"That's what I hear." He shifted his weight slightly. His manner was low and unruffled.
I asked if Sidd was making life hard for him.
"Well, that's an interesting point," he replied. "It may well be disruptive, frankly. It's hard to explain to the rest of the guys. I never liked the idea of the guy coming out here for ten minutes and then going off to the beach or wherever. He only throws a half-dozen pitches-just like he wants to keep his hand in, you know."
I nodded and said that I had come out to watch but had missed him.
"It's a sight," Johnson said, shaking his head. "What he does doesn't really belong in baseball, at least nothing I ever imagined." He looked over. "Do you realize he throws full-bore right from the start?"
"I didn't know," I said.
"Yep. Hell, warming up is practically an art in itself. Almost all pitching coaches try to get their people to take a short run around the field to loosen the muscles and get the adrenalin flowing. Then some light exercises-touching the toes, stretching the leg muscles. The first toss to the catcher is from about twenty-five feet ... then he slowly backs up to the rubber. Finch does none of these things. He steps into the enclosure and takes off his boot! That's his warm-up. Then he steps up and lets fly." He chuckled. "Ronn Reynolds tells me he's the guy who should be warmed up. He jokes they should wheel up a field gun about forty feet out and fire a couple of artillery shells into his catcher's mitt!"
A foul ball shot back: I flinched as it spun against the cords with a faint whine just in front of us, and dropped.
"Have you had this kind of trouble with a player before -I mean the disruptive element?"
Johnson smiled and said Oh yes, he'd had such problems. "When I managed the Miami Amigos we had an outfielder named Danny `Sundown' Thomas. He was called Sundown because his religion kept him from doing any athletic stuff from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. So on Saturday he wouldn't even show up at the ballpark. But then suddenly, at 7:30, just as the sun went below the horizon, Sundown'd rush in, dressed in his uniform, pounding his fist into his glove, all eager to play. Yep. Very disconcerting. Then we had a pitcher, Oscar Zamora, who had a shoe business in Miami. He only agreed to pitch on weekends when he wasn't out selling. It was not the most stable of conditions. It makes it hard on the other guys."
The progression of players continued into the battingcage. I realized how removed I was from things when I could not recognize any of them. Keith Hernandez was the only one I was fairly sure about: the dark moustache.
"Do you think anyone's caught on to Finch?" I asked.
"There're some guys poking around, I hear. Sports Illustrated. Guy came up to me a couple of days ago and asked if we had a cricket bowler in camp ... from Pakistan. He was embarrassed. He said his home office had wanted him to ask."
"What about the players?"
"They've got to know something's going on," Johnson said. "One or two of them must have heard the pops out there in the enclosure. Steve Garland, who's our trainer, must wonder about Ronn Reynolds' left hand. He keeps treating it for trauma. Then at noontime when we load up the bus to go on over to Lang Field for a game, the guys must wonder why Ronn Reynolds is left behind. He stares after the bus like we're leaving him on a desert island."
Johnson turned from the cage and faced me.
"You haven't got any idea if he's going to sign?"
"No."
"If we sign him, Cashen wants to send him down-no matter what-to Triple-A. It's the procedure. How do you think he'll take that?"
On a hunch I said that baseball was a very personal exercise for Sidd, and that I didn't think it would make any difference.
Batting practice was finished. The grounds-crew came out and hauled the cage away. One of its wheels squeaked sharply. Johnson and I started walking for the clubhouse.
"Have you told Sidd that his ways could be ... well, disruptive?" I asked.
"Yep, I've been straight with him."
"Do you recall what he said?"
"Recall? How the hell can I forget. What he said was: `When I see smoke beyond the mountain I know there's a fire. When I see horns beyond a fence I know there's an ox.' "
"Hmmmm."
"Exactly my own words. What was that anyway?" he asked.
"A koan. It all has to do with paradox. The mind is stretched with contemplation. Mental elasticity."
