by Bill Branger
“Yeah. Well.” I wasn’t going to win anything with this guy and I might as well admit it. But not before I passed him four tickets for good seats for the next game. That mollified him somewhat more than the sawbuck. Then I went over to the newly weds and slipped an envelope into Raul’s hand. “It’s $500 to keep you in pizza and beer until your next check.” Normally, I don’t go around slipping a little something extra to ball players, but Sid Cohen told me to do it and said I’d get the money back from him.
Raul opened the envelope and felt the greenbacks. He looked at me and said:
— This is from you?
— Let’s say it all comes from George eventually.
— And this, this limousine.
— George is being very, very generous. Maria broke in then:
“Are they always like this, these news people?”
—- This is them on a good day. Get on in with Raul. The driver is taking you to the Plaza and he’ll get you registered there. You got any problem, call me. (I had already written out my New Jersey number.)
They got in the limo and I slammed the door on them. Charlene said, “We should have bought some rice. When we were in Havana.”
“Yeah, I should’ve thought of it.” Throw rice in Havana, you’d have a food riot on your hands.
Raul rolled down his window.
— I am glad you came to Cuba to resolve this. You are a better man than you think you are sometimes.
— I am a tired man, Raul. The driver of this limo is taking you to the Plaza Hotel, which is very nice. You will get a suite of rooms there and you’re on your own until I call you tomorrow. We’ve got to get my agent to be your agent and get you a decent contract. Remember, sign nothing. If George wants to talk to you, don’t understand him. Sign nothing. Nothing.”
“He understands,” Maria Velasquez-Guevara said.
Married eighteen hours and I already saw where this marriage was heading. She was going to be the driver and he was going to be the guy in the backseat.
“Thank you, Señora,” I said.
She smiled then. “No. Thank you. For all that you managed to resolve for us. I have always wanted to see New York City.”
“Yeah, it’s something.”
“And I have my Raul,” she said, holding his arm.
“Like I said, I hope it never rains on your parade.”
“And I hope you find some sunshine for yours,” Maria said to me.
Damn. Was she smart or what?
Charlene and I clung to each other through the crowd of press that kept asking me dumb questions. We went around to the cab line at the side of the terminal and when I mentioned Fort Lee, New Jersey, the dispatcher shook his head and called up a Yellow. You could tell them Coney Island, which would take them about six hours to get to, and get away with it, but just a hop across the Hudson River to Fort Lee, you’d think you were asking to be driven to Alaska.
George was going to love reading about himself tomorrow in the Post I had told the reporters that he was going to negotiate a new contract for his hitting star and that the agent was Mr. Sid Cohen of Los Angeles. That’d upset his ulcer. He hates agents in general, but he really despises Sid Cohen. This makes Sid’s job much easier when it comes to dealing with George.
Charlene and I and our suitcases settled into the Yellow and took it into Manhattan and then up and across the Bronx to the GW Bridge and then over to Fort Home Sweet Home Lee. This time, Charlene came directly to my domicile where the shower works real good and there are plenty of big, fluffy towels to make you feel wanted.
I ordered up Chinese food and a six-pack of Miller’s from the restaurant down the street and we took turns using the bathroom. Travel in a foreign country can make you appreciate an American bathroom. Try it sometime. When the food came, I almost felt like a real human being again and that the last day in Havana was just a dream. Except for the Old Spice I had splashed on my face that still clung, or at least, I still smelled. That reminded me of the the two-hour oration at Raul and Maria’s wedding and that just made me tired again.
I know we ate. I know we had a beer each. And I know we didn’t actually say very much to each other. I pulled out the sleeper from the couch and turned on the TV and climbed in bed.
I was sound asleep before Clint Eastwood shot his first bad guy.
31
The year of the Yanquis.
Nothing succeeds like success, especially in New York where being Number One is the only thing.
The season had started out with everyone making fun of George and his crew of Cuban kids. The kids had stumbled around and gotten to know one another in spring training down in Lauderdale. Then George fired old Sparky and made me the manager, the only qualification I had being that I spoke some Spanish.
But somewhere along the way, the team started looking respectable. I can’t tell you exactly why. Well, it was Raul hitting the moon, of course, but it was a lot of other little things.
The people once came up to the Stadium in the Bronx to laugh at the Cubans and boo them and hold up their “New York Yanquis” pennants and boo George in his box. But you don’t boo a winner and the team was a winner and the boos were gone.
We went on a nine-game winning streak after the All-Star break and pulled up in first place in the East by five games. Everything was going well; the kids had their defenses down and their offenses up.
Something else. There was still a lot of hatred out there somewhere for the Cuban players and some people began to resent it. You only kick a guy when he’s down so long and then a contrary streak hits some people to build them up. After all, the kids weren’t Communists; they were just Cubans. If we could end up loving Russians, we could end up loving Cubans. And some people began to feel that way. We still brawled because the other teams saw the Cubans as a direct salary threat and I don’t blame them any more than I blame strikers beating up busloads of scabs coming to replace them. Feel sympathy for the scabs, too, if you want to know, because when a man has got to eat, he sometimes has to do whatever it takes to eat. I know that isn’t very principled of me, but I ain’t a principled kind of person.
