We were taking on the Ogden Gunners. They had been in the Utah–Idaho League with the Salt Lake City Bees. When the pro league hit a rock and sank, most of the team stuck together. They kept the name. I think the uniforms were new, though. Newer, I should say. They still had the old style: white caps with blue brims, crossed rifles over the heart, and an O in a diamond on the left sleeve.
Lorin Farr Park had a short right field with a high fence and was long in center and left. Wouldn’t you know it?—the Gunners sported three or four big, tall, strong-looking guys who batted left. That right there warned they knew what they were doing. If the park you play in favors one side over the other, a smart team will find players who can take advantage of it.
They started a southpaw, too, to make it tough on our left-handed swingers. We had Wes going, so we had to hope he was on his game.
It wasn’t the kind of game you’d use to teach somebody how to play baseball. They threw at us. Wes threw at them—he was never shy about that. Fidgety Frank took out their shortstop with a body block to break up a double play. They had to substitute for the guy; he got a wrenched knee. Then one of their runners spiked Eddie trying to steal second. Eddie got it bandaged and stayed in. Both sides said some things neither church would’ve been happy with. Nobody threw any punches and the benches didn’t clear, but that was about all we missed.
The fans loved it. They always get excited about games like that. They called us worse names than we called each other, things that weren’t in the Book of Daniel or the Book of Mormon.
They liked the game even better ’cause the Gunners won it 7-5. We had a guy called out at the plate when he looked safe easy. Harv didn’t cuss the umpire, but he called him hard of seeing so many ways that the jerk threw him out of the game anyhow.
We didn’t go out to supper with the Gunners. Harv stuck around just long enough to collect our share of the gate. Then we went back to our motor lodge. We cleaned up there and found somewhere to eat. If the Ogden team was out celebrating somewhere else, that was its business.
“He robbed us! In broad daylight, he robbed us!” Harv must’ve said it eight or ten times.
“What can you do?” Fidgety Frank said when he’d heard it often enough to get sick of it. “I mean, Harv, what can you do? You’d best believe we’re lucky that kind of crap doesn’t land on us even more than it does.”
“Shucks, I know one thing I can do,” Harv said. “I can make consarned sure that squinting baboon doesn’t work our game the next time we swing through here. I can make sure his guide dog doesn’t work it, either!”
Well, we all started giggling. Not laughing. When I say giggling, I mean giggling. And the sight of two big tables’ worth of long-haired, bearded ballplayers giggling like three-year-olds set the waiters giggling, too. One of them laughed so hard, he dropped the apple pie that was supposed to be part of our dessert.
He wasn’t happy about that. The price of it would come out of his pay, and you can bet a waiter at a diner in Ogden, Utah, wasn’t going to drive home in a Duesenberg. But Harv slipped him a half-dollar to go with his regular tip when we were leaving. The world suited him better after that.
“It was our fault,” Harv said as we walked back to our rooms. “We broke him up and made him drop that pie. Scales oughta balance.”
“You’re got a soft heart, Harv,” Wes said. “You’ve got a soft head, too.” He was still out of sorts because he’d lost the game.
“It could be,” Harv said. “But I don’t care. I’m gonna do what feels right by my lights. If anybody else doesn’t like it, too bad. No skin off my snoot.”
Wes thought that over. He decided he didn’t feel like picking a fight with his manager. The House of Daniel would have had a problem without him. But he would have had a bigger problem without the team. He had sense enough to see it. Pitchers, they’re mostly smarter than position players. Mostly.
Next morning, we went to Logan, northeast of Ogden. They played their games on the football field at the agricultural college, but they weren’t a college team. They’d played in the Utah–Idaho League, but they went under a year before it did. They went on as a semipro outfit and kept the Collegian name—another verse of that same song.
When you put a baseball field in a space made for football, you’re going to have one field that’s too short and one that’s too long. At the agricultural college, left was the short field—it was only 251 down the line. They had a tall chicken-wire screen that they mounted on two metal posts to take away some of the cheap homers, but it wouldn’t take away all of them. Meanwhile, you needed to climb on a horse to go to the fence in right.
