by Roger Kahn
I laughed again. “Hey,” Shuba said. “That’s not funny. What he should have said was ‘Nice catch.’
“Now something funny, that came from an usher. I wasn’t going good, and by this time all the bosses, O’Malley, Bavasi and Thompson, are Catholics, and my brother gets promoted to monsignor and word gets around. It’s real early and I’m not hitting at all. Some usher hollers down, ‘Hey, George. It’s a good thing your brother’s a bishop.’”
George smiled and sipped.
“When did it really end?” I said.
“All the time Rickey’s keeping me in the minors doesn’t do me any good and one year in Montreal I rip up my knee ligaments. That’s where it started to end. When I made the club to stay in ‘52 that knee was gone already. It just kept getting worse and worse. Around 1955,1 was only thirty-one, but the knee was so bad I couldn’t do much. So I quit. That’s all there was.
“I tried the sporting goods business. Up and down. So I went to work for the Post Office, steady and safe.”
“Does all the excitement and the rest seem real to you now?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s real.” George was drumming his fingers on the wooden table.
“What do you think of it?”
“Doesn’t mean much. When somebody would come up and ask for an autograph, I’d say, ‘Is this for a kid?’ And if it was, I’d give it to him. But if he said no, if it was for a man, I’d say, ‘Ah. Don’t be foolish. What does a grown man want something like that for?’ I had my laughs. One day against the Cubs, Hank Sauer was on first and Ralph Kiner was on third and neither one could run. I hollered, ‘Look for the double steal.’ But what does it mean? Ruth died. Gehrig died.”
The glasses were empty. He called and Katherine came downstairs and looked hopefully at George, wanting to be invited into the conversation, but Shuba has a European sense of a woman’s place. “Why don’t you come upstairs and sit with me?” she said.
“Because we’re talking,” Shuba said. “Men’s talk.”
“There was this time,” he said after fresh drinks had come, “in the World Series when I pinch-hit the home run.”
“Sure—1953. Off Allie Reynolds.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Shuba said. “It was the first game of that Series and Reynolds was fast and the fellers were having trouble seeing the ball and he’s got a shutout. I come up in the fifth and he throws that first pitch. I never saw it. It was a strike. If it had been inside, it would have killed me. Reynolds was in sun and I was in shadow. I never saw the ball. The next pitch he curved me. I only saw a little better. I was swinging, but I went down on one knee.” Shuba was a formful batter, always in control; slipping to a knee was as humiliating as falling flat. “Now the next pitch. I still wasn’t seeing the ball good, but I took my swing. My good swing. I hit it and it went to right field and I knew it would be long but maybe the right fielder could jump and as I trotted to first base I was saying, ‘Hail Mary, get it up higher. Hail Mary.’
“Only the second time in history anybody pinch-hit a home run in the World Series,” Shuba said, his face aglow. “But it wasn’t me. There was something else guiding the bat. I couldn’t see the ball, and you can think what you want, but another hand was guiding my bat.”
“I don’t know, George. Birdie Tebbetts was catching once when a batter crossed himself. Birdie called time, and crossed himself. And he told the hitter, ‘Now it’s all even with God. Let’s see who’s the better man.’”
“I don’t care what Tebbetts did. Another hand was guiding my bat.”
“Do you remember Ebbets Field, George? Now, if you close your eyes, can you see it?”
“Ah. That don’t mean nothing.”
“What means something?”
“The Church.”
“I mean in this life.”
He sprang up, reaching into a top drawer in the nearest file. “Marks in school,” he said. “Look at Marlene’s.” He put one of the girl’s report cards in front of me, then opened a notebook in which he had recorded her marks from term to term. “She had some trouble with arithmetic here in the second grade, but my wife talked to the Sister and worked with Marlene at home. Then Mary Kay …” He talked for another ten minutes about the way his children fared in school and how he, and his wife, kept notebook entries of their progress. He was still talking about the children when Katherine came downstairs again and without being asked refilled our glasses. “All that baseball was a preparation,” Shuba said. “You have certain phases in your life. Baseball prepared me for this. Raising my family.”
“Which is more important?”
“This is the real part of my life.”
“So all the rest was nothing?”
