by Rick Wilber
We laughed but had to admit that Jones was about the saddest horse we had ever seen. His eyes were just brown pools of liquid sorrow. His ears drooped. And still he hit well over .500 and covered third base like a rug.
One day he missed the game entirely. It was the day the Giants were in town, and 15,000 people were there to watch Jones bat against the great Matty. Brooklyn lost the game, and Pop O’Donnell almost lost his hair at the hands of the disappointed crowd.
“Who would have thought,” Pop mused, in the clubhouse after the game, “that that (here some words are omitted) horse would turn out to be a prima donna? It’s all night for a major-league ballplayer to act like a horse, but that horse is trying to act like a major-league ballplayer.”
It was almost by accident that Tim and I found out what was really bothering Jones. We followed him one day when he left the ballpark. We followed him nearly two miles to a racetrack.
Jones stood beside the fence a long time, turning his head to watch the thoroughbreds gallop by on exercise runs and time trials. Then a little stable boy opened the gate for him.
“Po’ ol’ hoss,” the boy said. “Yo’ wants a little runnin’?”
“Happens every day,” a groom explained to us. “This horse wanders here from God knows where and acts like he wants to run, and some boy rides him a while, bareback, pretending he’s a racehorse.”
Jones was like a different horse out there on the track; not drooping any more—ears up, eyes bright, tail like a plume. It was pitiful how much he wanted to look like a racehorse.
“That horse,” Tim asked the groom, “is he any good for racing?”
“Not here, anyway,” the groom said. “Might win a county-fair race or two.” He asked us whether we had any idea who owned the horse.
“Sir,” said Tim, like Edwin M. Stanton, “that horse belongs to the ages.” “Well, mister,” said the groom, “the ages had better get some different shoes on that horse. Why, you could hold a baseball in those shoes he has there.”
“It’s very clear,” I said as we walked back, “what we have here is a badly frustrated horse.”
“It’s clear as beer,” Tim said sadly.
That afternoon Jones hit a home run and absentmindedly trotted around the bases. As soon as the game was over, he disappeared in the direction of the racetrack. Tim looked at me and shook his head. Pop O’Donnell held his chin in his hands.
“I’ll be boiled in oil,” he said. “Berled in erl.” Nothing cheered up poor Pop until someone came in with a story about the absentee owner of a big-league baseball club who had inherited the club along with the family fortune. This individual had just fired the manager of his baseball farm system because the farms had not turned out horses like Jones. “What are farms for if they don’t raise horses?” the absentee owner had asked indignandy.
Jones was becoming a national problem second only to the Panama Canal and considerably more important than whether Mr. Taft got to be president. There were rumors that the Highlanders—people were just beginning to call them the Yankees—would withdraw and form a new league if Jones were allowed to play.
It was reported that a team of kangaroos from Australia was on its way to play a series of exhibition games in America, and Pres. Ban Johnson of the American League was quoted as saying that he would never have kangaroos in the American League because they were too likely to jump their contracts. There was talk of a constitutional amendment concerning horses in baseball.
The thing that impressed me, down there in the South, was that all this was putting the cart before the horse, so to speak. Jones simply didn’t want to play baseball. He wanted to be a racehorse. I don’t know why life is that way.
Jones made an unassisted triple play, and Ty Cobb accused Brooklyn of furnishing fire ladders to its infielders. He said that no third baseman could have caught the drive that started the play. At the end of the training season, Jones was batting .538 and fielding .997, had stolen 20 bases, and hit seven home runs. He was the greatest third baseman in the history of baseball and didn’t want to be!
Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Arthur Brisbane, and the rest of the bigshots got together and decided that if anyone didn’t know by this time that Jones was a horse, the newspapers wouldn’t tell him. He could find it out.
Folks seemed to find it out. People began gathering from all parts of the country to see Brooklyn open against the Giants—Matty against Jones. Even a tribe of Sioux Indians camped beside the Gowanus and had war dances on Flatbush Avenue, waiting for the park to open. And Pop O’Donnell kept his squad in the South as long as he could, laying plans to arrive in Brooklyn only on the morning of the opening game.
