Painting the Corners Page 9

  On the Expos’ bench, Martineau sensed the defensive strategy Orr would be employing and decided to have his next batter swing away. It was the left-handed hitting LaBarr, whose double had tied the game in the sixth inning. Martineau flashed the sign to Simone and then groaned out loud when LaBarr waved his bat timidly at the first pitch after it had already exploded into the catcher’s glove. Although concerned by what he had just seen, Martineau stayed with the same strategy. When Simone looked over to him from third, the manager indicated by a total lack of movement on his part that the “hit” sign was still on. Simone went through his motions and passed it along.

  The Yankees pitcher, Ken Montaigne, took a lot of time getting ready. It was his third year on the team and he knew how to play the psychological game with an anxious hitter. He stepped off the mound, wet several fingers on his throwing hand, wiped them on his uniform shirt, and smacked the baseball into his glove a few times before turning his attention back to LaBarr.

  At the corners, the infielders were beginning to creep in even closer to the plate. Martineau felt they were playing right into his strategy and was sure they’d be totally handcuffed by any ball hit hard in their direction. It was up to his catcher to get a piece of it. Then, as Montaigne started to pitch, even before the next delivery left his hand, LaBarr suddenly squared around and showed bunt.

  “What are you doing?” Martineau yelled, but it was too late. LaBarr was holding his bat out over the plate, and as soon as the ball made contact, it went to the onrushing first baseman on two easy bounces. He picked it up and in one fluid motion fired it to third. The shortstop, getting there quickly and straddling the base, dug the low throw out of the dirt and had the ball waiting for the sliding Bauer. The umpire pumped his fist down toward the ground and called the runner out.

  The Yankees fans, and a few of the more discriminating Expos supporters who risked verbal abuse from those around them, rose to their feet and applauded the defensive skill shown on both ends of the play. Pacing in front of his players, Martineau silently fumed at the costly mistake that now left his team with one out and a runner on first. He couldn’t understand why the hitters were suddenly ignoring what they were told to do. If it weren’t the end of the season, he thought, he’d spend as long as it took at the next practice making sure everyone on the club had each and every sign down pat.

  The Yankees infielders backed up to their normal positions, prepared to try and turn any ground ball into a game-ending double play. They were confident that Guy Crawford, the Expos’ leading hitter would be swinging away, not bunting. For his part, Crawford was looking to atone for the earlier errors he’d made that had given the Yankees their first two runs. He felt confident at the plate, certain of getting the hit that would turn the game around.

  When the count reached a ball and a strike, Martineau saw a chance to catch his opponents off guard and signaled for a bunt on the next pitch. Simone did his job in the coach’s box, whistling for Crawford’s attention before the fingers of both hands began touching his cheeks, nose, chin, elbows, and the bill of his cap. Crawford nodded, resumed his stance at the plate and proceeded to take a vicious swing at the fastball Montaigne threw over the outside corner. A moment later he began howling in agony as he dropped his bat while the ball blooped behind first base, down the right field line.

  “I don’t believe it,” Martineau hissed, getting up quickly and slamming his hand against his thigh as several Yankees ran hard to try and make the catch. “What are these guys trying to pull?” he asked, spitting the words out slowly as the players on the bench turned their heads away from him. The ball, a classic “Texas Leaguer,” landed fair by inches when no one could reach it in time. Only the speed of the right fielder in retrieving it in foul territory and throwing it home kept the tying run, in the person of the slow LaBarr, from attempting to score. But the Expos had men on second and third, and their fans were up again, screaming for victory.

  Danny Orr came off the Yankees’ bench and ran out to the mound. As soon as he got there, joining Montaigne and Ricky Sanderson, the catcher, he had his infielders come over as well. He had something to say to each of them, and was still talking and pointing to the different bases when the home plate umpire came out to break up the conference.

  “Come on, Danny,” he said impatiently, “I’m ready to piss my pants. Let’s play ball and get this over with.”

  Orr patted his pitcher on the backside and started off the field. “Maybe you guys ought to wear a catheter and a bag on days like this,” he hollered to the umpire who was already halfway back to the plate. Suddenly, as the thought began to work up an unwanted result, he wished he had one on himself.

  The Expos anticipated that their next hitter, Bobby Dumart, would be given an intentional walk. Martineau figured that the Yankees would then be looking to go for a force play at home or be willing to try for a double play in the right situation.

  But Orr decided on a different strategy. He was prepared to accept a tie, instead of risking defeat at that point, knowing that the ace of his staff would be able to pitch for them the following day or whenever the deciding game was scheduled to be replayed. He didn’t want to walk Dumart, not known for an ability to come through in the clutch, and then have to face Lou Thornton, the Expos’ power-hitting third baseman, with the bases loaded. Instead, Orr preferred to go after Dumart, even if it meant giving up the tying run on the play. If that happened, he would walk Thornton intentionally and hope to get the last out from the hitter who followed.