“Not nothing. Just not important. You do something important. Write. But playing ball.” He jerked his head and looked at the beams in the cellar ceiling. “What the hell is that?”
“You might not understand this, or believe me, but I would have given anything to have had your natural swing.”
“You could have,” George said.
“What?” I said. “What do you mean I could have?” And I saw, again, George standing in to hit as I first saw him, in 1948, when I was twenty and a copyboy and he was twenty-four and trying to become a major leaguer. It was a very clear, bright picture in my mind, and I could not see the pitcher or the crowd or even whether it was day or night. But I still saw Shuba. It was late in the year, when they bring up the good youngsters for a few games. He balanced on the balls of the feet as he waited for the pitch, holding the bat far back, and there was confidence and, more than that, a beauty to his stance. My father said, “What’s this Shuba’s first name? Franz?” But I was trying to understand how one could stand that beautifully against a pitcher and I did not answer and Shuba hit a long drive to right center field on a rising line. At a point 390 feet from home plate the ball struck the wire screen above the fence. It was still moving fast, thirty feet up. “Pretty good shot for Franz,” I said, but now my father, impressed, had fallen serious.
In the basement, Shuba said, “What did you swing?”
“Thirty-one, thirty-two ounces. Depends on the speed and the shape I was in.”
“Here’s what you do,” Shuba said. “Bore a hole in the top of the bat. Pour lead in it. Ten ounces. Now you got a bat forty-one or forty-two ounces. That’s what you want, to practice swinging. Builds up your shoulders and your chest and upper arms.”
“I couldn’t swing a bat that heavy.” I sipped the V.O. The cellar had become uncomfortably hot.
George was standing. “You take a ball of string and you make knots in it,” he said. “You make a lot of knots and it hangs in a clump.” He walked from the table and reached up toward a beam. A string coiled down and suspended, the base multiknotted into a clump. It was waist-high. “That’s the ball,” George said. His eyes were shining.
A large-thewed arm reached toward a beam. “I got some bats up here.” He chose two signed “George ‘Shotgun’ Shuba.” Both had been drilled and filled with lead. He set his feet, balancing as he had when my father joked about Franz Shuba, and he looked at the clumped string and I rose and drew closer, and he swung the bat. It was the old swing yet, right before me in a cellar. He was heavier, to be sure, but still the swing was beautiful, and grunting softly he whipped the bat into the clumped string. Level and swift, the bat parted the air and made a whining sound. Again Shuba swung and again, controlled and terribly hard. It was the hardest swing I ever saw that close.
Sweat burst upon his neck. “Now you,” he said, and handed me the bat.
“I’ve been drinking.”
“Come on. Let me see you swing,” he said. Cords stood out in Shuba’s throat.
I set my feet on green and white linoleum. My palms were wet. “Okay, but I’ve been drinking, I’m telling you.”
“Just swing,” Shuba ordered.
I knew as I began. The bat felt odd. It slipped in my hands. My swing was stiff.
&
nbsp; “Wrist,” George commanded. “Wrist.”
I swung again.
“You broke your wrists here.” He indicated a point two-thirds through the arc of the swing. “Break ‘em here.” He held his hand at the center. I swung again. “Better,” he said. “Now here.” I swung, snapping my wrists almost at the start of the swing. “All right,” he said, moving his hand still farther. “Snap ‘em here. Snap ‘em first thing you do. Think fast ball. Snap those wrists. The fast ball’s by you. Come on, snap. That’s it. Wrists. Swing flat. You’re catching on.”
“It’s hot as hell, George.”
“You’re doing all right,” he said.
“But you’re a natural.”
“Ah,” Shuba said. “You talk like a sportswriter.” He went to the file and pulled out a chart, marked with Xs. “In the winters,” he said, “for fifteen years after loading potatoes or anything else, even when I was in the majors, I’d swing at the clump six hundred times. Every night, and after sixty I’d make an X. Ten Xs and I had my six hundred swings. Then I could go to bed.
“You call that natural? I swung a 44-ounce bat 600 times a night, 4,200 times a week, 47,200 swings every winter. Wrists. The fast ball’s by you. You gotta wrist it out. Forty-seven thousand two hundred times.”