The wire said that night that 200,000 people had come to Brooklyn for the game, and 190,000 of them were in an ugly mood over the report that the League might not let Jones play. The governor of New York sent two regiments of the National Guard. The Giants were said to be caucusing to decide whether they would play against Jones. By game time, people were packed for six blocks, fighting to get into the park. The Sioux sent a young buck after their tomahawks, just in case.
Telephone poles a quarter of a mile from the field were selling for $100. Every baseball writer in the country was in the Brooklyn press box; the other teams played before cub reporters and society editors. Just before game time, I managed to push into Pop O’Donnell’s little editorial office with the presidents of the two major leagues, the mayor of New York, a half dozen other reporters, and a delegation from the Giants.
“There’s just one thing we want to know,” the spokesman for the Giants was asking Pop, “Are you going to play Jones?”
“Gentlemen,” said Pop in that soft-spoken, firm way of his that rattled window blinds, “our duty is to give the public what it wants. And the public wants Jones.”
Like an echo, a chant began to rise from the bleachers; “We want Jones!”
“There is one other little thing” said Pop. “Jones has disappeared.”
There were about 10 seconds of the awful silence that comes when your nerves are paralyzed but your mind keeps on thrashing.
“He got out of his boxcar somewhere between Georgia and Brooklyn,” Pop said. “We don’t know where. We’re looking.”
A Western Union boy dashed in. “Hold on!” said Pop. “This may be news!”
He tore open the envelope with a shaky hand. This message was from Norfolk, Virginia: HAVE FOUND ETEPHANT THAT CAN BALANCE MEDICINE BALL ON TRUNK, it read. WILL HE DO? If Pop had said what he said then into a telephone, it would have burned out all the insulators in New York.
Down at the field, the President of the United States himself was poised to throw out the first ball. “Is this Jones?” he asked. He was a little nearsighted.
“This is the mayor of New York,” Pop said patiently. “Jones has gone. Run away.”
The President’s biographers disagree as to whether he said at that moment, “Oh, well, who would stay in Brooklyn if he could run?” or “I sympathize with you for having to change horses in midstream.”
That was the saddest game ever covered by the entire press corps of the nation. Brooklyn was all thumbs in the field, all windmills at bat. There was no Jones to whistle hits into the outfield and make sensational stops at third. By the sixth inning, when they had to call the game with the score 18—1, the field was ankle deep in pop bottles, and the Sioux were waving their tomahawks and singing the scalp song.
You know the rest of the story. Brooklyn didn’t win a game until the third week of the season, and no team ever tried a horse again, except a few dark horses every season. Pittsburgh, I believe, tried trained seals in the outfield. They were deadly at catching the ball but couldn’t cover enough ground. San Francisco has an entire team of Seals, but I have never seen them play. Boston tried an octopus at second base but had to give him up. What happened to two rookies who disappeared trying to steal second base against Boston that spring is another subject baseball doesn’t talk about.
There has been considerable speculation as to what happened to Jones.
Most of us believed the report that the Brooklyn players had unfastened the latch on the door of his boxcar, until Pop O’Donnell’s Confidential Memoirs came out, admitting that he himself had taken the hinges off the door of his boxcar because he couldn’t face the blame for making baseball a game for horses. But I have been a little confused since Tim McGuire came to me once and said he might as well confess. He couldn’t stand to think of that horse standing wistfully beside the track, waiting for someone to let him pretend he was a racehorse. That haunted Tim. When he went down to the boxcar, he found the door unlatched and the hinges off, so he gave the door a little push outward. He judged it was the will of the majority.
And that is why baseball is played by men today instead of by horses. But don’t think that the shadow of Jones doesn’t still lie heavy on the game. Have you ever noticed how retiring, silent, and hangdog major-league ballplayers are, how they cringe before the umpire? They never know when another Jones may break away from a beer wagon, circus, or plow, wander through an unlocked gate, and begin batting .538 to their .290. The worry is terrible. You can see it in the crowds, too. That is why Brooklyn fans are so aloof and disinterested, why they never raise their voices above a whisper at Ebbets Field. They know perfectly well that this is only minor-league ball they are seeing, that horses could play it twice as well if they had a chance.