"Well, mine sure got stretched. Don't get me wrong. I like the kid. Maybe he's not easy. He doesn't exactly mingle. He's like one of those things in cuckoo clocks-appears and then he's gone. But he seems to worry about people. He gave me-what do you call those things-a mantra to quit chewing tobacco. It's a bad habit of mine. He wrote the mantra down on a piece of paper and told me its god was the color of sapphire. He gave it to me. He put his hands together like he was praying. A little bow. Class."
"Have you tried it?" I said.
"I'm going to save it up until the season starts," he said with a grin.
Often at night we went to Hurricane's, a restaurant on the beach where a jazz combo played. Debbie Sue tried to get Sidd to take his horn. She had an idea that he could sit in with the group-his horn in his lap until finally he would raise it to his lips, the first mellow tones stilling the commotion in the place, the crowd looking up from their blackened snapper and their shrimp baskets; even the other musicians, eventually, would put down their instruments and listen, the horn music welling out into the street beyond the people crowded at the door. Sidd smiled and said he liked to play just for us. Or perhaps for the porpoises out in the Bay. That would mean sitting on the beach so he wouldn't have to swim out there among them.
That night Debbie Sue wanted to go to a disco. We went to one named Dent's on Gulf Boulevard. Sidd and I sat together and watched Debbie Sue when she said she was bored with us and needed to "stretch her bones"-as she put it-on the dance floor. She danced alone, but almost immediately a circle of men materialized, so that at any time she could have taken a couple of steps forward and collected herself a partner. As it was, she never committed herself, but revolved slowly in a solitary orbit, her limbs moving at double the beat, her eyes vacant, often shielded by the tumble of her hair, jaws agape, and after a number of minutes of this she would drop back down into her seat as if pole-axed and ask for a glass of ginger ale.
Neither Sidd nor I danced with her. He seemed absolutely immune to the beat of the disco music submerging us with its volume-never a tap of the feet on the floor or a fingertip on the tabletop. Once, in the din, he leaned across the table and asked me, his voice popping in my eardrums, if, when I had a chance, would I explain the little white bag he had noticed on the pitcher's mound during an intrasquad game he had spied on at Huggins.
I shouted at him that the bag was full of rosin, which filtered through when a pitcher picked it up; it made the fingers feel supple on the ball.
I leaned back to take a breath and then I cupped my hands and yelled through the storm of noise that Jay Horwitz had asked me to tell him-that the Mets hoped Sidd would play in the Toronto Blue Jay "B" squad. It was coming up in a week.
Sidd's eyes widened slightly.
We got home at one in the morning. The dancing had not robbed Debbie Sue of any of her energy; the porpoise romp out in the Bay was what she wanted to do now. I declined firmly, and Sidd murmured and wondered if it couldn't be postponed.
"Namas-te," he said over his shoulder as the two left.
They came back very late. For the first time I felt a strong wrench of jealousy-knowing that Sidd would be holding the length of Debbie Sue's body, still damp from the sea, against his own. From my bedroom I could hear their bare feet on the cool floors of the bungalow, the opening of the refrigerator door and the scrape of dishes as Debbie Sue scrabbled around to make them a late-night sandwich. Their voices murmured. I heard them discussing whether to come in and wake me up ("Owls don't sleep at night, Sidd") so they could tell me about their adventures out in the Bay.
I tried to get myself to sleep
before they went into the bedroom. The bellowing of the frogs out in back helped, but occasionally their chorus would stop as if a conductor's baton had been drawn across the surface of the pond ... and the murmuring and the intermittent sounds from their room drifted through the bungalow. I got up to turn on the ceiling fan. It was cool in the winter and unnecessary, but the little electric motor made a soft whining sound, and when I lay back down the draft from it stirred around the pillow and made me think of being on a yacht somewhere at sea.
That night Sidd played the French horn for her. I always imagined he did so lying down on the bed, but Debbie Sue assured me that it wasn't as romantic as that-it was troublesome playing the French horn upside down.
"So he sits on the edge of the bed?" I had asked.
Debbie Sue nodded. "He plays these lovely classical things-very softly. He hunches over his horn. I look at the curve of his back. Out in the garden what he plays gets the frogs excited, doesn't it, Owl?"
"Of course."
"Does anyone complain?" she asked.
