by Rick Wilber
“Would that be honest?” Stillman said, rubbing his jaw.
Mouth pinched his cheek and said, “You sweet old guy, you’re looking at a desperate man. And if the baseball commissioner ever found out I was using a machine—I’d be dead. D-E-D! Dead, you know?” Mouth’s face brightened into a grimace that vaguely brought to mind a smile when he saw Casey approaching. “I like your stuff, kid,” Mouth said to him. “Now you go into the locker room and change your clothes.” He turned to Stillman. “He wears clothes, don’t he?”
“Oh, by all means,” Stillman answered.
“Good,” Mouth said, satisfied. “Then we’ll go up to Beasley’s office and sign the contract.” He looked at the tall pitcher standing there and shook his head. “If you could pitch once a week like I just seen you pitch, the only thing that stands between us and a pennant is if your battery goes dead or you rust in the rain! As of right now, Mr. Casey—you’re the number-one pitcher of the Brooklyn Dodgers!”
Stillman smiled happily and Casey just looked impassive, no expression, no emotion, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. He just stood there. Mouth hurried back to the dugout, took the steps three at a time and grabbed the phone.
“General Manager’s office,” he screamed into it. “Yeah!” In a moment he heard Beasley’s voice. “Beasley?” he said. “Listen, Beasley, I want you to draw up a contract. It’s for that left-hander. His name is Casey. That’s right. Not just good, Beasley. Fantastic. Now you draw up that contract in a hurry.” There was an angry murmur at the other end of the line. “Who do you think I’m giving orders to?” Mouth demanded. He slammed the phone down, then turned to look out toward the field.
Stillman and Casey were heading toward the dugout. Mouth rubbed his jaw pensively. Robot-shmobot, he said to himself. He’s got a curve, knuckler, fast ball, slider, change of pace and—hallelujah—he’s got two arms!
He picked up one of Bertram Beasley’s cigars off the ground, smoothed out the pleats and shoved it into his mouth happily. For the first time in many long and bleak months Mouth McGarry had visions of a National Teague pennant fluttering across his mind. So must John McGraw have felt when he got his first look at Walter Johnson, or Muller Higgins when George Herman Ruth came to him from the Boston Red Socks. And McGarry’s palpitations were surely not unlike those of Marse Joseph McCarthy when a skinny Italian kid named DiMaggio ambled out into center field for the first time. Such was the bonfire of hope that was kindled in Mouth McGarry’s chest as he looked at the blankfaced, giant left-hander walking toward him, carrying on his massive shoulders, albeit invisibly, the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Mrs. McGarry’s son, Mouth!
* * *
It was a night game against St. Louis forty-eight hours later. The dressing room of the Brooklyn Dodgers was full of noise, clattering cleats, slammed locker doors, the plaintive protests of Bertram Beasley, who was accusing the trainer of using too much liniment (at seventy-nine cents a bottle), and the deep, bullfrog profanity of Mouth McGarry, who was all over the room, on every bench, in every comer, and in every head of hair.
“You sure he’s got the signals down, Monk?” he asked his catcher for the fourteenth time.
Monk’s eyes went up toward the ceiling and he said tiredly, “Yeah, boss. He knows them.”
Mouth walked over to the pitcher, who was just tying up his shoes. “Casey,” he said urgently, wiping the sweat from his forehead, “if you forget them signals—you call time and bring Monk out to you, you understand? I don’t want no cross-ups.” He took out a large handkerchief and mopped his brow, then he pulled out a pill from his side pocket and plopped it into his mouth. “And above all,” he cautioned his young pitcher, “—don’t be nervous!”
Casey looked up at him puzzled. “Nervous?” he asked.
Stillman, who had just entered the room, walked over to them smiling. “Nervous, Casey,” he explained, “ill at ease. As if one of your electrodes were—”
Mouth drowned him out loudly, “You know ‘nervous,’ Casey! Like as if there’s two outs in the ninth, you’re one up, and you’re pitchin’ against DiMaggio and he comes up to the plate lookin’ intent!”
Casey stared at him deadpan. “That wouldn’t make me nervous. I don’t know anyone named DiMaggio.”
