The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  When I got my wind back Durocher was standing, hands on hips, staring down at me.

  “Why the hell didn’t you slide, Kid?”

  “I can’t,” I said, a little indignantly. “I’m diabetic, I have to avoid stuff like that. If I cut myself, or even bruise badly, it takes forever to heal.”

  “Oh,” said Durocher. “Well, I guess that’s okay then.”

  “You shouldn’t tag people so hard,” I said to Stanky. “Somebody could get hurt.”

  “Sorry, Kid,” said Stanky. I don’t think he apologized very often. I noticed that his spikes were filed. But I found later that he knew a lot about F. Scott Fitzgerald. His favourite story was “Babylon Revisited” so that gave us a lot in common; I was a real Fitzgerald fan; Stanky and I became friends even though both he and Durocher argued against reading The Great Gatsby as an allegory.

  “Where’d you learn your baseball?” an overweight coach who smelled strongly of snuff, and bourbon, said to me.

  “I live near Iowa City, Iowa,” I said in reply.

  Everyone wore question marks on their faces. I saw I’d have to elaborate. “Iowa City is within driving distance of Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and there’s minor league ball in Cedar Rapids, Omaha, Kansas City. Why there’s barely a weekend my dad and I don’t go somewhere to watch professional baseball.”

  “Watch?” said Durocher.

  “Well, we talk about it some too. My father is a real student of the game. Of course we only talk in Latin when we’re on the road, it’s a family custom.”

  “Latin?” said Durocher.

  “Say something in Latin,” said Whitey Lockman, who had wandered over from first base.

  “The Etruscans have invaded all of Gaul,” I said in Latin.

  “Their fortress is on the banks of the river,” said Bill Rigney, who had been filling in at third base.

  “Velle est posse,” I said.

  “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” translated Durocher.

  “Drink Agri Cola . . .” I began.

  “The farmer’s drink,” said Sal Yvars, slapping me on the back, but gently enough not to bruise me. I guess I looked a little surprised.

  “Most of us are more than ballplayers,” said Alvin Dark, who had joined us. “In fact the average player on this squad is fluent in three languages.”

  “Watch?” said Durocher, getting us back to baseball. “You watch a lot of baseball, but where do you play?”

  “I’ve never played in my life,” I replied. “But I have a photographic memory. I just watch how different players hold their bat, how they stand. I try to emulate Enos Slaughter and Joe DiMaggio.”

  “Can you field?” said Durocher.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I’ve always just watched the hitters. I’ve never paid much attention to the fielders.”

  He stared at me as if I had spoken to him in an unfamiliar foreign language.

  “Everybody fields,” he said. “What position do you play?”

  “I’ve never played,” I reiterated. “My health is not very good.”

  “Cripes,” he said, addressing the sky. “You drop a second Ted Williams on me and he tells me he can’t field.” Then to Alvin Dark: “Hey, Darky, throw a few with the kid here. Get him warmed up.”

  In the dugout Durocher pulled a thin, black glove from an equipment bag and tossed it to me. I dropped it. The glove had no discernable padding in it. The balls Dark threw hit directly on my hand, when I caught them, which was about one out of three. “Ouch!” I cried. “Don’t throw so hard.”

  “Sorry, Kid,” said Alvin Dark, and threw the next one a little easier. If I really heaved I could just get the ball back to him. I have always thrown like a non-athletic girl. I could feel my hand bloating inside the thin glove. After about ten pitches, I pulled my hand out. It looked as though it had been scalded.

  “Don’t go away, Kid,” said Leo. “In fact why don’t you sit in the dugout with me. What’s your name anyway?”

  “W. P. Kinsella,” I said.

  “Your friends call you W?”

  “My father calls me William, and my mother . . .” but I let my voice trail off. I didn’t think Leo Durocher would want to know my mother still called me Bunny.

  “Jeez,” said Durocher. “You need a nickname, Kid. Bad.”

  “I’ll work on it,” I said.