"Not yet."
That night he played "Strawberry Fields"-the tune he told us he had played when he first picked up a Tibetan horn. At least that was what he was playing when I drifted off.
VIII
IDD was especially fascinated by what I could tell him about the famous Japanese home-run hitter, SadaI haru Oh. I had written two pieces about him. The first was an article for Sports Illustrated about athletes' autographs. During the course of researching the article, I happened to spot Arnold Schwartzenegger, the body builder, sign a napkin in a New York restaurant. Considering the length of his name (and the porous nature of what he was writing on), it took him quite a while; I thought what a ponderous and awkward name for someone of such fame to sign ... pushing a pen through so many letters to get the thing done. I decided to write a paragraph or so in the article mentioning long-named athletes who had such problems (Billy Grabarkewitz, who was an infielder for the Dodgers, or the football coach Marty Schottenheimer, or Slobodan Zivojinovic, the Yugoslavian tennis player), balancing this with athletes with short, snappy names (Mel Ott, Ron Cey, et al.) and for whom an autograph was a simple, short scribble of the pen. I assumed the champion of this latter group would be Mr. Oh, the aforementioned Japanese, whose signature would presumably be a little calligraphic slash, or whatever.
It turned out that Oh by itself did not mean anything. It signifies "King" but it has to be qualified by the Sadaharu. So when my self-addressed envelope came back from Japan, the signature of the great batter ran down the entire length of the page, just about as long a vertical drop of letters as Arnold Schwartzenegger's was across the page horizontally. His name suddenly became a contender in the wrong category!
The shortest autograph in my research, incidentally, turned out to be the basketball player Oscar Robertson's, "The Big 0," who signs an "0." The loveliest was a football player's-Lynn Swann of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who draws his name with an "S" as the outline of a swan floating on the water, with the other letters filling out the bird's feathers and so forth.
"Did you ever meet Sadaharu Oh?" Sidd asked.
I told him I'd had two opportunities. Once Oh had come to Hawaii on a Japanese All-Star team. I was in the islands on assignment. I went to a press luncheon where I thought I was going to hear the great slugger speak. I was too late. His seat at the dais was empty. A pitcher from his team was speaking to the guests through an interpreter. He was talking about the contest between the pitcher and the hitter-the duel. I could still remember the word the translator used-shabu.
"Yes," Sidd said. "I know of the shabu."
I went on to say that the pitcher himself was a pleasant-faced gentleman. His baseball cap-which he had apparently worn through lunch-was cocked back on his head, which gave him a kind of perky look. But beside him the translator was trying to indicate the near-savage confidence the pitcher felt he had to have to win the shabu. His face was twisted with mock fury. "The effrontery!" he sneered his translation at us. "This guy who dares to step up to the plate to face my pitching!" He relaxed and looked over at the pitcher to get his next lines. The pitcher spoke briefly. He nodded and smiled. The translator turned and snarled at us, "I throw strike. He swings. He misses. To imagine he can touch the Master!" The translator turned to be prompted. His lip curled. The pitcher's teeth shone. "What! He is still at the plate? In Tai Chi we call this stupidity! So I throw him another strike. He cannot hit it. But what's this? Still at the plate?" The translator looked as though he were going to faint from the shock. The pitcher's voice rose slightly but pleasantly, as if a child were being praised. The translator picked up a spoon and banged it on the table. "Stupid, presumptuous, pompous, silly!" he shouted. "Why should I be carrying this wimp! Three strikes! About time!" The translator let out a long-drawn breath ... as if he, too, was relieved that this infernal nuisance had been removed from the batter's box. At the pitcher's next comments the translator's eyes popped and he threw up his hands. "But what's this? Another jerk coming out of the dugout. What a bore!"
Sidd laughed. "It is true, isn't it? There is always someone waiting in the shadows of the dugout."