“He don’t know anyone named DiMaggio,” Monk explained seriously to Mouth McGarry.
“I heard 'im,” Mouth screamed at him. “I heard ’im!” He turned to the rest of the players, looked at his watch, then bellowed out, “All right, you guys, let’s get going!”
Monk took Casey’s arm and pulled him off the bench and then out the door. The room resounded with the clattering cleats on concrete floor as the players left the room for the dugout above. Mouth McGarry stood alone in the middle of the room and felt a dampness settle all over him. He pulled out a sopping wet handkerchief and wiped his head again.
“This humidity,” he said plaintively to Dr. Stillman, who sat on the bench surveying him, “is killing me. I’ve never felt such dampness—I swear to God!”
Stillman looked down at Mouth’s feet. McGarry was standing with one foot in a bucket of water.
“Mr. McGarry.” He pointed to the bucket.
Mouth lifted up his foot sheepishly and shook it. Then he took out his bottle of pills again, popped two of them in his mouth, gulped them down, and pointed apologetically to his stomach. “Nerves,” he said. “Terrible nerves. I don’t sleep at night. I keep seeing pennants before my eyes. Great big, red-white-and-blue pennants. All I can think about is knocking off the Giants and then taking four straight from the Yanks in the World Series.” He sighed deeply. “But for that matter,” he continued, “I’d like to knock off the Phillies and the Cards, too. Or the Braves or Cincinnati.” A forlorn note crept into his voice now. “Or anybody, when you come down to it!”
Dr. Stillman smiled at him. “I think Casey will come through for you, Mr. McGarry.”
Mouth looked at the small white-haired man. “What have you got riding on this?” he asked. “What’s your percentage?”
“You mean with Casey?” Stillman said. “Just scientific, that’s all. Purely experimental. I think that Casey is a superman of a sort and I’d like thatproved. Once I built a home economist. Marvelous cook. I gained forty-six pounds before I had to dismantle her. Now with Casey’s skills, his strength and his accuracy, I realized he’d be a baseball pitcher. But in order to prove my point I had to have him pitch in competition. Also, as an acid test, I had to have him pitch with absolutely the worst ball team I could find.”
“That’s very nice of you, Dr Stillman,” Mouth said. “I appreciate it.”
“Don’t mention it. Now shall we go out on the field?”
Mouth opened the door for him. “After you,” he said.
Dr. Stillman went out and Mouth was about to follow him when he stopped dead, one eyebrow raised. “Wait a minute, dammit,” he shouted. “The worst?” He started out after the old man. “You should have seen the Phillies in 1903!” he yelled after him.
An umpire screamed, “Play ball!” and the third baseman took a throw from the catcher, then, rubbing up the ball, he carried it over to Casey on the mound, noticing in a subconscious section of his mind that this kid with the long arms and the vast shoulders had about as much spirit as a lady of questionable virtue on a Sunday morning after a long Saturday night. A few moments later, the third baseman cared very little about the lack of animation on Casey’s features. This feeling was shared by some fourteen thousand fans, who watched the left-hander look dully in for a sign, then throw a sidearm fast ball that left them gasping and sent the entire dugout of the St. Louis Cardinals to their feet in amazement.
There are fast balls and fast balls, but nothing remotely resembling the white streak that shot out of Casey’s left hand, almost invisibly, toward the plate, had ever been witnessed. A similar thought ran through the mind of the St. Louis batter as he blinked at the sound of the ball hitting the catcher’s mitt and took a moment
to realize that the pitch had been made and he had never laid eyes on it.
This particular St. Louis batter was the first of twenty-five men to face Casey that evening. Eighteen of them struck out and only two of them managed to get to first base, one on a fluke single that was misjudged over first base. By the sixth inning most of the people in the stadium were on their feet, aware that they were seeing something special in the tall left-hander on the mound. And by the ninth inning, when Brooklyn had won its first game in three weeks by a score of two to nothing, the stadium was in a frenzy.
