchados.” He held up three fingers. “Three strikeouts.” He looked at his fingers as if he couldn’t believe how easy it was.

  “I’ll tell you what I think, Roberto. I think you better call me Mr. Chozen. Just Mr. Chozen, understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Roberto said, grinning. “Mr. Chozen.”

  “And I think the next time I call for a curve, you damn well better throw a curve or shake it off so I can know what’s coming. You don’t, I’ll yank your ass in the middle of the count and make sure you sit the bench for the rest of the season. You understand that?”

  Roberto thought about what this meant.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Chozen,” he said. And he was not grinning.

  When Chozen selected a bat and stepped out of the dugout for the on-deck circle, Roberto looked around like a lost child. No one offered any help at first. Then Raul Atán, the shortstop from the Mexican League, said something to him in Spanish and Roberto sat next to him. Bobby listened to them talk gibberish for a while, then Raul stood and introduced the pitchers to Roberto.

  “This is Peanut Butter,” Raul said. “He and Mr. Chozen are the only Lunkers to play in the Majors.”

  Roberto extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Butter.”

  The dugout exploded with laughter.

  Raul explained. “Peanut Butter is his apodo. His nickname, Roberto. Like you were called El Diamante Negro in Cuba.”

  Cyrus reached up and shook Roberto’s hand. “Good to meet you, Roberto. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “You like the peanut butter, Mr. —?”

  “Cyrus. Call me Cyrus.”

  “You like the peanut butter, Cyrus?”

  “I like it okay, but they call me Peanut Butter because when I’m behind in the count I have a nervous habit of working my mouth like it’s full of peanut butter.”

  “Ah,” Roberto said. “I do not get behind in the count much since I was about twelve years old, so I am not sure. Maybe I will do this same thing.”

  Raul turned
to Bobby. “This is Lucky Strike, Roberto. He’s our ace southpaw.”

  Roberto extended his hand hesitantly. “This is your nickname, right, sir? You must strike out many of the batters to have this kind of a name. I am very pleased to meet you.”

  Bobby had been thinking about this moment. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to shake the new pitcher’s hand. It wasn’t because the Cuban was replacing him as the best pitcher on the team. Better pitchers came and went every season. It was because he had never shaken a colored man’s hand, not even the doormen he was friends with at the American Legion Hall.

  After a pause, Bobby did shake Roberto’s hand. Then he waited a while, careful not to touch any part of his body with his right hand before going to the water cooler at the end of the dugout and rinsing it off.

  “I strike out a few, but few strikeouts are lucky,” Bobby had said after quickly shaking Roberto’s hand. “They call me Lucky Strike because of these.” He reached in the pocket of his glove, beside him on the bench, and held up a red, white, and blue pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

  Roberto turned to Raul. “They have a funny way of nicknaming here in these United States, no?”

  Raul laughed. “I don’t think the problem is the United States. I think it’s Louisiana.”

  A sharp crack of the bat turned everyone’s heads toward the field.

  The voice of the announcer, Judge Sam Carlton, scratched through the PA system, “And it’s another one-sacker for our left fielder, number 7, Charlie ‘The Joker’ Harper.”

  Roberto asked Raul, “He is a funny man, this Charlie Harper?”

  “No, he’s the most serious hombre on the team. Sort of religious, in fact.”

  “It will take some getting used to, this American nicknaming,” Roberto said.

  The team watched Chozen sacrifice Charlie to second. Raul said to Roberto, “I bat after Cagle, so I have to take my warm-up cuts.” To Leo Tycer he said, “Leo, if I turn Roberto over to you, can I trust you to treat him right?”

  A thin, bespectacled man with a hatchet face looked up in surprise. “Me? When have you ever known me not to cut a man a square deal?”

  The right fielder stepped up to the plate. Before entering the dugout, the manager hollered to him, “Watch ’em close, Hardie! Pick a good one and give it a ride!”

  “That is his nickname,” Roberto asked Leo, “Hardie?”

  “No,” Leo said, pushing his round, gold-rimmed glasses up his nose. “His real name is Hardie Nettles, but we call him Badballs.”

  Roberto watched Hardie take the first pitch for a strike. After a check swing on the next throw, the umpire called strike two.

  “He have—,” Roberto began. He wasn’t sure how to phrase his question. “He have—. This Badballs, he have some kind of the-private-area problem?”

  “No,” Leo said. “Watch this next pitch. What you think it’ll be?”

  “Me, I would throw him my fastball and strike him out.”

  “Maybe,” Leo said, “but in the Big Leagues you might want to throw it outside, get him to chase something out of the strike zone.”

  The pitcher wound up and delivered. The ball came in high and outside. Hardie reached out and tagged it for an opposite-field double that drove in Charlie Harper.

