Dutch Blue Error

by William G. Tapply

  The Grabowskis grew corn and raised cattle on their hilly little spread out in the Berkshires. They scraped and sweated enough money out of that rocky, unyielding earth to send their only son to college. Johnny Grabowski enrolled at Fitchburg State College. He wanted to become a teacher. The college assigned him a red-headed baseball player named Eddie Donagan as a roommate. Donagan had no parents and Johnny Grabowski had no friends, so they struck the obvious bargain. Eddie spent his vacations with the Grabowskis, and Johnny followed Eddie around to parties.

  When Johnny Grabowski was drafted, Eddie wanted to sign up to go to Vietnam with his friend. Johnny wouldn’t let him. “You stay home and take care of Ma and Pa,” he told Eddie. “And keep that arm in shape. I want to see you in a Sox uniform when I get back.”

  Eddie kept his part of the deal. But Johnny didn’t keep his. The helicopter he was riding in was blown out of the sky. He had been in Vietnam for nine days when it happened.

  So when Eddie signed his contract he insisted that Jake and Mary Grabowski be present, and after all the signatures had been inscribed and witnessed, Eddie glanced at me, and I said, “Eddie has a little announcement he’d like to make.”

  Eddie went over and stood between Jake and Mary Grabowski. He draped his arms around their shoulders and said, “Jake and Mary have been like parents to me. And Johnny was my brother. I love them. I can never repay them for everything. But I wanted to do something. Here’s what I’m trying to say. Me and Mr. Coyne worked out this thing. It’s a scholarship to Fitchburg State in Johnny’s name. It’s for a needy boy who wants to be a teacher. The Johnny Grabowski Scholarship. Mr. Coyne fixed it up with the school, and everything’s all set.”

  Mary Grabowski’s thin body shook as she cried softly, and Jake pumped Eddie’s hand.

  “You should all know,” I added, “that the money for the scholarship comes out of Eddie’s bonus. It’s enough to cover room and board and tuition for four years.”

  That’s how Eddie Donagan was back then. Generous, warm, simple. He loved baseball, Jan, and Jake and Mary Grabowski. He’d never had any money, so giving a lot of it away didn’t strike him as a big deal.

  Eddie played for the Red Sox farm club in Jamestown, New York, that summer of 1970, and in September he and Janet Farina were married at St. Eulalia’s in Winchester. Jake Grabowski was his best man, and I was an usher. Sam held the reception under a big tent on his side lawn. Most of the guests were his business associates. It looked like the opening scene from The Godfather.

  That winter Eddie took a couple courses at Boston State, but he didn’t finish them. He worked part-time in one of Sam’s liquor stores. He and Jan lived at Sam’s house in Winchester.

  One Saturday night that winter Gloria, to whom I was still married then, and I took Eddie and Jan to a concert at Memorial Hall in Cambridge. The Harvard and Radcliffe orchestra and chorus were performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was Gloria’s idea to invite Eddie and Jan—she had a kind of missionary zeal about bringing culture to the unwashed masses, into which category she automatically lumped all professional athletes like Eddie and weekend golfers like me. Jan, with the benefit of her Mount Holyoke education, seemed thrilled at the prospect, and Eddie went along good-naturedly. His idea of classical music was something melodious by Simon and Garfunkel, and when the musicians filed into the hall, the men in their black tuxedoes and the women in frilled white blouses, he leaned across Gloria and whispered to me, “It only takes four Beatles to do a tune. Look at all those musicmasters up there! Man, this song must be something!”

  Gloria patted his arm. “It is,” she said. “It’s a great song.”

  Jan looked embarrassed. “Eddie, shh!” she said to him.

  When the orchestra began to play, Eddie leaned forward. I could see his eyes studying the moves of the conductor. His head bobbed to the rhythms of the music. At the beginning of the second movement, he leaned toward me, his hand carelessly balanced on Gloria’s knee and his eyes bright with recognition, and whispered, “That’s Huntley-Brinkley music, man!”

  A little later, when the chorus was singing “The Ode to Joy,” I glanced at Eddie. He was leaning back in his seat and his eyes were closed. Tears glistened on his cheeks.

  After the performance the four of us paused on the steps outside the hall to turn up our collars and huddle into our heavy coats against the winter air. Eddie had one arm around Jan’s shoulders. He grabbed my hand and pumped it. “Man, that was beautiful. A great show!” He looked down at Jan. “We gotta get that record,” he said to her.