Before the game, the Collegians’ manager walked over to Harv and said, “Hear you had a run-in with the Gunners yesterday.”
“That’s right.” Steam didn’t shoot out of Harv’s ears, but I don’t know why not. “And if you want to play the way they did, we’ll have another one with you fellas today.”
“No, no.” Their manager shook his head. “Those guys, they think they gotta show you how big it is every time they put on spikes. You don’t throw at us, we won’t throw at you. If you do, we can take care of ourselves.”
“We aren’t headhunters. You know anything about us, you know that,” Harv said. “Frank may push you back from the plate, but—”
“That’s not the same thing. Sure. I know the difference,” the Logan man said. “Fair enough. If it doesn’t start, we’ll both be happy. If it does, we’ll go on from there.”
“Yup.” Harv held out his hand. The Collegians’ manager shook with him. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth isn’t Book of Daniel talk, but it’d be baseball Holy Writ even if it weren’t in the Good Book some other place. They both understood it. So did everybody else on both sides.
The crowd cheered when the Collegians took the field. The cheers sorta faded away instead of coming down on top of us. They sounded lonely and far off. Football fields are different, that’s all.
So are games you play on football fields. Wes hit a screamer that would have been out of most parks. I mean to tell you, he almost broke that baseball. It hit near the top of the screen and bounced down into their left fielder’s glove. The guy knew his business. He fired it into second. Wes took a big turn around first, but he had to scoot back in a hurry. What should have been a homer turned into a single.
The screen tooketh away, and the screen gaveth. Yeah, I know that’s wrong, but it was right, too. In the top of the second, Eddie hit a high, lazy fly ball to left. The Collegians’ outfielder drifted back till he’d pressed his behind against the chicken wire. Then all he could do was look up and watch the ball sail about two feet over the top of the screen and out.
Eddie laughed all the way around the bases—not at the Collegians’ pitcher, but at the park. He hustled around the bases, too. He had about as much power as I did. He didn’t hit many home runs, and he didn’t know how to act them out. It’s the big, strong guys who get to practice the slow trot.
Then the Collegians tied it. They had a man on third and one out when their hitter smashed one into the gap in right-center. “I got it!” I yelled. “I got it! I got it!” I didn’t know if I had it or not, but I remembered what happened to Rabbit and Double-Double. I didn’t want another smashup.
And darned if I didn’t have it. It wasn’t quite as good a catch as the one I made in Ponca City, ’cause I could use both hands. But I covered a lot of ground to get there. The runner on third waltzed home, but if I hadn’t caught it they would have had another guy there—or he might have come all the way around.
Their batter stopped about ten feet past first and stared out at me with his hands on his hips. “Call the police!” he hollered. “I been robbed!” He kicked at the dirt and trotted back to the dugout.
Some people threw me silver when I came in after the inning ended. “Obliged, folks,” I said as I picked it up. “Much obliged.” Two bucks and a quarter, it came to. It wouldn’t go to waste.
; “Nice one, Snake,” Fidgety Frank said. “You might’ve saved us a big inning there.”
“You can go get ’em, all right,” Harv added.
What I wanted was to swing the bat. If Eddie could hit one out here, I could, too. I could, only I didn’t. Their pitcher worked me away, away, away. I tried to pull one, but all I could manage was a grounder to short.
Next time I batted, we were down 3-2. We had a man on first. The pitcher went away from me again. I took one off the plate for a ball and fouled one back. Then I thought, Hey, he just won’t come in to me. So okey-doke, why don’t I go the other way myself?
Sure enough, low and away one more time. I golfed it into right-center, and it rolled between the two outfielders. I’ve got pretty fair speed. I tripled standing up and drove in the guy ahead of me. Then I scored on a fly to center.
“Lookit the Snake!” Fidgety Frank said. “Does it with the glove, does it with the bat, too!”
“Bat me cleanup!” I told Harv.
“You want to clean up, Snake, go get yourself a broom,” he said. He knew I was joking. Good thing he did, too. A team with me batting fourth wouldn’t be one anybody wanted to watch.