  I sat right beside Leo Durocher all that stifling afternoon in the Polo Grounds as the Giants swept a doubleheader from the Phils, the start of a sixteen-game streak that was to lead to the October 3, 1951, Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff. I noticed right away that the Giants were all avid readers. In fact, the New York Times Best Seller Lists, and the Time and Newsweek lists of readable books and an occasional review were taped to the walls of the dugout. When the Giants were in the field I peeked at the covers of the books the players sometimes read between innings. Willie Mays was reading The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. Between innings Sal Maglie was deeply involved in Carson McCullers’s new novel The Ballad of the Sad Café. “I sure wish we could get that Cousin Lymon to be our mascot,” he said to me when he saw me eyeing the bookjacket, referring to the hunchbacked dwarf who was the main character in the novel. “We need something to inspire us,” he added. Alvin Dark slammed down his copy of Requiem for a Nun and headed for the on-deck circle.

  When the second game ended, a sweaty and sagging Leo Durocher took me by the arm. “There’s somebody I want you to meet, Kid,” he said. Horace Stoneham’s office was furnished in wine-coloured leather sofas and overstuffed horsehair chairs. Stoneham sat behind an oak desk as big as the dugout, enveloped in cigar smoke.

  “I’ve got a young fellow here I think we should sign for the stretch drive,” Durocher said. “He can’t field or run, but he’s as pure a hitter as I’ve ever seen. He’ll make a hell of a pinch hitter.”

  “I suppose you’ll want a bonus?” growled Stoneham.

  “I do have something in mind,” I said. Even Durocher was not nearly so jovial as he had been. Both men stared coldly at me. Durocher leaned over and whispered something to Stoneham.

  “How about $6,000,” Stoneham said.

  “What I’d really like . . .” I began.

  “Alright, $10,000, but not a penny more.”

  “Actually, I’d like to meet Bernard Malamud. I thought you could maybe invite him down to the park. Maybe get him to sign a book for me?” They both looked tremendously relieved.

  “Bernie and me and this kid Salinger are having supper this evening,” said Durocher. “Why don’t you join us?”

  “You mean J. D. Salinger?” I said.

  “Jerry’s a big Giant fan,” he said. “The team Literary Society read Catcher in the Rye last month. We had a panel discussion on it for eight hours on the train to St. Louis.”

  Before I signed the contract I phoned my father.

  “No reason you can’t postpone your studies until the end of the season,” he said. “It’ll be good experience for you. You’ll gather a lot of material you can write about later. Besides, baseball players are the real readers of America.”

  I got my first hit off Warren Spahn, a solid single up the middle. Durocher immediately replaced me with a pinch runner. I touched Ralph Branca for a double, the ball went over Duke Snider’s head, hit the wall and bounced halfway back to the infield. Anyone else would have had an inside the park homer. I wheezed into second and was replaced. I got into 38 of the final 42 games. I hit 11 for 33, and was walked four times. And hit once. That was the second time I faced Warren Spahn. He threw a swishing curve that would have gone behind me if I hadn’t backed into it. I slouched off toward first holding my ribs.

  “You shouldn’t throw at batters like that,” I shouted, “someone could get seriously hurt. I’m diabetic, you know.” I’d heard that Spahn was into medical texts and interested in both human and veterinary medicine.

  “Sorry,” he shouted back. “If I’d known I wouldn’t have thro
wn at you. I’ve got some good liniment in the clubhouse. Come see me after the game. By the way I hear you’re trying to say that The Great Gatsby is an allegory.”

  “The way I see it, it is,” I said. “You see the eyes of the optometrist on the billboard are really the eyes of God looking down on a fallen world . . .”

  “Alright, alright,” said the umpire, Beans Reardon, “let’s get on with the game. By the way, Kid, I don’t think it’s an allegory either. A statement on the human condition, perhaps. But not an allegory.”

