by Rick Wilber
The Mighty Casey
Rod Serling
THERE IS a LARGE, extremely decrepit stadium overgrown by weeds and high grass that is called, whenever it is referred to (which is seldom nowadays), Tebbet’s Field, and it lies in a borough of New York known as Brooklyn. Many years ago it was a baseball stadium housing a ball club known as the Brooklyn Dodgers, a major league baseball team then a part of the National League. Tebbet’s Field today, as we’ve already mentioned, houses nothing but memories, a few ghosts and tier after tier of decaying wooden seats and cracked concrete floors. In its vast, gaunt emptiness nothing stirs except the high grass of what once was an infield and an outfield, in addition to a wind that whistles through the screen behind home plate and howls up to the rafters of the overhang of the grandstand.
This was one helluva place in its day, and in its day, the Brooklyn Dodgers was one rip-roaring ball club. In the last several years of its existence, however, it was referred to by most of the ticket-buying, turnstile-passers of Flatbush Avenue as “the shlumpfs!” This arose from the fact that for five years running the Brooklyn Dodgers were something less than spectacular. In their last year as members of the National League, they won exactly forty-nine ball games. And by mid-August of that campaign a “crowd” at Tebbet’s Field was considered to be any ticket-buying group of more than eighty-six customers.
After the campaign of that year, the team dropped out of the league. It was an unlamented, unheralded event, pointing up the fact that baseball fans have a penchant for winners and a short memory for losers. The paying customers proved more willing to travel uptown to the Polo Grounds to see the Giants, or crosstown to Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees, or downtown to any movie theater or bowling alley than to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers stumble around in the basement of the league season after season. This is also commentative on the forgetfulness of baseball enthusiasts, since there are probably only a handful who recollect that for a wondrous month and a half, the Brooklyn Dodgers were a most unusual ball club that last season. They didn’t start out as an unusual ball club. They started out as shlumpfs, as any Dodger fan can articulately and colorfully tell you. But for one month and one-half they were one helluva club. Principally because of a certain person on the team roster.
It all began this way. Once upon a time a most unusual event happened on the way over to the ball park. This unusual event was a left-hander named Casey!
It was tryout day for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Mouth McGarry, the manager of the club, stood in the dugout, one foot on the parapet, both hands shoved deep into his hip pockets, his jaw hanging several inches below his upper lip. “Tryout days” depressed Mouth McGarry more than the standing of his ball club, which was depressing enough as it stood, or lay—which would be more apt, since they were now in last place, just thirty-one games out of first. Behind him, sitting on a bench, was Bertram Beasley, the general manager of the ball club. Beasley was a little man whose face looked like an X ray of an ulcer. His eyes were sunk deep into his little head, and his little head was sunk deep in between two narrow shoulder blades. Each time he looked up to survey McGarry, and beyond him, several gentlemen in baseball uniforms, he heaved a deep sigh and saw to it that his head sank just a few inches deeper into his shoulder blades. The sigh Bertram Beasley heaved was the only respectable heave going on within a radius of three hundred feet of home plate. The three pitchers that scout Maxwell Jenkins had sent over turned out to be pitchers in name only. One of them, as a matter of fact, had looked so familiar that McGarry swore he’d seen him pitch in the 1911 World Series. As it turned out, McGarry had been mistaken. It was not he who had pitched in the 1911 World Series but his nephew.
Out on the field McGarry watched the current crop of tryouts and kept massaging his heart. Reading left to right they were a tall, skinny kid with three-inch-thick glasses; a seventeen-year-old fat boy who weighed about two hundred and eighty pounds and stood five feet two; a giant, hulking farm boy who had taken off his spike shoes; and the aforementioned “pitcher,” who obviously had dyed his hair black, but it was not a fast color and the hot summer sun was sending black liquid down both sides of his face. The four men were in the process of doing calisthenics. They were all out of step except the aging pitcher, who was no longer doing calisthenics. He had simply sat down and was fanning himself with his mitt.
Beasley rose from the bench in the dugout and walked over to McGarry. Mouth turned to look at him.
“Grand-looking boys!”