  Stump Kelly had been right about Eddie Donagan’s talent. He played Double A Ball for Pawtucket the following spring, and in August he was called up to the Triple A club in Louisville. His combined record with the two minor league teams in 1971 was fourteen and three. The papers began to hail him as a cinch to make the Red Sox in 1972. He was added to the forty-man roster in the winter and went to spring training with the Boston team.

  He called me collect one afternoon that March. I was in my office staring out at the gray city that was suffocating under layers of clouds, fog, and slush. Eddie was in Winter Haven, Florida.

  “They’re sending me back to Pawtucket,” he said. “What a bummer.”

  “They can do that, Eddie. You’ll be back.”

  “How the hell can they do that to me? Nobody’s hit me all spring. I shut out the Tigers for three innings day before yesterday.”

  “That’s the business you’re in. Stick to pitching. Do your stuff. You’ll make it.”

  “I’m gettin’ chilled, man. It’s bogus. A real turnoff.”

  “I can’t help you. Keep your mouth shut and throw the hell out of the ball.”

  “Yeah,” he grumbled.

  “How’s Jan?”

  “Oh, she’s okay, I guess. She doesn’t like living in a motel. The other wives chill her. I guess if I’m headed back to Pawtucket she’ll be home in a week or so.”

  “Give her my love. And Eddie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do your job. Pitch, don’t bitch. Okay?”

  “Sure. Ten-four.”

  “So how’s the weather down there?”

  “The weather? Oh, you know. Florida.”

  “By the way, Eddie. Spalding wants to sign you up.”

  “Yeah? Is that good?”

  “I don’t think so. They figure you’re going to make it. They try to sign minor leaguers up cheap, lock them in, so that when they do make it, it won’t cost them a bundle. I suggest you wait. There’s Wilson, Rawlings, all the rest. We can do better when you’re a big league pitcher.”

  “I don’t know, Brady. I could use some of that iron.”

  “You don’t need money now. It’s up to you. I say you should wait.”

  I heard him sigh. “Sure. You’re the lawmaster. I’ll wait.”

  “Smart decision.”

  He laughed. “See you later, Counselor.”

  The Red Sox were in the thick of a pennant race when they called Eddie Donagan up in July. Fenway Park was sold out the night he started his first game. For Eddie it was what he called a “Bogart”—a big game. “My first debut,” he said. Sam and Josie and Jan and I sat in seats Eddie got for us behind the Red Sox dugout. And Eddie pitched the same way he had that first time I watched him at Fitchburg State College, hunching his shoulders, bending like a bow, and zipping the ball with the speed and accuracy of an arrow. The fans loved him, a gangly local kid, big-shouldered and open-faced and red-headed. He pawed and scraped at the mound, cheered his fielders, chatted with the baseball, and bounded on and off the field like a boy on his way home from school for summer vacation.

  The White Sox hitters looked about as skilled as those college kids from North Adams State had looked that first time I’d seen Eddie pitch. They waved at his “yakker,” swung late at his “cheese,” and after eight innings he had a one-to-nothing lead. He had given up four singles, one walk, and, by Sam’s count, had struck out six.

 
When Eddie sprinted to the mound to begin the ninth inning, the people in Fenway Park all stood and began to applaud. The sound of thirty-five thousand pairs of hands clapping for Eddie Donagan made me shiver. I glanced at Sam and saw that his eyes were shining. Eddie stood awkwardly, flipping the ball back and forth from his hand to his glove while Carlton Fisk, the catcher, pretended to adjust his shin guards. I could see Fisk grinning at Eddie’s discomfort.

  When the first Chicago batter stepped into the box the fans continued to stand and applaud. When he hit Eddie’s second pitch hard on the ground into center field, the applause shifted into a chant, “Ed-die, Ed-die,” and grew in volume when Eddie Kasko, the Red Sox manager, hopped out of the dugout and jogged to the mound. Fisk walked out, his mask tucked under his arm, and the three of them talked for a moment. From where I sat I could see them smiling. Eddie nodded his head vigorously, and then Kasko slapped him on his ass and walked back into the dugout.

  When the next Chicago batter came to the plate, the noise in the park suddenly stopped. It was Dick Allen, a fearsome slugger in those days, and destined to be the American League’s Most Valuable Player that year. One by one the fans sat down to watch the confrontation.