We won the game. The final was 6-4. The Collegians’ pitcher came up to me and said, “I served up what you wanted there, didn’t I?” He sounded ticked off at himself. Pitchers always figure they can outthink hitters and set them up.
“I was waiting for it, yeah,” I answered. If we’d been in a league together, I would’ve put on a stupid expression and said something like Huh? I musta got lucky. But I wouldn’t see him again for another year, if I ever did. So the truth didn’t cost me anything.
He shook his head. “If I’d come in, though … I hate that stupid screen.” Any pitcher would’ve said the same thing.
I patted him on the shoulder. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. What else can you say? It’s the same for hitters as it is for pitchers.”
“I know. Not like I haven’t been through it before.” He made a sour face. “I thought you’d try and pull it again. Pitch inside to a righty at this field and you better make out your will beforehand.”
I looked out at the screen. Not so long ago, people started calling Weeghman Park in Chicago the Friendly Confines. I’ve never been to Chicago, but Weeghman can’t be as friendly as that.
* * *
You go north. You go south. You go up some highway. You come back down the same highway. Maybe Harv was still straightening things out after the Great Zombie Riots. Maybe he just got wind of another team that wanted a game with us. I dunno. I was starting to think he made up our schedule as he went along.
All of which is by way of explaining how we went up US 91 from Ogden to Logan and then halfway back down US 91 from Logan to Brigham City. We laughed about it some, but not too much. All the guys except me were used to it, and I was sure getting used to it in a hurry.
I hardly cared which way we went. This part of the country was new to me, and you notice different things going down a road from the ones you see coming up it. I had more money coming in than going out, and that was new to me, too. I liked it. I had enough to eat. I was playing. I was doing enough to help the team. So why should I have cared where I did it?
There were peach orchards all around Brigham City. They can ’em there, and make jam out of ’em. Some of them make moonshine brandy from ’em, too, and don’t think that won’t put hair on your chest even if you’re a girl. And the town team, the team we were taking on, was the Brigham City Peaches.
Of course Brigham City was another Mormon-founded town. I was getting to know the look of them. I was getting to like it, too: the wide streets, the sycamores shading them, the greenery everywhere, the mountains always thrusting up in the distance. Plenty of worse ways to live.
One other thing I noticed—the Mormon cities didn’t have any shantytowns outside of them. Part of that has to be because Utah has hard winters. Well, fine, but so does Colorado, and Pueblo and Colorado Springs and Denver had their share of those huts and shacks on the edge of town. The Mormons worked hard to take care of their own. They weren’t perfect about it, but who is?
The Brigham City ballyard was another one in the middle of a city park. There were trees that weren’t sycamores all over the park, and bees buzzing around them. Eddie said they were locust trees. I thought locusts was another name for grasshoppers, but what do I know?
It was a neat, pretty little place. The Peaches had PEACHES on their shirtfronts in orange letters. Their caps showed a B and a C, with a peach patch sewn on between them. I thought it was a silly name for a team, but they did all right by it.
Their pitcher was a kid named Heber Orson Woodruff. They introduced him by all three names, and I’ve never forgotten a handle like that. I’ve never forgotten the game he threw at us, either.
We did get a hit. It was a clean one—Azariah doubled inside of third. Heber Orson Woodruff walked three or four guys, and the Peaches kicked one behind him. But he blew fastballs past us all game long, and I’d never seen anybody else who could do that. I didn’t see anybody after him, either.
Wes pitched a pretty fair game. We lost 3-0 anyhow. When it was over, Harv shouted at the kid: “Sonny, why ain’t you pitching in Detroit or New York City?”
“On account of I like it here, sir,” Heber Orson Woodruff answered. I’ve already talked about how polite the Mormons were. The Peaches’ pitcher, he had it worse than most.
“Long as you stay healthy, you’re good enough to go to the pros,” Harv said. “Maybe outside of Carpetbag Booker, you’re the best pitcher we’ve seen in I don’t know how long.”
“I couldn’t help my family with the orchard then, sir,” Heber Orson Woodruff said. “And a pro team probably wouldn’t like it when I went on a mission for a couple of years.”