There was also a frenzy of a sort in the Brooklyn dugout. The corners of Mouth McGarry’s mouth tilted slightly upward in a grimace that the old team trainer explained later to a couple of mystified ballplayers was a “smile.” Mouth hadn’t been seen to smile in the past six years.
Bertram Beasley celebrated the event by passing out three brand-new cigars and one slightly used one (to McGarry). But the notable thing about the Brooklyn dugout and later the locker room was that the ball team suddenly looked different. In the space of about two and a half hours, it had changed from some slogging, lead-footed, aging second-raters to a snappy, heads-up, confidentlooking crew of ballplayers who had a preoccupation with winning. The locker room resounded with laughter and horseplay, excited shouting drifted out from the showers. All this in a room that for the past three years had been as loud and comical as a funeral parlor.
While wet towels sailed across the room and cleated shoes banged against locker doors, one man remained silent. This was the pitcher named Casey. He surveyed the commotion around him with a mild interest, but was principally concerned with unlacing his shoes. The only emotion he displayed was when Doc Barstow, the team trainer, started to massage his arm. He jumped up abruptly and yanked the arm away, leaving Barstow puzzled. Later on Barstow confided to Mouth McGarry that the kid’s arm felt like a piece of tube steel. McGarry gulped, smiled nervously and asked Doc how his wife had been feeling. All this happened on the night of July 1.
* * *
Three weeks later the Brooklyn Dodgers had moved from the cellar to fifth place in the National League. They had won twenty-three games in a row, seven of them delivered on a platter by one left-handed pitcher named Casey. Two of his ball games were no-hitters, and his earned-run average was by far the lowest not only in either League, but in the history of baseball. His name was on every tongue in the nation, his picture on every sports page, and contracts had already been signed so that he would be appearing on cereal boxes before the month was out. And as in life itself, winning begot winning. Even without Casey, the Dodgers were becoming a feared and formidable ball club. Weak and ineffectual bat-slappers, who had never hit more than .200 in their lives, were becoming Babe Ruths. Other pitchers who had either been too green or too decrepit were beginning to win ball games along with Casey. And there was a spirit now—an aggressiveness, a drive, that separated the boys from the pennant-winners and the Brooklyn Dodgers were potentially the latter. They looked it and they played it.
Mouth McGarry was now described as “that master strategist” and “a top field general” and, frequently, “the winningest manager of the year” in sports columns that had previously referred to him as “that cement-headed oaf who handles a ball club like a bull would handle a shrimp cocktail.” The team was drawing more customers in single games than they’d garnered in months at a time during previous seasons. And the most delightful thing to contemplate was the fact that Casey, who had begun it all, looked absolutely invulnerable to fatigue, impervious to harm, and totally beyond the normal hazards of pitchers. He had no stiff arms, no sore elbows, no lapses of control, no nothing. He pitched like a machine and while it was mildly disconcerting, it was really no great concern that he also walked, talked, and acted like a machine. There was no question about it. The Dodgers would have been in first place by mid-August at the very latest, if a shortstop on the Philadelphia Phillies had not hit a line ball directly at Casey on the mound, which caught him just a few inches above his left eye.
The dull, sickening thud was the shot heard all around the borough, and if anyone had clocked Mouth McGarry’s run from the dugout to the mound, where his ace left-hander was now sprawled face downward, two guys named Landy and Bannister would have been left in eclipse. Bertram Beasley, in his box seat in the grand-stand, simply chewed off one quarter of his cigar and swallowed it, then fell off his seat in a dead faint.
The players grouped around Casey, and Doc Barstow motioned for a stretcher. McGarry grabbed his arm and whispered at him as if already they were in the presence of the dead.
“Will he pull through, Doc? Will he make it?”
The team doctor looked grim. “I think we’d better get him to a hospital. Let’s see what they say about him there.”
Half the team provided an escort for the stretcher as it moved slowly off die field. It looked like a funeral cortege behind a recently deceased head of state, with Mouth McGarry as the principal mourner. It was only then that he remembered to motion into the bull pen for a new pitcher, an eager young towhead out of the Southern Association League who had just been called up.