  The players wanted to give me some nickname other than “Kid.” Someone suggested “Ducky” in honour of my running style. “Fats” said somebody else. I made a note to remove his bookmark between innings. Several other suggestions were downright obscene. Baseball players, in spite of their obsession with literature and the arts, often have a bawdy sense of humour.

  “How about ‘Moonlight,’” I suggested. I’d read about an old-time player who stopped for a cup of coffee with the Giants half a century before, who had that nickname.

  “What the hell for?” said Monte Irvin, who in spite of the nickname preferred to be called Monford or even by his second name Merrill. “You got to have a reason for a nickname. You got to earn it. Still, anything’s better than W. P.”

  “It was only a suggestion,” I said. I made a mental note not to tell Monford what I knew about his favourite author, Erskine Caldwell.

  As it turned out I didn’t earn a nickname until the day we won the pennant.

  As every baseball fan knows the Giants went into the bottom of the ninth in the deciding game of the pennant playoff trailing the Dodgers 4–1.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to Durocher, “everything’s going to work out.” If he heard me he didn’t let on.

  But was everything going to work out? And what part was I going to play in it? Even though I’d contributed to the Giants’ amazing stretch drive, I didn’t belong. Why am I here? I kept asking myself. I had some vague premonition that I was about to change history. I mean I wasn’t a ballplayer. I was a writer. Here I was about to go into Grade 12 and I was already planning to do my master’s thesis on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  I didn’t have time to worry further as Alvin Dark singled. Don Mueller, in his excitement, had carried his copy of The Mill on the Floss out to the on-deck circle. He set the resin bag on top of it, stalked to the plate and singled, moving Dark to second.

  I was flabbergasted when Durocher called Monford Irvin back and said to me, “Get in there, Kid.”

  It was at that moment that I knew why I was there. I would indeed change history. One stroke of the bat and the score would be tied. I eyed the left field stands as I nervously swung two bats to warm up. I was nervous but not scared. I never doubted my prowess for one moment. Years later Johnny Bench summed it up for both athletes and writers when he talked about a successful person having to have an inner conceit. It never occurred to me until days later that I might have hit into a double or triple play, thus ending it and really changing history.

  When I did take my place in the batter’s box, I pounded the plate and glared out at Don Newcombe. I wished that I shaved so I could give him a stubble-faced stare of contempt. He curved me and I let it go by for a ball. I fouled the next pitch high into the first base stands. A fastball was low. I fouled the next one outside third. I knew he didn’t want to go to a full count: I crowded the plate a little looking for the fastball. He curved me. Nervy. But the curveball hung, sat out over the plate like a cantaloupe. I waited an extra millisecond before lambasting it. In that instant the ball broke in on my hands; it hit the bat right next to my right hand. It has been over thirty years but I still wake deep in the night, my hands vibrating, burning from Newcombe’s pitch. The bat shattered into kindling. The ball flew in a polite loop as if it had been tossed by a five-year-old; it landed soft as a creampuff in Pee Wee Reese’s glove. One out.

  I slumped back to the bench.

  “Tough luck, Kid,” said Durocher, patting my shoulder. “There’ll be other chances to be a hero.”

  “Thanks, Leo,” I said.

  Whitey Lockman doubled. Dark scored. Mueller hurt himself sliding into third. Rafael Noble went in to run for Mueller. Charlie Dressen replaced Newcombe with Ralph Branca. Bobby Thomson swung bats in the on-deck circle.

  As soon as umpire Jorda called time-in, Durocher leapt to his feet, and before Bobby Thomson could take one step toward the plate, Durocher called him back.

  “Don’t do that!” I yelled, suddenly knowing why I was really there. But Durocher ignored me. He was beckoning with a big-knuckled finger to another reserve player, a big outfielder who was tearing up the American Association when they brought him up late in the year. He was 5 for 8 as a pinch hitter.

  Durocher was already up the dugout steps heading toward the umpire to announce the change. The outfielder from the American Association was making his way down the dugout, hopping along over feet and ankles. He’d be at the top of the step by the time Durocher reached the umpire.