Harv started to say something to the Peaches’ manager. Then he closed his mouth again. He could see he wouldn’t change anything. Afterwards, though, when we found somewhere to eat, he was still shaking his head. “I don’t know whether to admire that kid or smack him in the teeth,” he said. “He’s got no idea how good he is, and he doesn’t want to find out.”
“He has a life he’s happy with. He plays ball for fun,” Eddie said. “What’s so bad about that?”
“He doesn’t care to use a gift the good Lord gave him,” Harv said. “If that ain’t sinful, it oughta be.”
I bobbed my head up and down. If I’d had Heber Orson Woodruff’s talent, I would’ve ridden it as hard and as far as I could. But I didn’t. I’d never be anything but a semipro outfielder. Seeing that arm go to waste made me want to cry. Some of the other House of Daniel players nodded with me. This was as far as they’d go, too.
Eddie said, “You don’t know, Harv. Maybe he makes an even better peach farmer than he does a pitcher.”
“What if he does?” Wes said. “Nobody prints peach-farmer cards for little kids to collect.”
“Nothing wrong with being a peach farmer,” Eddie said. “I’m gonna have the peach cobbler for dessert.”
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it—and I’m gonna have peach pie myself,” Wes answered. “But the reason they don’t make peach-farmer cards is, plenty of people can do a good job growing peaches. An arm like that kid’s got comes along once in a blue moon. He made us look like … like…” He stopped, because he couldn’t think of anything strong enough.
Harv could: “He made us look like a bunch of doggone semipros. The Pittsburgh Crawdads couldn’t do that, and most of their team would be in the bigs if they were white.” He shook his head. “What can you do?”
You couldn’t do anything. As far as I know, Heber Orson Woodruff’s still raising peaches in Brigham City. I suppose he’s done his missionary work by now. Maybe he’s still pitching for the Peaches; maybe he hurt his shoulder or his elbow. I don’t know. All I know is, I follow the box scores pretty close, and I never saw his name in the bigs. You ask me, it’s a shame. Heber Orson
Woodruff didn’t ask me, and I guess he doesn’t think so.
* * *
I wondered where in Utah we’d bounce next. Somewhere halfway down the state, was my guess. We didn’t, though. We headed up into Idaho instead. It looked like Utah, only with more pine trees. We had a Fourth of July game at Overland Park against the Pocatello Bannocks.
What’s a Bannock? I don’t know. I did find out Pocatello was in Bannock County. Maybe they were an Indian tribe. The Bannocks were one more team that had been in the Utah–Idaho League when there was a Utah–Idaho League. Now they played in something called the Twilight League. They called it that even though Overland Park had no lights. Why did they? I don’t know that, either.
It was … a ballpark. It was big enough to have a covered grandstand. We played in the late afternoon—there’d be fireworks after the game—but it was a demon of a hot day. You think of Idaho, you think of deep snow. It’s not hot for a long stretch of the year, but when it is, it is. The outfield fence was made from vertical planks. They weren’t nailed together clinker style; there were spaces between them. I saw some kids, and some grown-ups, peering through, watching the game for nothing. Knothole gang, only more so.
One of the marks of a good team is that, when you lose, you want to come back and win the next day even more than you would if you’d won. That seemed especially true against the Bannocks. Heber Orson Woodruff had made us look bad in our own eyes. We weren’t used to getting toyed with like that. So we took it out on the poor Pocatello team, no matter that they hadn’t had anything to do with it.
We got two in the first, three in the third, and three more in the fourth. After that, it was all over but the shouting. We did some shouting, too, ’cause we kept tacking on runs. By the time it was done, it was 13-4. Fidgety Frank didn’t work too hard the last few innings. He lobbed it in there, figuring they’d mostly hit it where somebody could run it down. They mostly did, too. Sometimes they didn’t, so they scored a few late runs.
After the game, the Bannocks looked glum. We hadn’t tried to run up the score on them or make them look bad. It was just one of those days where this side trounces that. “I see how you fellas won the Post tournament,” one of their players said to me.
The House of Daniel Page 28
