Keystone Kids

by John R. Tunis

  “Ask that guy what the score is and he’ll tell you he got two hits for four times at bat!”

  “Shucks, he’s always thinking of his own hits.”

  “Keeps his batting average on his sleeve, that bird.”

  By the remarks and the tone in which they were made it was evident Case was far from popular on the club.

  “Yeah, he had that one all figured out; he had his batting average all figured out before he hit first base. There’s some guys on this club don’t think of nothing but their batting average and the dinner menu.” Case’s appetite was famous.

  The incident upset the manager also. When Red Allen struck out, with Case and Spike on base, he turned toward the bench, his hands flung out and an expression on his face that said, Well, what can you do with a team like this?

  Red lumbered back to the dugout and sat down just in time to catch the gesture. The big, good-natured first baseman sank to his seat, disgusted. Like all of them, he hated to have the manager criticize him in public. He said nothing, but his folded arms and the scowl on his usually calm face told plainly how he felt.

  With the score a tie at one to one in the fifth, and Swanson on second, Spike watched anxiously from the bench while his brother laid down a perfect bunt along the third base line.

  If they get him, they’ll have to step on it, thought Spike, as the boy’s feet flashed toward first.

  Actually, no play was made at all. Men were on first and third. Now the Pirate pitchers in the bullpen began bearing down, while Crane roared encouragement from third base. Suddenly the Pittsburgh catcher whipped a quick throw into third, and the baseman slapped the ball on Swanson as he slid back. It was a decision that could have gone either way.

  Out? Out? In disgust Ginger threw the glove in his hand on the ground. Two out and a man on first, instead of men on first and third and one out. That’s throwing it away. Crane stalked angrily in from the coaching lines, while Cassidy replaced him back of third. The peppery little manager was reaching the end of his rope. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he upset the bat rack with a kick of his foot, and then tossed a couple of white towels out onto the ground before the bench.

  “Shoot! Shoot!” he muttered, when Swanny, just as angry, came sullenly in and sat down. “Shoot! Some of you birds see third so seldom you don’t know how to act when you do get there.”

  Then Harry Street leaned into a fastball and sent it sizzling deep in far left field. “There you are! There you are!” shouted Crane, jumping up to the step. “There you are, what’d I tell you... there you are! We’d have had the ballgame if Swanson hadn’t been asleep... WHAT... what! What’s that...”

  In one bound he was out of the dugout and rushing for the plate. Cassidy, the third base coach, and Draper, behind first, were there before him. The umpire had called the hit foul and was waving Harry back as he rounded second.

  His jaw out, his fists clenched by his side, his upper lip curled back dangerously, the Dodger manager roared up to the plate umpire, already the center of more players than he liked. From the bench the rest of the team could hear that rasping voice, could see him pour the pent-up anger of weeks upon the unfortunate official. Across the way the Pirates jumped in to join the mob around the plate, everyone yelling at everyone else, shouting as they ran toward that seething mass of gesticulating ballplayers.

  “It was... it was not... it was so... it was not, I say... I was right on the line, I tell ya... you big bum... O.K.... Wanna make something out of it... ?”

  The umpire turned and walked majestically away. His back was to the plate and he moved slowly toward the stands, arms folded, his dignity unruffled. From the edge of the melee around the plate, the Russells could hear Ginger’s invective as he chased along at the umpire’s shoulder. His face was up close, his jaw out, every gesture threatening. Finally the official turned. Now he was angry.

  “Crane... if you follow me two steps further, you’re out of the game.”

  “Then I’m out, ’cause I’m gonna follow you.” And he did.

  The hand of the umpire went up, there was a shout from the sparse crowd, Crane was banished from the game. It was a sort of signal.

  Suddenly a riot broke out about the plate, bats and fists were swinging, men went down, spikes glistened in the sunshine of late afternoon.

  Gosh! I wish I was manager of this team, Spike thought. No, I don’t either. I wish we were back on the Volunteers and out of this sort of thing.

  12

  SO! KLEIN’S A HITTER, is he? He’s a hitter, this rookie! O.K., the pitchers all said. Fine, we’ll show him. We’ll loosen him up; we’ll let him have a look at big league stuff.