As I said, it was going well. We were winning. And when we lost a game, the gloom didn’t sink in deep, not into the bones. The club was as loose and cheerful as it could be with a pennant race rounding the turn and heading into the stretch.
Well, mostly.
It was inevitable that Raul would tail off some, hitting the phenomenal streak and all. But he couldn’t seem to get back into the rhythm of the thing.
The other thing was how happy he was.
We had a good long home stand in August and Raul was just one big grin, ear to ear, It was Maria, of course, and Maria was in her natural element in New York. I’ve talked some about the style that Cubans have — a certain way of walking and talking that depends on the way they carry it off more than what the substance is. Well, that style fits in well in New York, which means that Maria fit in well.
They ate out every night and found some elegant restaurants that I had never been to in all my years playing for the Yankees. Of course, I live on a more modest scale and tend to watch my pennies turn into dollars, but Raul and Maria were having none of it.
Sid Cohen negotiated the kid a two-year $8 million contract, which must have looked like all the money in the world to Raul. Even to Maria, whose parents were better off in the Cuban scheme of things.
The couple was an item around New York, as the newspaper people say. They were wined and dined at parties and they even met the mayor at Grade Mansion.
Pretty heady stuff and I was trying my best to let Raul enjoy it all without lousing up his game. But I must have been doing something wrong.
He was hitting .387 by the middle of August and going south all the time. He hadn’t hit a home run in three weeks, either.
Despite all this, the Yankees were holding their own because of the play of the other kids, who were stepping up big time. I realize that last sentence is fu
ll of sports clichés but that’s the thing about sports, it lends itself well to clichés. Especially baseball, which has been played so long that it’s got whiskers on it.
After our extended home stand we had to go on the road to bat the ball around with the cities in our part of the country. We started in Boston, did two games with Toronto, went down to Camden Yards in Baltimore, and then had a four-game series with the Miami Marlins.
It wasn’t all peaches and cream on that trip. There was Rush Limbaugh and a piece in the American Spectator about Castro cutting a secret deal with the State Department and using the great National Pastime to subvert American interests in the Caribbean.
Among the glitterati in New York that didn’t play, because everyone there pretends to be a liberal. But it got us boos in Chicago and in Milwaukee and Cleveland and even a couple more death threats.
That’s when Mr. Baxter paid me a second visit.
It was around midnight after a home game and I was bushed and alone in my room in Fort Lee when he knocked at the door. I opened it for him. He was alone this time.
He came in the room, inspected it, and sat down in the single armchair, the one I use to do my thinking in when I stare out the window at New York’s skyline over the bridge.
“You all mean to win this thing?”
I just sat there and said nothing.
“I asked you a question.”
“Saw the president is up in the polls. Can’t be the worst thing.”
“The worst thing is what they’re saying on radio about him.”
“I don’t listen to radio except for country music.”
“We do. We have a plan here, Ryan. I didn’t tell you that.”
“Planned on us doing well, but not that well.”
“The other players aren’t happy.”
“You are the commissioner after all.”
“We can’t fuck with baseball. National Pastime.”
“You aren’t. We’re winning.”
“Ryan, what if I told you that Jack Wade wants to make a deal with us? Tell us about how you get those cars from the Mexican assembly plants and drive them over the border.”
“He would be wrong to say that because it doesn’t happen.”
“Well, you know. It takes a while to sort through things.”
“Listen, Baxter. I can’t help it if we’re good.”
“Not that good. Raul Guevara is faltering.”
“He’s still hitting .378.”
“He’s going south. How about some other people going south?”
“You want to fix the games?”
“No, no, no. I never said that. I said you can play to your potential. But your potential is not to give Cuba a propaganda victory. Let them say they have the best baseball players in the world. We could take a lot of heat on that. It might affect our standing in places.”
“Like what?”
“Mexico, for starters. Or upset Costa Rica.”
“I would hate that to happen.”
“You think it’s been easy to enforce this embargo on Cuba these last thirty-five years? We’re not going to give away the Caribbean now because of some baseball players “
“You mean the Yankees can do that? Lose Mexico?”
“It complicates things. Raul has already signed an eight-million-dollar contract. What if Castro sees the further economic possibilities? And the other teams, what if they want a piece of Cuba? This thing snowballs and Castro can just freeze us out. Trump up some crazy charge about the U.S. trying to steal their young manhood or something.”
“That’s your problem, isn’t it? I'm just a country boy and I play ball the only way I know how.”
“You really want to be part of a federal indictment?”
I thought about it some. Then I put my can of beer on the table and just looked at him before I said, “How’d you like to go through that window? That one right over there you’ve been admiring the view out of? How ‘bout if I just pick you up and throw you out that window?”