  Unlike his opponent on the opposite side of the field, Martineau was going for a win, not a tie. He had already used his best pitchers in the last two games and wanted to see the Series end now, even if it meant a dangerous gamble on his part. He knew that a successful squeeze play would tie the score at three, but realized that there would be only one more chance to get the hit that would bring them the coveted crown. Besides, a poorly executed bunt could result in the tying run failing to score. If that happened, he thought, it would put tremendous pressure on Thornton, his third baseman, to deliver a hit with two outs.

  Martineau decided to have Dumart swing away and hope that he could knock in at least one run. He figured that a hit to the outfield would win the game, but that even if the ball were caught, LaBarr would have a chance to tag up at third and score after the catch. Suddenly, he realized that he should have already had a runner in for LaBarr, whose defensive skills were no longer needed, and scolded himself for the mental error. He called down the bench to Phil Arlette, a rookie with the Expos who had a lot of speed, and sent him in to run at third. The stage was now set, and Martineau, feeling the adrenaline, knew that this was why he loved doing what he did and being a part of baseball.

  Although both managers were aware that the game was riding on every pitch, neither one ever expected the sudden ending they were about to witness. Dumart watched Simone carefully from the batter’s box as the signs were flashed to him, and then touched the buckle of his uniform belt with his left hand to show that he understood what he was supposed to do. That move, never one that Martineau insisted upon from his players, gave the fifth-year skipper a strong sense of confidence in his right fielder and convinced him that he had settled on the right strategy.

  But all that good feeling evaporated in seconds. As soon as Montaigne kicked his leg in the air and threw to the plate, Dumart turned to bunt and dropped the ball down the third base line. Unable to restrain himself, Martineau yanked the Expos cap off his head and began shouting “No, no, no,” even as he saw the play beginning to unfold. Moments earlier, Arlette had listened as Simone whispered in his ear at third that he should be ready to tag up on a fly ball or try to score on anything hit to the infield. He was totally unprepared for a bunt and got a late start toward home.

  Gene Gabriel, the Yankees third baseman, was playing on the edge of the grass as he’d been instructed, and started in to field the ball, about a step ahead of Arlette. From the stands, the two of them appeared to b
e racing side by side. Gabriel picked up the ball barehanded as he was running and dove to his right in an effort to tag the base runner instead of trying to throw the ball home. But Arlette had put on a burst of speed in the last few strides and was past the sprawling third baseman before Gabriel could reach out and touch him with the baseball.

  Gabriel knew he had missed the tag when he hit the ground, landing heavily on his stomach. He turned over quickly and tried to throw the ball to his catcher from a prone position. But he was unable to put much on it, and the Yankees’ bench, seeing the play develop in front of it, watched in shocked disbelief as the ball landed in the dirt, several feet to the left of Sanderson, and skipped past him to the backstop. Crawford followed Arlette across the plate and the game was over.

  In his mind’s eye, even as he sought to come up with a reason for the series of botched plays by his hitters that inning, Martineau could see and hear the play-by-play announcer shouting into his microphone, “The Expos win the Series. The Expos win the Series.” He couldn’t keep the huge grin from spreading across his face. After all, he had just reached the pinnacle of his managerial career. He looked toward the stands, waved to his wife, and put up two fingers in a victory salute. She returned the greeting and blew him a kiss.

  Cheering fans stood and clapped their hands as the winners ran to embrace each other. They watched with pleasure as the jubilant teammates soon become an ecstatic pile of players on the infield grass. Then, as if permission to do so had been broadcast over the public address system, they quickly started moving out of the stands to get as close to their young heroes as they could before exiting the park for the warmth of their car heaters.

  In an interview he gave after the game to Le Jour, a local newspaper, Martineau was asked to discuss the strategy he employed with each of his players in the last of the ninth inning. Not wanting the fans to know that every hitter in the inning had apparently missed or misunderstood the signs while they were at bat and had failed to execute his strategy, he sidestepped the question. Instead, after reflecting a few seconds, he told the reporter that as a manager he had to know what his players did best, and call on them to do it at the right moment. “They just did what I asked them to do, and we were fortunate that most of it worked out.”

  The reporter smiled. “Well, Jack,” he answered, “in the end, all those signs you gave them spelled victory. Congratulations.”

  Martineau thanked him. He liked the way the reporter had put it. But it wasn’t quite that simple. He knew that the victory his players had just attained, coming the way it did, could only happen in the kind of games he managed. Boys would be boys. And as he went over to join his wife, he told himself how lucky he was to have his own team in the Montreal Intracity Little League.

  •

  BLOWING BUBBLES

  •

  “If Satch (Paige) and I were pitching on the same team, we would clinch the pennant by July fourth and go fishing until World Series time.”

  —Dizzy Dean

  ROBERT LEE HARRISON, Jr. was two years old when his father took an afternoon off from work on the farm, drove the 40 miles into Knoxville where his draft board was located, and signed up for duty in the United States Marines. It was barely nine months after the Sunday morning on which angels of death, emerging from a cloudy sky disguised as Japanese fighter-bombers, wrapped their arms around the sleeping American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

  Chances are that Bobby Lee’s dad wouldn’t have been called to serve for quite a while, if at all. He was the sole support of his wife and child, and had mortgage payments to meet on a farm that he and Roselynn purchased just three years earlier. They had put whatever savings they had into buying the land shortly after finding out that she got pregnant on their honeymoon.