  And they proceeded to throw at his head every time he came to bat. Bob noticed this immediately and mentioned it to Spike that night in their room in the Copley Plaza in Boston.

  “Say, that boy Klein is sure taking it from the pitchers. They’re throwing at his head. Seems like he’s been on the ground most of every game he’s played so far.”

  “Well, that’s the correct treatment for a busher who thinks he can hit, isn’t it?” Spike was not over-sympathetic.

  “Yeah, but this Klein’s a Jewish boy.”

  The elder Russell, seated on his bed in the act of removing his shoes and socks from tired feet, looked up quickly. Had his brother been listening to other and older men on the team?

  “Oh? He’s Jewish, is he?”

  “Sure, didn’t you know that?” Then after a moment Bob added with authority, “Won’t last.”

  Now Spike knew. It was the same record, the same words and music. He replied quickly, “Why won’t he last?”

  “ ’Cause he’s Jewish, that’s why. Man, the bench jockeys’ll get him. They’ll ride that baby to death, you see if they don’t. The pitchers’ll dust him off, too. Besides, those Jewish boys can’t take it.”

  His brother’s tone and his words irritated Spike. That phrase, he recalled, had jarred on him when Swanson first spoke it. Now it rankled. “What makes you think so, Bobby? How ’bout Newman on the Travelers and Stern with the Crackers and...”

  “Aw, they’re yellow. No guts,” announced his brother with the finality of a radio announcer reading a commercial. It was the same line, the same expression, the same verdict Spike had heard previously. “Everyone knows it,” continued the younger Russell.

  Spike glanced over at his brother. “Why? Who’s everyone?”

  “Everyone. All the fellows. That throw he made this afternoon on the double steal, remember? It was supposed to be to second; man, it hit the dirt ten feet in front of me.”

  “Maybe if you’d had that dusting off and fast balls chucked at your noggin all afternoon, you’d be a little nervous, too.”

  “Maybe. Let’s watch him next time. But the boys all say he won’t last.”

  Spike hung his coat on a hanger in the closet, and turned. “He sure can’t if the gang doesn’t give him some support. D’ja notice when he was chasing that foul fly in the fourth into our dugout, the boys on the bench let him tumble right in. The poor guy like to kill hisself.”

  “I noticed that. They should have yelled. I yelled.”

  “So’d I. He never heard—he doesn’t know our voices yet, and the coaches were shouting, and everything. But they should have called out in the dugout, those guys sitting there. That’s their business. D’ja see, he barked all the skin off his right elbow as it was?”

  “Yeah. This ballclub’s queer, all right. There are so many cliques and gangs... Say, Spike! You know you owe me a nickel.”

  “By gosh, that’s right. So I do.”

  Since their earliest days in outlaw ball the two always had had a pool into which each one paid a nickel whenever he made an error. They used the money every winter to buy themselves a Christmas dinner at the Andrew Jackson and thus escape Mrs. Hampton’s boarding-house on McGavock Street. Back with Charlotte and Savannah in the Sally League that five cents was money. As they earned more money, Bob wanted to increase the
ante, but Spike wouldn’t hear of such a thing.

  “Say, how we stand now?”

  Spike drew out his little black notebook and consulted it. In this book he tried every day to write up after the game any information he had obtained that afternoon about the way to play the hitters, details of the pitchers he had faced, facts about their own play around second, and other items pertaining to their trade. He also kept score of their pool, too.

  “Why, look here! That’s funny! We’re exactly even so far at forty-five cents apiece. Yep, and we’re batting close, too. I’m up to one point of you, Bob.”

  Bob sank into an easy chair and opened up an evening paper. “That’s great. Say... get a load of this gent.” And he began to read from the sports pages.