  “See,” Leo said. “That’s why we call him Badballs. He can’t hit anything up the middle to save his soul, but he connects with bad balls right regular. Hardie Nettles never met a bad pitch he didn’t like.”

  Lambert Daniels, the redheaded first baseman, cut in. “Yeah, all that nicknaming’s a bunch of funny business. I can tell you this, though. Ain’t gonna be no ‘Red’ on no team I’m playing on. For some reason I still ain’t figured out, redheads play first or catcher, and they always call ’em Red. Anybody dare call me Red on any team I ever played for, I bust his head and showed him some real red.”

  Charlie Harper came into the dugout breathing hard from his hundred-and-eighty-foot sprint home. He dropped between Bobby and Cyrus. “Lord,” he said. “I gotta run more in the off season.” He instinctively reached for a breast pocket on his uniform, then glanced at Bobby and lifted his glove like a boy searching for toads under a rock. A pack of Luckies fell to the cement. “Bobby, you mind?” he asked, picking them up.

  “Not at all,” Bobby said. “Have two. Here.” He tossed a book of paper matches onto the bench.

  At the end of the fourth inning, the Lunkers were ahead 4-1, getting two runs from the bottom of the batting order. Roberto’s strikeouts excited the fans. As he jogged to the mound in the fifth, they chanted, “Ah-lay-mahn! Ah-lay-mahn! Ah-lay-mahn!”

  Bobby noticed there was something eerie about it, like they were worshiping a god who had come to deliver them not just from another losing season but from the poverty and losses of their personal lives.

  The players, too, caught fire. They were not used to dominant pitching, and their bats responded to Roberto’s exhibition.

  In the bottom of the fifth, cleanup man Lamar Cagle sent one over the Gaidry’s sign in right field to make it 6-1.

  “Ha!” Lambert said, slapping his beefy thigh. “That’s fifty percent off any item in the store! Maybe I can get the Big Chief to buy me that TruVal sports shirt I been admiring in the winder.”

  As he did on every home-team score, Judge Carlton rapped his gavel. Then his voice echoed through the ballpark. “You can kiss that sweet one bye-bye, folks, ’cause you ain’t gonna see it again till we meet where it landed—on that other shore.”

  On cue, the organist struck up the tune to “In the Sweet By and By.” While Big Chief Cagle rounded the bases, the players argued over who would cash in on their cleanup man’s good fortune. As Cagle crossed home, the fans joined together in singing the chorus, a tradition going back nearly a decade.

  In the sweet by and by,

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

  In the sweeeet by and by-iiiiiiiii,

  We shall meet on that beau-tee-ful shore.

  The players met Cagle jogging toward the dugout. For luck, everyone on the team, right down to batboy Dickie Chozen, laid hands on the big center fielder. In Spanish, Raul explained the ritual to Roberto.

  In the top of the sixth, Galveston made their first solid contact when second baseman Kip Radley shot a grass-spitting grounder to short. Raul Atán dove for the ball and threw the runner out on one knee to end the visitor’s half of the inning.

  Raul ran a gauntlet of backslapping in the dugout.

  —“Atta boy, Atán!”

  —“Good job on that worm-burner, Scoop!”

  —“Good throw, Raul.”

  —“Dirtiest uniform in the league. Keep it up, Scoop.”

  The Lunkers’ first baseman, Lamb Daniels, drew a walk to start the bottom of the sixth, then third baseman Zigmond Emory tipped a fastball off the end of his bat. The ball hit the first-base line, kicking up a small white cloud, and stayed fair. Galveston’s first baseman fielded the ball and ran back to his bag for the easy out while Daniels advanced to second.

  Several players in the dugout said it was pure chance the foul line was still clearly marked late in the game. Without the cloud of lime, the ump might have called the ball a foul.

  Shaking his head, Raul said to Roberto, “This is a term I cannot understand since I have been playing. If the ball hits the line, it is fair. Section 2 of the Official Rules states, ‘All foul lines are in fair territory.’ The foul line, then, should be called the fair line.” He held his hands out and shrugged his shoulders. “It is clear, is it not?”

  Hardie Nettles punched the shortstop on the arm. “Good ol’ Rules. He never gives up, huh, Bobby? Still trying to win new converts.”

  Bobby grinned till his eyes almost closed. He looked at his cigarette, drew its last breath, then, pinching the butt between his thumb and middle finger, flicked it through the chain link fence onto the field.

  Bill, Bobby’s brother, leaned over. “Don’t matter what you call a thing. Only m
atters what it does.” He worked his mouth and popped his dentures out, made a face, then swallowed them back in. “You can call these teeth or dentures, it don’t matter a damn to me. They eat just as good, either way.”

  Leo said to Raul, “That’s right, Two-Name. You of all people oughta know the label ain’t the thing itself.”