  But there was no drama. Allen hit Eddie’s first pitch high into the misty Boston night, over the left field wall, over the screen atop the wall, and the ball was still rising on the ascending arc of its big parabola when I last saw it. I turned to look at Eddie. His body was still facing the plate, his legs planted in his follow-through, but his head had swiveled around to follow the flight of the ball, and his finger was the barrel of a gun pointed at his temple.

  The silence in the ballpark was as awesome, in its way, as the applause of a few minutes earlier had been. Then a guy sitting somewhere behind me yelled, “At’s okay, Eddie-boy. At’s okay.” And the chant built again, “Ed-die, Ed-die,” as Kasko climbed out of the dugout and moved slowly toward the mound. Eddie started to walk toward him, and they met by the third-base line. I could see the back of Kasko’s neck redden as he thrust his jaw at Eddie. I couldn’t tell what the manager said to him, but Eddie’s chin sagged onto his chest, and he trudged slowly into the dugout and out of sight without looking up or acknowledging the cheers.

  Later that evening we all met at Sam’s house. Sam kept pounding Eddie on the back telling him what a great game he pitched, and Eddie grinned shyly and didn’t say much of anything, and Jan hugged his arm. Josie kept running in and out of the kitchen where she had a vat of pasta bubbling.

  “Tough one to lose,” I said to Eddie, when I found myself momentarily alone with him.

  “Man, I was stylin’, when all of a sudden that Allen went ding-dong. Took me to the bridge.” Eddie took a big gulp from his Budweiser.

  I smiled. “What did Kasko say when he came to take you out? He didn’t look too happy.”

  “He said, ‘When I come out to get you, you wait for me. You wait right there on the mound ’til I get there. Don’t you ever make me look bad again.’”

  “What’d you say?”

  Eddie flashed his Huck Finn grin. “I told him not to sweat it, he wouldn’t have to get me any more.”

  “And what’d he say to that?”

  “He said if I was in Pawtucket it wouldn’t be a problem.”

  Eddie didn’t go back to Pawtucket. He took his spot in the Red Sox pitching rotation, and when the season ended he had won six games, lost only that first one, and the Red Sox lost the pennant to Detroit by a single game. Even though he had played only half the season, Eddie got several votes for Rookie of the Year, which his teammate Fisk won. He had the city of Boston, as Sam liked to say, “by the short hairs.” Everywhere he went he was recognized, welcomed, loved. The Red Sox sent him to visit sick kids at Children’s Hospital. He did publicity for the Jimmy Fund. He spoke at Little League banquets and Rotary Club meetings in places like Andover and Bridgewater. I got him some easy endorsement money from a Somerville Pontiac dealer, and we signed a five-year exclusive contract with Rawlings, who wanted to manufacture a full line of Eddie Donagan sporting equipment.

  Eddie started off the 1973 season about where he had left off—and it wasn’t until sometime in June when I first became aware of the change. It didn’t even seem important, because Eddie was still winning, and the sportswriters loved his ingenuous antics and inventive language. But he was starting to give up runs. The Sox had plenty of hitters, and they lived with the tradition of outslugging their opponents. In comfortable little Fenway Park, the Red Sox expected their pitchers to give up runs, so at first they didn’t seem to care that Eddie’s five-to-nothing games had become five-to-three or four. Kasko was making trips to the mound to bail Eddie out of ninth-inning trouble quite regularly, and a few times the relief pitchers failed and the runners Eddie had left on the bases scored, and then he was a loser.

  I was with Eddie one night after he had blown a three-run lead in the eighth inning and was lifted from a game that the Sox eventually lost in the eleventh. Jan had gone to bed, and Sam and Josie were away, so it was just Eddie and I at the kitchen table sipping beer.

  “You got a sore arm or something?” I asked him.

  “Hey, you ever lose a court case?”

  “Sure. Somebody’s got to lose. Sometimes I don’t have a case that can be won.”

  “In baseball somebody’s got to lose, too.”

  “Don’t give me that crap. Baseball’s different from the law. You’re not pitching the way you can.”

  “This ain’t an easy game, lawmaster. Everybody gets beat sometimes. It ain’t like Fitchburg. No salad teams. These guys are all major leaguers. There’s no margin for error.”

  I sipped my beer and said softly, “You seem to be erring a lot lately.”

  “Christ, man, I ain’t a machine. So I’m making a few bad pitches. I’m still a winner.”

  “You don’t look like a winner out there.”