  “We sat on the Brooklyn bench this afternoon for a while during practice and heard lots of good words for the Keystone Kids of Manager Ginger Crane’s Drowning Dodgers. If Spike and Bob Russell are as good as the manager and coaches of the team say they are, most of the great second-base combinations of the past should have been in semipro ball. ‘Mechanically, this is the best combination I’ve seen come up,’ Crane said yesterday, and Coach Charlie Draper echoed his remarks. ‘Me, too, and I’ve seen some good ones. This Spike is about the best pivot man on a doubleplay I’ve ever watched.’ ”

  Bob tossed the paper over to his brother, who read the paragraphs.

  His face got warm. “Gosh!” he said. Made you solemn, sort of.

  Bob became restless. He got up and wandered about the room; then he put on his coat and went out to the elevator, down for a double scoop dish of ice cream before going to bed. Spike stood reading the column again and again. Gosh! It sure scared a fellow, talk like that. Why, that’s enough to put the whammy on us, that is!

  In ten minutes his brother was back. Bob climbed into bed thinking: Gee, I’m glad I let Spike manage our salary deal last winter. He can handle that MacManus all right. Why, he could even manage this ballclub, Spike could.

  Yes, the second base combination of the Dodgers was still working; but the remainder of the club was rapidly sliding down hill. The laughter and jokes of the clubhouse, the free and easy smoothness of their play in spring training had gone. No one wisecracked any more; no one made hot foots or played tricks. Now they were tense and tight, and even Raz grew silent as the season went on into the torrid heat of mid-July and the team sank gradually into sixth place. When a team is in sixth the dressing room loungers, the actors and celebrities, bother it no more. They abandoned the Dodgers to follow the Pirates and the Cards in their struggle for the lead.

  Meanwhile, Ginger Crane’s desperate attempts to avert disaster had little success. Now his hunches were hunches and nothing more, wild stabs backed by no reasoning, moves made in the hope of changing their luck and finding the right combination to stop their downward slide in the second division. Things looked blacker than an umpire’s heart.

  “Shoot!” said the manager, in reply to a sportswriter’s query just before their first game after returning to Brooklyn. “Shoot! What does it matter who I pitch today? If you don’t give a pitcher more than three hits a game, he can’t be expected to win for you.”

  “The boys haven’t been hitting recently,” said the sportswriter.

  “I’ll say! We can’t seem to buy ourselves a base hit these days.”

  “It’s the hairpins,” said Charlie Draper. “We can’t find any, so we can’t get any two baggers. Since women started cutting their hair short we don’t find any hairpins and we don’t get any two base hits.”

  “Let’s get some today,” said Crane with a burst of his old-time fire. His mouth shut tight. He clapped his hands. “All right now, boys, all right now. Lil’ pepper! Take nothing for granted. Lil’ pepper today... lil’ pepper...”

  They got their hits, too. With the help of these and a couple of bases on balls and a blooper by Harry Street which dropped dead on the left field foul line with the bags filled, the Dodgers had a four to nothing lead with the game half gone. Directly behind triumph came disaster, as always stalking the second division team.

  In the seventh the Cubs got two men on base, and the runner on second tried to score on a single. Karl Case’s throw was only a few feet from the plate, but when big Babe Stansworth, the catcher, pivoted to tag the runner sliding around to the rear of the plate, his spike caught in the dirt and his ankle cracked with a snap Spike Russell could hear in the cut-off position behind the box. The team rushed up to him, a stretcher was brought out, and the big chap, writhing in pain, was carried off the field. The Dodgers were left without a first-string catcher to finish out the season and Klein, in the dugout, began nervously fumbling with the buckles on his shin guards.

  This incident, the new catcher, the men on second and third, all upset Rog Stinson in the box. He walked the next man, while from the visitors’ bench the jockeys howled and on the lines the red-faced coaches joined in the jeering.

  “Yeah... who’s ’at catching now?”

  “Hey, Buglenose... hold that ball!” Spike wondered how they had managed to learn the team’s nickname for the youngster in such a short time. But he knew things of this sort were part of the rival coaches’ business. The boy behind the plate was plainly nervous, Rog was nervous, and the nervousness of the pitcher communicated itself again to the catcher. A ball got away from him and dribbled on the ground back of the plate. He yanked off his mask, twisted rapidly around, pounced on it, juggled the ball, picked it up, and stood there poised to throw.