“I wish I’d known this years ago,” I said. George’s face looked very open. “It would have helped my own hitting.”
“Aah,” Shuba said, in the stuffy cellar. “Don’t let yourself think like that. The fast ball is by the both of us. Leave it to the younger guys.”
5
CARL AND JIMMY
Congenital malformation … in which the child has slanting eyes … a large tongue and a broad, short skull. Such children are often imbeciles.
Mongolism, as defined by Webster
In the comedian’s story, Carl Erskine has been having difficulties throwing strikes. Someone scratches a single. Two men walk. Now with nobody out and bases loaded, that paradigm of constancy, the archetypal Dodger fan, rises in Ebbets Field. “Come on, Oiskine,” he bellows. “These guys stink.” A curve breaks low.
“Don’t worry,” the fan shouts. “I’m witcha.” A curve is wide.
“Hang in there,” calls the fan. “You can do it, Oisk.” A fast ball sails high. Ball three.
“Go get ‘em,” the fan shouts. “We love ya, Oisk, baby.” A final fast ball is inside. The batter walks, forcing in a run. “Hey, Dressen,” screams the constant fan, “take that bum out.”
I had all but forgotten the story, a specialty of a comic named Phil Foster, until Erskine, replying to a letter, signed himself “Oisk.” He lives where he was born, in Anderson, Indiana, amid oaks, sycamores, Hoosiers and memories that resound in Brook-lynese.
When I last saw Erskine, he had shouted from a taxicab near Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street in Manhattan. That is an epicenter of the advertising world and finding Erskine there was like encountering a poet in a television studio. Not impossible but incongruous. “What are you doing here?” I demanded, climbing into the cab.
“It’s complicated,” he said. A shirt manufacturer had asked him to take executive training and then direct a band of retired athletes selling sportswear. “How much is a house in Westchester?” he said.
“Better figure thirty-five thousand, and up,” I said. It was 1960.
He winced. He had lost some hair. “That’s what other people told me.”
“How do you feel about leaving Indiana?”
“Mixed. This is challenging.”
“How are the children?” I said.
“Fine. There are three now. And Betty’s expecting again.”
The cab stopped in traffic. I had somewhere to get to. I scribbled my number. “It’ll be great having you back.”
“I’ll really call you,” Erskine said, but never did.
Later Ralph Branca explained that the Erskines’ fourth child had been born mongoloid. “A lot of people thought he ought to be put in an institution,” Branca said, his dachshund face more sorrowful than usual. “But Carl and Betty wanted to bring it up themselves. So they took off. They’re gone.” Erskine had stopped house-hunting in Westchester. He had quit his position with the shirt manufacturer. He had brought Betty and all the children back to Anderson. There he felt native and believed he stood a chance to make Jimmy Erskine as fully human as a mongoloid can become.
Near Toledo, I left the Turnpike for Highway 24, which follows the Maumee River southwest through Ohio towns called Texas and Napoleon and Antwerp. It is a pretty road winding into back country. When you have driven turnpikes too long, you develop a variety of fears. What would happen if, at seventy-five miles an hour, a tire exploded; or if the trailer ahead should lose a wheel; or if suddenly you sneezed with blinding violence? These are, of course, distant possibilities, but the fear is immediate. It is as if the human organism, controlling a vehicle for hour upon hour at the speed of a cheetah in full spring, asserts a protest by exaggerating dangers. Turning onto a country road, and having to cut the speed in half, one is flooded with relief. The road is respite.
“If you want to git to Interstate 69,” a boy said in a gas station at Milan Center, Indiana, “jes’ keep goin’.”
“That the way to Anderson?”
“Where’s Anderson?” To the boy at the pump, Milan Center and the village of Leo, sixteen miles north, were the world.
IS 69 leads down from Huntington County into Grant and on to Madison, through farmland mixed with stands of wood: thick oak, luxuriant maple, hickory, birch, ash, beech. Indiana trees are a deep-rooted, towering breed. The state was forest before man assaulted it with axes and with plows.