  He slammed his beer can onto the table. “Okay, man. Get offa my back, will you? You’re my lawyer, not my fuckin’ manager. You just take care of my iron and leave the baseball to us ballplayers. Okay?”

  I shrugged. “Okay, Eddie.”

  He cocked his head at me, his eyes blazing. I smiled and gave him the finger. Then he grinned. “Up yours, too,” he said. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry, man. I’m taking all kinds of horseshit these days, and it just don’t seem fair, know what I mean? What’s the matter with Eddie Donagan? I hear it everywhere. I see kids on the street, they yell, ‘Hey, Eddie, what the fuck’s the matter with ya?’ The papers they’re sayin’, ‘What happened to Donagan? How come he’s givin’ up runs and hits and even losin’ a game now and then?’ Now the coaches are startin’ to screw around with me, like I was some kind of little machine. They say, ‘Here, shorten your stride, you’re overstriding, Eddie.’ So I shorten my stride and it feels fucked up, and I tell them, and they say, ‘Look, kid, we’re big coaches, we’ve been around for a long time, and you’re just a young wise-ass, so you just do what we tell ya to do and we’ll make a pitcher but of you. Yessiree.’ Shit. I was a pitcher without them. They tryin’ to tell me I’m too—you know, eccentric. They tell me I gotta stop talkin’ to the players and fixin’ up the pitcher’s mound. They want me to try the, whatchacallit, you know, Bob Turley, the… ah, shit…”

  “The no-windup delivery? They want you to do that?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Hey, that ain’t Eddie Donagan. One of ’em’s even sayin’ I oughta get another pitch. Wants to teach me the fuckin’ forkball. Hey, I don’t need no forkball, or a knuckleball or a palm ball or a goddam spitter. I just wish to hell they’d leave me alone, is what I wish.”

  I lit a cigarette. “I’m sorry I mentioned it. You’re doing fine. Pitch a shutout for us sometime, though, will you?”

  “Man, I feel one comin’ on,” he said. “Watch out, you Indians.”

  But he didn’t pitch a shutout against Cleveland. He walked two batters leading off the seventh inning and Kasko yanked him. Eddie thr
ew his glove into the dugout as he walked away from his manager. Later, Kasko told a reporter he was thinking of taking Eddie out of the starting rotation and putting him in the bullpen so he could, as he put it, “work out his problems.”

  I was watching on television the night in Detroit that it all blew up in Eddie Donagan’s face. In the first inning he walked the leadoff batter on four pitches. The fourth actually went behind the batter, who glared at Eddie as he jogged to first. Eddie hit the next batter on the foot with his first pitch. His next pitch bounced in front of the plate and caromed past the catcher. The runners moved to second and third. That’s when Kasko came slowly out of the dugout. The television camera zoomed in on Eddie as he stood on the mound to wait for the manager to come take the ball from him. Eddie’s forefinger was pointed at his temple.

  He called me collect later that night. “I’m all fucked up, man. I don’t know where the fuck it’s going. Oh, man, am I fucked up.”

  “You been drinking, Eddie?”

  “Damn straight I’ve been drinking, man. Oh, shit, I can’t do nothin’ any more.”

  “It was just one of those things. You’ll be fine. Forget it.”

  “Just one of those things,” he sang. “Yeah. Ha, ha. Forget it, he says. Listen, lawmaster, you ever try to talk and nothing but gobbledygook come out of your mouth? Huh? That ever happen to you, you gonna talk to the jury, be all eloquent and do your lawyer thing, and nothing but noises come out? You ever talk to a judge and hear yourself barkin’ like a dog? Huh?”

  “Jesus, Eddie. It must be frustrating.”

  “Frustrating! Ha! Know what they call it? Oh, big joke. It used to be a big joke. Something that happened to other guys. The Steve Blass disease. Remember Steve Blass? It means you’re a big league pitcher who wakes up one day and finds out that he doesn’t know where the fuck the ball is going to go when he lets go of it. Well, man, I got it. I got it bad. A bad case of Steve Blass. Terminal case. Eddie Donagan’s sick, and all the guys, they stay away from me now. They think it’s contagious. Don’t go near Eddie Donagan. He’s got the Big C. Cancer of the head. Even the coaches, they don’t look at me when they see me. All of a sudden they don’t wanna come near me. They think if they try to help me somebody’ll blame them for what happened. Ah, shit, man, am I ever fucked up.”