  While the coaches jeered, the runners dashed forward and then darted back to safety, and the rival bench howled with delight. For the moment Klein was saved, but his nervousness was plain for everyone to see. And always from the bench and the coaching lines came that storm of words, of names, of jokes, all directed at the boy there in his catcher’s tools. “Ah there, Buglenose...”

  “Don’t drop that ball, Buglenose...”

  “Watch out... watch out, or you’ll be back in the Three I League next week...” Then the batter singled cleanly and two more runs scored. Now the tieing run was perched on third. A long fly brought it in, and the teams were even at four runs apiece.

  The next batter came up with Spike’s favorite ball. It was a sizzling grasscutter well over toward third, a ball that had legs on it, low and fast. Harry, his glove outstretched, stabbed and missed. Spike was there behind the third baseman, waiting for the ball, got it cleanly and burned it home ahead of the heavy, slow baserunner. The huge man on the path was ten feet from home when the ball landed in Klein’s hands. So instead of sliding he ran as hard as he could and hurled himself, shoulder forward, at the rookie catcher. The blow knocked Klein spinning, and the ball tumbled from his grasp.

  Confusion! Everyone was running. Rog raced for the ball, Harry came charging in from third, and Spike dashed for the plate, too. This was something he wouldn’t usually have done. But he snatched the ball from Rog Stinson and ran over to the burly Cub runner, who was picking himself up from the collision and shaking dirt out of his shirt. He slapped the ball on his shoulder.

  “He never touched the plate, he never touched the plate!” shouted Spike to the umpire.

  From nowhere Crane appeared at his side. For just a second or two his cursing was directed toward the young catcher, and then as he caught the significance of the shortstop’s words, he, too, charged Old Stubblebeard, the umpire, with all his fury and all the invective at his command. He shouted, he shrieked, he screamed. His howls drowned out the protests and assertions of the player, the rival manager, and his coaches. For the second time in two days the umpire turned away from the plate, arms folded. But this time his patience was short. Suddenly he turned and pointed toward the dugout.

  Ginger refused to budge.

  “This’ll cost you a hundred dollars,” said the umpire. Then Ginger moved. Slowly he moved. He was out of the game.

  Too late Cassidy took over the team. The winning run was home and they trooped in to the lockers twenty m
inutes later, another lead thrown away, another game lost that should have been won, another bitter disappointment, and another cheerless dinner ahead of them. They sat there dispirited and disgusted.

  “What time is it?” asked someone finally. “Does anyone know what time it is?”

  “Does anyone care?” said a voice. It was typical of their feeling. No one cared.

  Crane had for some reason vanished from the room and at least they were thankful to be spared his rasping voice as they slumped down before their lockers.

  Tired and discouraged, Spike sat on the bench. Someone touched his shoulder. There was a quiet sentence in his ear. He tried to hear, to understand.

  “MacManus wants to see you.” He looked up at Bill Hanson, the club secretary.

  “Me? Now? Like this?”

  “Yeah. You better go right up.”

  Now what could that mean? Dismissal, probably, or a ticket for Nashville, or a fine at the very least for his raging at the umpire that afternoon. Hang it, he’d defend himself. The man never did touch the plate, never.

  He was sure there was something wrong, but he felt almost too tired to think. And he knew Jack MacManus would be in a terrible mood after watching them lose that game. So he was prepared for the worst, prepared also for the owner’s red angry face, his abrupt manner. He could see that things had been stormy already that afternoon in the main office.

  “Russell! Sit down!” It was a command.

  MacManus rose, threw away the stub of a cigar, and lit another. He walked across the room, came back, and reseated himself under the big elk’s head on the wall. He started to speak.

  Then something hit Spike, hit him hard, knocked all the breath out of him. It was the tense voice of MacManus.

  “How’d you like to manage the Dodgers?”

  The world went round. He was dizzy. He was insane. He was hearing things. Manager! Manage the Dodgers!

  He tried to collect himself, to hold himself down to the chair from which he had been blown by the explosion. Then he heard his own voice, thin, far away.