“Who were you expecting?” Beasley said, sticking a cigar in his mouth. “The All-Stars? You stick out a tryout sign for a last division club”—he pointed to the group doing the calisthenics—“and this is the material you usually round up.” He felt a surge of anger as he stared into the broken-nosed face of Mouth McGarry. “Maybe if you were any kind of a manager, McGarry, you’d be able to whip stuff like this into shape.”
McGarry stared at him like a scientist looking through a microscope at a bug. “I couldn’t whip stuff like that into shape,” he said, “if they were eggs and I was an electric mixer. You’re the general manager of the club. Why don’t you give me some ballplayers?”
“You’d know what to do with them?” Beasley asked. “Twenty games out of fourth place and the only big average we’ve got is a manager with the widest mouth in either league. Maybe you’d better get reminded that when the Brooklyn Dodgers win one game we gotta call it a streak! Buddy boy,” he said menacingly, “when contract time comes around, you don’t have to.” His cigar went out and he took out a match and lit it. Then he looked up toward home plate, where a pitcher was warming up. “How’s Fletcher doing?” he asked.
“Are you kidding?” Mouth spat thirty-seven feet off to the left. “Last week he pitched four innings and allowed only six runs. That makes him our most valuable player of the month!”
The dugout phone rang and Beasley went over to pick it up. “Dugout,” he said into the receiver. “What? Who?” He cupped his hand over the phone and looked over at Mouth. “You wanta look at a pitcher?” he asked.
“Are you kidding?” Mouth answered.
Beasley talked back into the phone. “Send him down,” he said. He hung up the receiver and walked back over to Mouth. ‘He’s a lefty,” he announced.
“Lefty Shmefty” Mouth said. “If he’s got more than one arm and less than four—he’s for us!” He cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled out toward the field. ‘Hey, Monk!”
The catcher behind home plate rose from his squat and looked back over toward the dugout. “Yeah?”
“Fletcher can quit now,” Mouth called to him. “I’ve got a new boy coming down. Catch him for a while.”
“Check,” the catcher said. Then he turned toward the pitcher. “Okay, Fletch. Go shower up.”
Beasley walked back over to sit on the bench in the dugout. "You got the lineup for tonight?” he asked the manager.
“Working on it,” Mouth said.
“Who starts?”
“You mean pitcher? I just feel them one by one. Whoever’s warm goes to the mound.” He spat again and put his foot back up on the parapet, staring out at the field. Once again he yelled out toward his ballplayers. “Chavez, stop already with the calisthenics.”
He watched disgustedly as the three men stopped jumping up and down and the old man sitting on the ground looked relieved. Chavez thumbed them off the field and turned back toward the bench and shrugged a what-the-hell-can-I-do-with-things-like-this kind of shrug.
Mouth took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. He walked up the steps of the dugout and saw the sign sticking in the ground which read: “Brooklyn Dodgers—tryouts today.” He pulled back his right foot and followed through with a vicious kick, which sent the sign skittering along the ground. Then he went over to the third-base line, picked up a piece of grass, and chewed it thoughtfully. Beasley left the dugout to join McGarry. He kneeled down alongside of him and picked up another piece of grass and began to chew. They knelt and
lunched together until McGarry spit out his piece of grass and glared at Beasley.
“You know something, Beasley?” he inquired. “We are so deep in the cellar that our roster now includes an infield, an outfield and a furnace! And you know whose fault that is?”
Beasley spit out his own piece of grass and said, ‘You tell me!”
“It ain’t mine,” McGarry said defensively. “It just happens to be my luck to wind up with a baseball organization whose farm system consists of two silos and a McCormick reaper. The only thing I get sent up to me each spring is a wheat crop.”
“McGarry” Beasley stated definitely, “if you had material, would you really know what to do with it? You ain’t no Joe McCarthy. You ain’t one half Joe McCarthy.”
“Go die, will you,” McGarry said. He turned back to stare down the third-base line at nothing in particular. He was unaware of the cherubic little white-haired man who had just entered the dugout. Beasley did see him and stared wide-eyed. The little old man came up behind Mouth and cleared his throat.