That is the secret we sportswriters have kept all these years: that is why we have never written about Jones. And the Brooklyn fans still try to keep it secret, but every once in a while the sorrow eats like lye into one of them until he can hold it back no longer and then he sobs quietly and says, “Dem bums, if dey only had a little horse sense.”
Louise Marley's background singing folk music and opera often informs her award-winning writing. Primarily a novelist, she also writes short fiction, including this splendid baseball story that offers a feminist perspective as it comments on Malamud's The Natural and talks about who and what and where you are in life, and how strange it can be sometimes to think about how you got there.
Diamond Girls
Louise Marley
RICKY SAT ALONE IN her private locker room, turning a baseball in her elongated fingers. The pre-game had begun, and the speakers in the main locker room rattled with music and announcements and advertisements. She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and cradled the baseball in her palm. Just another game, she told herself. It’s a long season.
But it wasn’t true. Long season, sure. But this was no ordinary game. Someone hammered on the door, and shouted, “Arendsen! Skip says to come over now.”
“Coming” she called back. She stood, and stretched her arms over her head, her fingers ritually brushing the ceiling. She put the ball, her first major league game ball, back into its protective cube. Lew had saved it for her, gotten it signed.
She missed Lew. No one called a better game than he did, but he had retired at the end of last year, her rookie season, his bat worn out, his knees gone. It had been tough this season without him, a different catcher every rotation, a different attitude every game. She’d lost her last three starts. The sports columns had her on her way back to the minors after two of them, and they weren’t far from the truth.
Her agent tried to shield her from the worst of Management’s comments, but she knew her career was on the line. Three losses were a bad way for anyone to start a season. It was worse for Ricky Arendsen.
And now this. Skip had tried to warn her, in his bluff, half-articulate way. “Management took a risk on you,” he had said this morning, shuffling through the scouting reports on Everett. “Not worth the grief if you aren’t the best.” She only nodded. She knew that already.
Now she closed her locker, and tucked her mitt under her arm. She left the cramped space that was hers, and walked around the comer to the other door. The official statement to the press said that Ricky Arendsen had a separate locker room for her own privacy, but Ricky—and everyone else—understood it was more complicated than just that. Maybe the guys didn’t want a woman in their locker room. More likely, they didn’t want her in their locker room.
It had been the same in high school, in college, in the minors. It didn’t matter that she possessed a killer curve, a one-hundred-plus fastball, a splitter that made grown-up men wave their bats like beginning T-Ballers. What mattered, not to everyone, but to enough of them, was what she was, and how she got that way.
Ricky adjusted her cap, and pulled open the door with its vivid team logo.
The Skipper looked up when she came in, pointed to the bench in front of him. Raimundo grinned at her, and moved over to make room. He was catching her today, which was good. She felt a bit better when he was behind the plate. She didn’t have to shake him off as often as she did Baker.
“Hey, Rick,” he said as she eased herself onto the bench. He moved another couple of inches over to give her space. She nodded down at him. Raimundo was a good six inches shorter than she was, just clearing six feet four.
“Hey, Ray,” she said. She quirked her lips and lifted her eyebrows, pretending a calm she didn’t feel. “Place is crawling with reporters.”
“Whatcha get, Newsmaker.” He said it with sympathy, his forehead crinkling.
“Yeah. I know.”
Newsmaker was the least offensive of the many appellations attached to Ricky Arendsen when she came up to the show. The worst had been coined by a conservative preacher in a weekly newspaper column. The fans picked it up, shouting it whenever she took the mound. Lab Rat, Lab Rat, a one-two rhythm, a bit of doggerel that irritated her dreams.
She fiddled with the laces on her mitt, hooking them tight with the extra-long first joint of her finger, flexing the designer muscles of her wrists. She was a hell of a specimen, just as they said. Her thighs were smoothly muscled, perfectly jointed at the hip. Her calves were long and strong, her ankles like steel. Her eyesight was off the charts.