“How ‘bout if you get halfway smart? We talked to George this afternoon. He’s waiting for a call from you.”
I should have known.
I picked up my phone and punched in the office number. It was George without any interference.
“Hey, George “
“Ryan?”
“Me.”
“He see you?”
“Sitting right here.”
“He explain things?”
“In his half-ass government way.”
“He’s got me in a box, Ryan. Tell me. Are we going to win the pennant?”
“Time will tell,” I said.
“Ryan, I never asked you for anything.”
I closed my eyes.
“Ryan, I don’t want you to fix anything, I really don’t.”
“I know. You just want me to not make things work quite as well as they have,"
“Ryan. This just makes me sick.”
“What are they going to do to you, George? Income tax?”
“Ryan, we’re all in this together.”
“Yeah.”
“All right, Ryan?”
“Yeah,” I said,
I hung up.
“What about it, Ryan?”
“When the government wants you, they gotcha.”
Baxter didn’t smile. If he had smiled, I might have really thrown him through that window. But he didn’t smile. It was all business. He just nodded, got up, and let himself out the door without another word.
The odd thing about the last series — the one down in Miami before we came home — was the reaction of the Miami Cuban population. Everyone knows how anti-Castro they are and we were getting some heat at the beginning of the season because the kids were, well, Castro’s kids.
But all that was by the boards now. Cuban pride was too great and our four-game series in Miami was a triumph, in that we won three of them and won the hearts of the Cubans in Dade County.
Raul didn’t do much for his batting average on the trip, but he seemed cheerful about it. Maria was up in New York, but it didn’t seem to bother Raul the way it did when she was in Havana. I guess getting married does that to you.
Which brings up Charlene and me.
I was missing her.
Half the nights, I would end up in my room on the road and call her and run up these big long-distance bills just to say nothing to her.
Jack Wade was trying to make a deal on his income tax problems and it turned out that had all been George’s fault, too, the way I’d thought it was in the first place. Seems George sicced the IRS on Jack Wade to give me the dog and when the IRS found something seriously wrong, they kept on keeping on.
In a way, I felt responsible for what happened to Jack because it probably wouldn’t have happened if he didn’t want to give me a job selling cars for him and George Bremenhaven needed me instead to speak Spanish for him.
We got back in New York the first week in September for a fourteen-game home stand.
We lost the first two to Cleveland. Raul went oh for 10. He was hitting right around .310 now, and it was looking worse and worse. So George came down to me in my office off the locker room late one afternoon and exploded.
“What the fuck am I paying this kid eight million dollars for? He’s like every ball player I ever dealt with, as soon as he gets the big bucks, he quits on me.”
“I don’t think it’s that, George. I think he’s just adjusting to … you know, being married.”
“And that was your bright idea, too. I should thank you for that, my weekly bill from the Plaza Hotel.”
“George, he wasn’t gonna come back if he couldn’t bring Maria with him. It seemed like a good idea. Besides,” I said, turning the knife, “you wanted good but not best.”
“Oh, that was a pipe dream anyway. We’re in second place now. Second is good. Build on next year.”
“You’re plain rotten, George. You work so many deals you can’t even keep track of what you want
and when you want it.”
“You know what’s a good idea? Keeping ball players in cages like you cage dogs in a kennel and let them out once a day for exercise.”
“Players ain’t dogs, George.”
“No! Dogs got more loyalty! Raul is stinking up the team.”
“We’re still in striking distance of first place,” I said.
“It’s that woman! He’s too fucking happy! Players are like artists, they need to be miserable to do their best work.”
“I’ve known happy players —”
“You give a player job security and a contract for life, the next thing is they aren’t hungry anymore. I want hungry players, that’s why I dumped my payroll last year.”
“Well, I don’t see —”
“I called Cuba, I called that cocksucker in the beard and he didn’t take my call. I ended up talking to some colonel and I said Raul is screwing me. You know what he said? He said it was about time someone screwed the Yankees!”
“He didn’t mean the team, George, he was talking in general about yankees.”
“He meant me! That son of a bitch is sitting in the Plaza Hotel charging room service and fucking his brains out while he slouches around the park hitting just over 300.”
“A lot of ball players would like to hit 300,” I pointed out.
“It’s not good enough for me, though! I’ve got standards! And I gave him all that money, him and your fucking agent Sid Cohen!”
Managers and general managers get paid to take this kind of abuse from time to time, especially from owners who like to interfere with the team. Owners figure there’s no fun in just owning a team unless they can mess with it or throw little temper tantrums or let their wives redesign the uniforms or such,
So I just took it from George and let him sputter along until it was game time and I had to excuse myself to make out the starting lineups.
I didn’t really give George any satisfaction, but it didn’t bother me, either.
Thinking back on everything that happened next, I should have paid more attention to George’s tirade. When a lunatic is giving you signals about himself, you should listen alertly.
32
Raul went oh for 21.