The kid ambled toward the mound. It was obvious that at this moment he wished he were back in Memphis, Tennessee, sorting black-eyed peas. He took the ball from the second baseman, rubbed it up, then reached down for the rosin bag. He rubbed his hands with the bag, then rubbed the ball, then rubbed the bag, then put down the ball, wound up and threw the rosin bag. As it turned out, that was his best pitch of the evening. Shortly thereafter he walked six men in a row and hit one man in the head. Luckily, it was a hot-dog vendor in the bleachers, so that no harm was done in terms of moving any of the men on base. This was taken care of by his next pitch to the number-four batter on the Philadelphia Phillies squad, who swung with leisurely grace at what the kid from Memphis referred to as his fast ball, and sent it on a seven-hundred-foot-trip over the center-field fence, which took care of the men on the bases. The final score was thirteen to nothing in favor of the Phillies, but Mouth McGarry didn’t even wait until the last out. With two outs in the ninth, he and Beasley ran out of the park and grabbed a cab. Beasley handed the driver a quarter and said, “Never mind the cops. Get to the hospital.”
The hackie looked at the quarter, then back toward Beasley and said, “This better be a rare mint, or I’ll see to it that you have your baby in the cab!”
They arrived at the hospital twelve minutes later and pushed their way through a lobby full of reporters to get to an elevator and up to the floor where Casey had been taken for observation. They arrived in his room during the last stages of the examination. A nurse shushed them as they barged into the room.
“Boobie,” McGarry gushed, racing toward the bed. The doctor took off his stethoscope and hung it around his neck. “You the father?” he asked Mouth. “The father,” McGarry chortled. “I’m closer than any father.”
He noticed now for the first time that Dr. Stillman was sitting quietly in the comer of the room, looking like a kindly old owl full of wisdom hidden under his feathers.
“Well, gentlemen, there’s no fracture that I can see,” the doctor announced professionally. “No concussion. Reflexes seem normal—”
Beasley exhaled, sounding like a strong north wind. “I can breathe again,” he told everyone.
“All I could think of,” Mouth said, “was there goes Casey! There goes the pennant! There goes the Series!” He shook his head forlornly, “And there goes my career.”
The doctor picked up Casey’s wrist and began to feel for the pulse. “Yes, Mr. Casey,” he smiled benevolently down into the expressionless face and unblinking eyes, “I think you’re in good shape. I’ll tell you, though, when I heard how the ball hit you in the temple I wondered to myself how—”
The doctor stopped talking. His fingers compulsively moved around the wrist. His eyes went wide. After a moment he opened up Casey’s pajamas and sent now shaking fingers running over the chest area. Afte
r a moment he stood up, took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.
“What’s the matter?” Mouth asked nervously. “What’s wrong?”
The doctor sat down in a chair. “There’s nothing wrong,” he said softly. “Not a thing wrong. Everything’s fine. It’s just that—”
“Just that what?” Beasley asked.
The doctor pointed a finger toward the bed. “It is just that this man doesn’t have any pulse. No heartbeat.” Then he looked up toward the ceiling. “This man,” he said in a strained voice, “this man isn’t alive.”
There was absolute silence in the room, marred only by the slump of Beasley’s body as he slid quietly to the floor. No one paid any attention to him. It was Dr. Stillman who finally spoke.
“Mr. McGarry,” he said in a quiet, firm voice, “I do believe it’ll have to come out now.”
Beasley opened his eyes. “All right, you son of a bitch, McGarry. What are you trying to pull off?”
Mouth looked around the room as if searching for an extra bed. He looked ill. “Beasley,” he said plaintively, “you ain’t gonna like this. But it was Casey or it was nothing. God, what a pitcher! And he was the only baseball player I ever managed who didn’t eat nothing.” Stillman cleared his throat and spoke to the doctor. “I think you should know before you go any further that Casey has no pulse or heartbeat. . . because he hasn’t any heart. He’s a robot.”
There was the sound of another slump as Bertram Beasley fell back unconscious. This time he didn’t move.
“A what?” the doctor asked incredulously.
“That’s right,” Stillman said. “A robot.”
The doctor stared at Casey on the bed, who stared right back at him. “Are you sure?” the doctor asked in a hushed voice.