She wondered what Grace Everett’s eyesight was like.
They were calling Everett “The Natural.” No engineered virus, no stem cell modifications, no Lab Rat. Just a wiry, quick second baseman, a freckled girl with a stringy red ponytail and a wicked bat. In the minors they called her Grade, or Little Red. Now, coming up against Ricky Arendsen, Grace Everett had become the Natural. No misunderstanding what that was about, no other way to interpret it. She was The Natural. Ricky wasn’t.
“Okay, guys,” the Skipper said. He stood in front of the chalkboard, where someone had scribbled the line-ups, a few names crossed out, substitutes chalked in. Some of the players were chowing down from the buffet, but Ricky never ate right before a game.
Skip nodded to her. “You okay, Rick?”
She gave him a thumbs-up, and pulled off her cap to scratch her scalp through her short scruff of brown hair.
“Good. So,” the Skipper began. “Everybody. The main thing is, don’t let it all get to you today, okay? Everett’s just another ballplayer. Let’s play it that way. Cool and calm.”
Someone standing beside the row of open lockers snorted, “Yeah, Skip. That’ll work.”
The Skipper shot him a heated look. “I mean it,” he growled. “No crap out there.” “Hey, Skip, it’s not us,” someone protested. “It’s the fans. Worse than New York!” Ricky hunched her shoulders. Ray murmured, “Easy, Rick.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a stunt,” he added under his breath. “I hear they brought her up just to face you. She’ll fan a few times, fall on her face, and go straight back to Triple-A.” Ricky turned her head without changing position. “Where’d you hear that?” Ray shrugged. “Talk around the office.”
“I don’t know, Ray. Her stats are solid.”
Ricky didn’t want to think about Everett, about what this game must mean to her She had to concentrate on her own problems. Three straight losses after her twelve-and-eight last year. If they sent her down, she’
d never get called up again, not after all the stuff that happened last season. She needed a W today as much as she ever had in her life.
“Listen,” the Skipper said. “Anybody’s out of line, in the stands or on the field, Security throws ’em out of the park, okay?”
“If it’s not too late,” someone said from the back of the room. Ricky didn’t need to turn to know who the grumbler was. Center field. Ditch Daniels, they called him, because he wore a ditch in the grass between left and right. Ditch had been struck by something when she was pitching her second game, a cup or a ball or something thrown from the outfield bleachers. He was touchy and hot-tempered on the best of days, and that really tipped him over He never had a good word for her not even when she came in on one day’s rest to save the last game of the season, propelling the team into the playoffs. Ditch had memorized every one of the death threats she’d received since she came up. As if Ricky didn’t remember them well enough without his quoting them word for word when he knew she could hear him.
“Look at it this way,” the Skipper said finally. “The park’s sold out, even the bleachers. For a regular season game. Management’s happy, which is good news at contract time, right? Let’s just get this one. Let Security worry about the nutcases.”
The team grunted assent, and filed out of the locker room and up the ramp to the dugout. Ricky headed for the bullpen to warm up.
A solid wall of sound greeted her, defeating the announcer as he read the rosters. When Ricky trotted to the mound, tossed a few pitches to Ray, the volume dissipated, gradually, like a spent wave, leaving an electric silence in its wake. A familiar prickle crept across Ricky’s shoulders and up under her cap, as if something were pointed at the back of her neck or between her shoulder blades. Jackie Robinson had felt the same thing, she supposed. Like a great big target. Sometimes Ricky felt as if the mound was a bull’s-eye, with her smack in the center.
Ray gave the ump a nod, and the first batter, a leftie, stepped into the box, bat describing semi-circles above his shoulder. Ricky leaned forward, bent at the waist. She held the ball behind her back, turning it in the fingers of her left hand till she found just the right spot, the seams fitting perfectly between her fingers and her long, flexible thumb. Ray gave her the sign, curve down and in, and she nodded. She straightened. Her right leg lifted in the high kick, hands above her head. The wind-up. The throw. Strike one. Ragged cheers from the home town fans, half-hearted taunts from the visitors, and the game was underway.