  As he skipped by me, the last person between Bobby Thomson and immortality, I stuck out my foot. The outfielder from the American Association went down like he’d been poleaxed. He hit his face on the top step of the dugout, crying out loud enough to attract Durocher’s attention.

  The trainer hustled the damaged player to the clubhouse. Durocher waved Bobby Thomson to the batter’s box. And the rest is history. After the victory celebration I announced my retirement blaming it on a damaged wrist. I went back to Iowa and listened to the World Series on the radio.

  All I have to show that I ever played in the major leagues is my one-line entry in The Baseball Encyclopedia:

  I got my outright release in the mail the week after the World Series ended. Durocher had scrawled across the bottom: “Good luck, Kid. By the way, The Great Gatsby is not an allegory.”

  For Brian Fawcett,

  whose story “My Career with the Leafs”

  inspired this story.

  The Night Manny Mota Tied the Record

  August 7, 1979: Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, California. Dodgers are playing Houston Astros. I am seated high above the field, just to the third-base side of home plate. Pregame presentations are being made. It is Mormon Family Night. The stadium is nearly full. It is five days since Thurman Munson died.

  I spend my time people-watching. In front of me are a number of co-workers from an office of some kind, probably a food company, I decide, noting the size of the women. Every one of them is overweight, the one directly in front of me by about two hundred pounds. These women cram their sweating faces with every variety of concession food. The one in front of me has purchased a tray of six hotdogs. Several of them have whole trays of beer, six cups, each slopping foam over its waxy edge.

  To my left, I watch an old man standing in the aisle staring at his ticket as if trying to decide where his seat should be. Eventually he chooses my aisle and makes his way to the seat next to me. He looks like a retired bank manager: iron-grey hair carefully styled, a blue pinstripe suit, vest, and tie. He carries a zippered leather binder. What fascinates me is the ticket he holds in his left hand. As he stands in the aisle it appears to blink like a tiny computer making calculations. It flashes all the way down the row of seats, stopping as he slides into the chair next to mine.

  Our eyes meet as he adjusts the small brown leather case in his lap, and I can see the same sense of tragedy floating in his eyes as I have viewed on my own the past five mornings.

  “A terrible thing,” I say.

  He nods gravely. “Did you watch the funeral coverage on TV?”

  It is my turn to nod. He has a sincere, fatherly voice that, my mind being preoccupied with the death of Thurman Munson, reminds me of the unseen baseball executive who talks to Munson in a widely shown commercial for a shaving product.

  In the commercial, Munson knocks, then enters the executive’s office, saying, “What’s the problem? I’m playing good ball.”


  “You certainly are,” the unseen executive says. “In my opinion, Thurman Munson is the finest catcher in the game.”

  As if reading my mind, the dapper old man beside me looks straight into my face and says, “Yes, a terrible loss, to the game and to the fans. In my opinion, Thurman Munson is the finest catcher in the game.”

  I feel like an egg with a finger-painted happy-face on it as I register my surprise.

  “Is?” I say.

  He leans towards me, smiling wryly, and speaks in a confidential manner. “Death,” he says, “need not be as final as many of us are used to believing.”

  We are interrupted by the playing of the National Anthem. The old man stands at attention with his right hand over his heart. I look around me: everything appears to be normal, the palm trees beyond the left-field fence sway ever so slightly. I can discern nothing out of the ordinary except the presence next to me. When the anthem finishes I remain silent; whatever kind of game we are playing, it is his move.

  “What would you say,” the old man continues, “if I told you that it might just be possible to move time back, like a newsreel being played in reverse, and undo what has been done?” He stares at me, half smiling, giving me the chance to joke his statement away if I choose.

  “You’re talking about Thurman Munson?”

  “More or less.”

  “Are you suggesting that if time were turned back, Munson’s plane would have landed safely at the Canton Airport last week? That none of this would have happened?”