The second time I told Sidd I had actually met Oh. I had been commissioned to do a piece on him. It was published in a magazine, now defunct, called Quest. I saw him play in Aumamoto, Kyushu, in a game against the Hanshin Tigers. I was on self-imposed leave from Vietnam. It was the beginning of what my sister used to call "the time of the shakes." I went to Japan in an effort to settle myself down and get my nerves under control. I thought a baseball game would help. With its pace, the nonmilitary nature of its procedures, the predictability of its rituals, it had none of the metaphors of where I had been. It was, indeed, the last helpful remedy before I went back into Southeast Asia and the time of the shakes began in earnest.
Actually, I remember very little of the circumstances of the baseball game itself (who won and so forth) and not much of the short meeting with Oh afterward. I do not recall even writing the article or where I did so-the vaguest recollections of a Japanese country inn come to mind, with paper walls and tatami mats, and that my back ached from sitting on the floor to write without a backrest. I do recall something of the nature of baseball itself in Japan-that amplified music seemed to play throughout the game, and that the fans returned the foul balls back onto the field from the stands. I remember the managers in the dugouts communicating through little megaphones, the kind used by coxswains to shout at their oarsmen. And then, of course, I have a vivid memory of Oh at the plate. I remember the sun shining on the enormous number 1, which was the numeral he wore on the back of his jersey.
In fact, they called him "the Big One." And no wonder! He was the home-run champion for fifteen years. He would turn the number to the pitcher just before stepping into the batter's box so that he was preceded by the visual notice of his presence. He said of this procedure, "I feel like a rough Japanese sea. My number rises toward the pitcher like a dark wave before I strike."
His statistics were awesome. He hit over a hundred more home runs than Henry Aaron (868 to 755) while playing a year less (the same as Babe Ruth-twenty-two seasons) and over seasons shorter than those here in the United States. The apologists for the American home run hitters point out that the Japanese pitching is not as finetuned as ours, and that their fences tend to be closer to the plate. No matter. Oh eventually received the batter's ultimate recognition: a pitcher on the Hanshin Tigers named Kakimoto told everyone he had a secret way of keeping Oh from hitting a home run. His comments were circulated in the papers and a large crowd was on hand to see what he was going to do when the Tigers and the Giants next met. In the second inning Oh came up with the bases empty. Kakimoto walked him intentionally.
To hit the ball Oh had perhaps the most unique style in the history of batting-picking up his forward foot, bal ancing then on the other leg for an instant like a stork (indeed, the style was called "flamingo batting"), and then striding into the ball as i
t came into the strike zone. His coach called it "the dog-lifting-his-leg-at-the-hydrant batting style."
"Oh said his ability to hit came from his `spirit center,' " I mentioned to Sidd. "This was located two fingers below the navel. Just like tumo-heat," I said.
Sidd nodded and smiled.
Oh's batting coach persuaded Oh to learn aikido, the practice of weaponless defense, and the concept of mathe space or time "in between." In baseball, ma would be the distance between the pitcher's hand and the batter's box. Whoever can control the ma prevails. "You must master ma," Oh was told. "You must bring your opponent into your own space. His energy then belongs to you."
One of the tricks in baseball, Oh learned, was to pretend that the opponent was a distant mountain-what his tutors called "a distant view of close things." Imagining the pitcher as a "distant mountain" would make the ball appear to be slower as it traveled that enormous distance to the batter. When I got back to Vietnam I tried this in a softball game. I looked out from the plate and pretended the correspondent from the Baltimore Sun on the mound was a "distant mountain." I swung early and skied the ball to the third baseman.
Sidd asked if I had actually met Oh.
I said that after the game I had gone to keep an appointment with him. My interpreter took me to the wrong dressing room. I looked for a player wearing a big i on his jersey. It was too late. Players were coming out of the shower. The interpreter finally got things straight. He took me to the visiting-team locker room. The star was looking out the window at a parking lot. He had already dressed. I looked at my notes. An indication of my troubles to come, I could not phrase a question from them. I said I wished to talk to him about baseball.
He was very polite. "The truth is, outside baseball, I am a fairly boring fellow."
We barely exchanged more than a sentence or two. I asked him about autographs-my mind reverting to that first piece I had written about him. Didn't he feel suffocated by the large number of people asking him to sign something?
The Curious Case of Sidd Finch Page 11