  But Robert Harrison, the great-grandson of a man who served the Tennessee legislature for twelve years and vigorously supported the course of conduct that led to secession, the Civil War, and his own death at Antietam, wanted to fight for his country. At 25, his good fortune was in having a wife who understood how he felt, and two younger brothers, both with medical deferments, who were willing to live on the farm and take care of it until he returned. His bad luck was in being among the first wave of troops to assault the beach at Munda in the Solomon Islands. Bobby Lee was still a month shy of his third birthday when his father’s body was returned to Plainfield for burial among his ancestors.

  * * *

  Robert Harrison met Roselynn Spark in the summer of 1938. He was 21 years old and playing minor league baseball for the Cincinnati Reds’ farm team in Memphis, the lowest level of the Club’s organization. The players knew that they either had to be good enough to move up a notch, to Double-A ball, after two years there, or “go on back where you came from.”

  Bob was an infielder with a lot of potential. He had been spotted earlier that same summer by “Horse” Mabry, a Reds scout well known for his annual pilgrimage through the farm country of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, looking for raw, emerging talent in American Legion or pickup games on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

  Mabry liked what he saw of the agile, muscular shortstop who played his game confidently, but quietly. He offered him 75 dollars a month to sign with the Memphis Gulls. Bob’s father, himself a farmer, wasn’t pleased about losing his son’s help, but didn’t try to talk him out of it. It was his way of showing appreciation to the boy who had eagerly taken on an ever-increasing number of chores and responsibilities from the time he turned six. And as far as Bob Harrison was concerned, going back to the farm, if that’s what life had in store for him, was almost as enjoyable as playing baseball.

  On one of the Gulls’ rare days off, Bob stopped to watch some girls playing fast pitch softball at a local playground. Each team had its own matching caps and T-shirts, and brought an abundance of spirit and a fair amount of skill to the game. He was attracted by the redheaded pitcher of the Robins. She wore the number “0,” chewed gum continuously, and occasionally blew large bubbles while overpowering the batters on the other side. She had a nice figure, and her short white skirt called attention to a suntanned pair of long, slim legs. Bob smiled every time she celebrated another strikeout by pumping her fist in the air.

  He probably wouldn’t have had enough nerve to speak to her, despite an immediate desire to do so, except that one of Roselynn’s teammates recognized him as a Gulls player. Several of them at a time began drifting over to where he stood near the high-wire backstop. To them, the tall, good-looking boy with the wavy blond hair, deep-set brown eyes, and shy smile had “most eligible bachelor” written all over him. When Roselynn asked for his autograph on a page she ripped out of the team’s scorebook, Bob asked her to tear it in half and let him have hers also. She blushed but did it, correctly suspecting that he would also want her telephone number.

  Bob called her a few days later and they went to a movie that Sunday, after his game. They stopped at a drugstore on the way home and talked for hours over hamburgers and cherry cokes. He learned that she was eighteen, had graduated from high school that spring, and had never lost a softball game she pitched.

  “Do you always chew that much bubble gum?” he asked, watching her remove some from the package for the third time since they left the theater.

  Roselynn blushed. “Only when I’m a little tense,” she said, “like when I’m playing ball or working hard.” She hesitated a moment. “And sometimes when I’m out on a date.” She smiled on the last words, and he smiled back.

  During the rest of the summer, Roselynn went to all the Gulls’ home games that didn’t conflict with her own softball schedule. She worked as a secretary for a trucking company, and her early quitting time made it easy for her to prepare dinner each evening for her father, a widower, before going off to play ball or watch Bob’s games. The Gulls owner, aware of the relationship, had given Roselynn a pass. When the games were over, she waited for Bob outside the park and he would take her home.

  By the time his season ended
and he had to return to Plainfield, at the other end of the state, they knew they were in love. Bob’s playing had earned him an invitation to the Reds’ spring training camp the following February and a place on the Gulls’ roster for a second year.

  They agreed that they wouldn’t get married until Bob had been assured by the Cincinnati organization that he had the talent to make it to the Major Leagues, or if he quit baseball and returned to farming full time. Roselynn understood that the first option might require her to wait several years while Bob’s progress was charted and measured in hits, runs, and errors.

  But it didn’t work out that way. After burning up the league for the first two months of the new season, Bob was involved in a violent collision at home plate and suffered some badly torn cartilage in his left knee. He was sent to Cincinnati for an operation and remained there during the early stages of his rehabilitation. But he soon learned that his knee would never be able to hold up to the constant stress it would have to take in the Majors, and the Reds released him.

  Bob returned to Memphis and broke the news to Roselynn. “I guess that means I’ll never find a Bob Harrison card in my bubble gum packages,” she said, teasingly, and then embraced him quickly so she could hide her own tears. “But now I can have the real thing to myself a lot sooner,” she whispered, kissing the side of his neck.

  They began planning their small wedding right away, and were married nine weeks later. Roselynn knew that her move to Plainfield as Bob’s wife would probably end her competitive softball days. Playing with a vengeance, she pitched twelve more winning games for her team and was also its leading hitter.