“Mr. McGarry?” he said. “I am Dr. Stillman. I called about your trying out a pitcher.”
Mouth turned slowly to look at him, screwed up his face in distaste. “All right! What’s the gag? What about it, Grampa? Did this muttonhead put you up to it?” He turned to Beasley. “This is the pitcher, huh? Big joke. Yak, yak, yak. Big joke” Dr. Stillman smiled benignly. “Oh, I’m not a pitcher,” he said, “though I’ve thrown baseballs in my time. Of course, that was before the war.”
“Yeah,” Mouth interjected. “Which war? The Civil War? You don’t look old enough to have spent the winter at Valley Forge.” Then he glared at him intently. “Come to think of it—was it really as cold as they say?”
Stillman laughed gently. “You really have a sense of humor, Mr. McGarry.” Then he turned and pointed toward the dugout. “Here’s Casey now,” he said.
Mouth turned to look expectantly over the little old man’s shoulder. Casey was coming out of the dugout. From cleats to the button on top of his makeshift baseball cap there was a frame roughly six feet, six inches high. The hands at his sides were the dimensions of two good-sized cantaloupes. His shoulders, McGarry thought to himself, made Primo Camero look like the “before” in a Charles Atlas ad. In short, Casey was long. He was also broad. And in addition, he was one of the most powerful men either McGarry or Beasley had ever seen. He carried himself with the kind of agile grace that bespeaks an athlete, and the only jarring note in the whole picture was a face that should have been handsome, but wasn’t, simply because it had no spark, no emotion, no expression of any sort at all. It was just a face. Nice teeth, thin lips, good straight nose, deep-set blue eyes, a shock of sandy hair that hung out from under his baseball cap. But it was a face, McGarry thought, that looked as if it had been painted on.
“You’re the lefty, huh?” McGarry said. “All right.” He pointed toward the home plate. “You see that guy with the great big mitt on? He’s what’s known as a catcher. His name is Monk. Throw a few into him.”
“Thanks very much, Mr. McGarry,” Casey said dully.
He went toward home plate. Even the voice, McGarry thought. Even the voice. Dead. Spiritless. McGarry picked up another long piece of grass and headed back to the dugout, followed by Beasley and the little old man, who looked like something out of Charles Dickens. In the dugout, McGarry assumed his familiar pose of one foot on the parapet, both fists in his hip pockets. Beasley left the dugout to return to his office, which was his custom on days the team didn’t play. He would lock himself in his room and add up attendance figures, then look through the want ads of The New York Times. Just Stillman and Mouth McGarry stood in the dugout now, and the elderly little man watched everything with wide, fluttering eyes, like a kid on a tour through a fireworks factory. McGarry turned to him.
“You his father?”
“Casey’s?” Stillman asked. “Oh, no. He has no father. I guess you’d call me his—well, kind of his creator.” Dr. Stillman’s words went past McGarry the way the super-chief goes by a water tank. “That a fact?” he asked rhetorically. “How old is he?”
“How old is he?” Stillman repeated. He thought for a moment. “Well, that’s a little difficult to say.”
Mouth looked over toward the empty bench with a see-the-kind-of-idiocy-I-have-to-put-up-with kind of look. “That’s a little difficult to say,” he mimicked fiercely.
Stillman hurriedly tried to explain. “What I mean is,” he said, “it’s hard to be chronological when discussing Casey’s age. Because he’s only been in existence for three weeks. What I mean is—he has the physique and mind of roughly a twenty-two-year-old, but in terms of how long he’s been here—the answer to that would be about three weeks.”
The words had poured out of Dr. Stillman’s mouth, and McGarry had blinked through the whole speech.
“Would you mind going over that again?” he asked.
“Not at all,” Dr. Stillman said kindly. “It’s really not too difficult. You see, I made Casey I built him.” He smiled a big, beatific smile. “Casey’s a robot,” he said. The old man took a folded and creased document from his vest pocket and held it out to Mouth. “These are the blueprints I worked from,” he said.
Mouth swatted the papers out of the old man’s hand and dug his gnarled knuckles into the sides of his head. That goddamn Beasley There were no depths to which that son of a bitch wouldn’t go to make his life miserable. He had to gulp several times before he could bring himself to speak to the old man, and when finally words came, the voice didn’t sound like his at all.