Anderson, Madison County seat, is an expanding industrial community, 69,923 strong according to the 1970 Census, up 42.5 percent since 1960 and, some demographers predict, the heart of a one-million-population area when a.d. 2,000 arrives. The city begins four miles west of IS 69, and as I turned, the sky glowed orange. It had been a long day’s journey and, remembering the Shubas’ V.O., and the Erskines’ earnest baptism, I stopped on Arrow Avenue, and bought a bottle of Scotch from a back shelf. Anderson is a blue-collar town; men there drink blended whisky and Canadian.
The Erskines live on West Tenth in a two-story red-brick building with a modest front yard like ten thousand private homes in Fiatbush. “Well, it’s about time. We’re getting hungry.” At the doorway, Carl, who was forty-three, looked grayer than I had anticipated. His features were sharp. But the body still held trim. It surprised me when he walked to see him limp.
“You look well.” Betty Erskine, a round-faced comfortable woman, appeared not to have changed at all. She smiled and we sat for a moment in their living room, spacious, nicely furnished and carpeted. On a spinet, against one white wall, a music book stood open to Chopin. Susan Erskine, blonde and fifteen, was studying piano. Looking at Susan, you knew, without asking, that she was a cheerleader for Anderson High. “And Gary,” Betty said, “our second son, is finishing college at Texas. The Dodgers have already drafted him. Danny is rugged, and he plays football for DePauw at Greencastle. And this is Jimmy.”
Jimmy Erskine, nine, came forward at Betty’s tug. He had the flat features and pinched nostrils of mongolism.
“Say, ‘Hello, Roger,’ “ Betty said.
Jimmy shook his head and sniffed.
“Come on,” Carl said.
“Hosh-uh,” Jimmy said. “Hosh-uh. Hosh-uh.”
“He’s proud,” Carl said, beaming. “He’s been practicing to say your name all week, and he’s proud as he can be.” The father’s strong right hand found Jimmy’s neck. He hugged the little boy against his hip.
The Erskines’ den extends square and compact from the living room. The walls are busy with plaques and books. “Would you like to drink the present you brought?” Carl asked. It was after dinner. He went to a cabinet under a bookcase and produced three scrapbooks, bound in brown tooled leather. “Some old fellow kept these. We didn’t know anything about them unt
il I came back here to live.
“I was looking beyond baseball, beyond a lot of things and I enrolled in Anderson College as a thirty-two-year-old freshman.” Erskine tells stories with a sense of detail. “All right,” he said. “Monday morning. Eight-o’clock class. The start of freshman English. I get to the building. I got these gray hairs. It’s two minutes to eight when I walk in, a little scared. All of a sudden the room gets quiet.” Erskine grinned. “They thought I was the professor.
“I got in about sixty-five credits before Dad died and for a lot of reasons I had to quit. Heck, I wasn’t only a thirty-two-year-old freshman. I became a thirty-six-year-old dropout.”
Betty went for a Coke and a drink, and the ceremony of scrapbooks began. “Here’s one of yours,” Erskine said. “How does it read?” He had opened to the World Series strikeout story:
A crowd of 35,270 fans, largest ever to squeeze and elbow its way into Ebbets Field for a series contest, came to see a game the Dodgers had to win. They saw much more. They saw a game of tension, inescapable and mounting tension, a game that offered one climax after another, each more grinding than the one before, a game that will be remembered with the finest.
“John Mize,” Erskine said, “was some hitter. But he had a pretty good mouth, too. All afternoon I could hear him yelling at the Yankee hitters. ‘What are you doing, being suckers for a miserable bush curve?’ Then he’s pinch-hitting in the ninth and I get two strikes. Wham. John Mize’s becomes the strikeout that breaks the record.”
“On a miserable bush curve?”
“A sweet out.”
“Here’s the Scotch,” Betty said. “And a Coke for you, Carl.”
“But I wasn’t out of it,” Erskine said. He was sitting forward on a plush chair, his face furrowed with thought. “After Mize, I had to pitch to Irv Noren. I walked him. All right. Now here comes Joe Collins. I forget the record. All I can think is that the right-field wall is 297 feet away and Collins is a strong left-handed hitter who has struck out four times. Baseball is that way. One swing of the bat. He hits the homer. He scores two runs. He goes from goat to hero. He wins it all. Collins had the power and I’m thinking, ‘Oh brother, he can turn this whole thing around for himself.’