“Old friend.” His voice came out in a wheeze. “Kind, sweet old man. Gentle grandfather, with the kind eyes, I am very happy that he’s a robot. Of course, that’s what he is.” He patted Stillman’s cheek. “That’s just what he is, a nice robot.” Then there was a sob in his voice as he glared up at the roof of the dugout. “Beasley you crummy son of a bitch!” A robot yet. This fruity old man and that miserable ball club and the world all tumbling down and it just never ended and it never got any better. A robot!
Dr. Stillman scurried after Mouth, who had walked up the steps of the dugout and out onto the field. He paused along the third-base line and began to chew grass again. Over his shoulder Casey was throwing pitches into the catcher at home plate, but Mouth didn’t even notice him.
“I dunno,” he said to nobody in particular. “I don’t even know what I’m doing in baseball.”
He looked uninterested as Casey threw a curve ball that broke sharply just a foot out in front of home plate and then shrieked into the catcher’s mitt like a small, circular, white express train.
“That Beasley,” Mouth said to the ground. “That guy’s got as much right in the front office as I’ve got in the Alabama State Senate. This guy is nothing, that’s all. Simply a nothing. He was bom a nothing. He’s a nothing now!”
On the mound Casey wound up again and threw a hook that screamed in toward home plate, swerved briefly to the left, shot back to the right, and then landed in the catcher’s mitt exactly where it had been placed as a target. Monk stared at the ball wide-eyed and then toward the young pitcher on the mound. He examined the ball, shook his head, then threw it back to him, shaking his head slowly from side to side.
Meanwhile Mouth continued his daily analysis of the situation to a smiling Dr. Stillman and an empty grandstand. “I’ve had bum teams before,” he was saying. “Real bad outfits. But this one!” He spat out the piece of grass. “These guys make Abner Doubleday a criminal! You know where I got my last pitcher? He was mowing the infield and I discovered that he was the only guy on the club who could reach home plate from the pitcher’s mound on less than two bounces. He is now ensconced as my number two starter. That’s exactly where he’s ensconced!”
He looked out again at Casey to see him throw a straight fast ball that landed in Monk’s glove and sent smoke rising from home plate. Monk whipped off the glove and held his hand agonizedly. When the pain su
bsided he stared at the young pitcher disbelievingly. It was then and only then that picture and sound began to register in Mouth McCarty’s mind. He suddenly thought about the last two pitches that he’d seen and his eyebrows shot up like elevators. Monk approached him, holding his injured hand.
“You see him?” Monk asked in an incredulous voice. “That kid? He picks up where Feller left off, I swear to God! He’s got a curve, hook, knuckler, slider, and a fastball that almost went through my palm! He’s got control like he uses radar. This is the best pitcher I ever caught in my life, Mouth!”
Mouth McGarry stood there as if mesmerized, staring at Casey, who was walking slowly away from the mound. Monk tucked his catcher’s mitt under his arm and started toward the dugout.
“I swear,” he said as he walked, “I never seen anything like it. Fantastic. He pitches like nothing humanP
Mouth McGarry and Dr. Stillman looked at one another. Dr. Stillman’s quiet blue eyes looked knowing, and Mouth McGarry chewed furiously down the length of a piece of grass, his last bite taking in a quarter inch of his forefinger. He blew on it, waved it in the air and stuck it in his mouth as he turned toward Stillman, his voice shaking with excitement.
“Look, Grampa,” Mouth said, “I want that boy! Understand? I’ll have a contract drawn up inside of fifteen minutes. And don’t give me no tough talk either! You brought him here on a tryout and that gives us first option.”
“He’s a robot, you know,” Stillman began quietly.
Mouth grabbed him and spoke through clenched teeth. “Grampa,” he said in a quiet fury, “don’t ever say that to nobody! We’ll just keep that in the family here.” Then suddenly remembering, he looked around wildly for the blueprint, picked it up from the ground and shoved it in his shirt pocket. He saw Stillman looking at him.
