Fathers Playing Catch with Sons

March 1, 1973

But I don't want to go. Work feels good. I am writing poems again. I don't want to leave Michigan in March, go to Florida and run around bases all day in a baseball uniform making an ass of myself.

Three months ago, Gerry McCauley, my agent, asked me to spend a week of spring training with the Pittsburgh Pirates. I accepted, knowing that things like this never happen. Gerry daydreams a lot. This time his plan is to have me, a poet, himself, and other authors and one doctor join the Pirates in Florida.

I make reservations. I cancel appointments. I do back exercises.

• • •

But, all the same, baseball. ... It began with listening to the Brooklyn Dodgers, about 1939, when I was ten years old. The gentle and vivacious voice of Red Barber floated from the Studebaker radio, during the Sunday-afternoon drives along the shore of Long Island Sound. My mother and my father and I, close in the front seat, heard the sound of baseball--and I was tied to that sound for the rest of my life.

We drove from Connecticut to Ebbets Field, to the Polo Grounds, to Yankee Stadium. When I was at college, I went to Fenway Park and to Braves Field. Then, in 1957, I left the East and moved to Michigan. At first, I was cautious about committing myself to the Tigers. The Brooklyn Dodgers had gone to Los Angeles, of all things, and whom could you trust? Al Kaline? Rocky Colavito? Jim Bunning? (continued on page 140) fathers playing catch (continued from page 119) Norman Cash? I went to Tiger Stadium three or four times a year, and I watched Big Ten baseball frequently, especially in 1961, when a sophomore football player named Bill Freehan caught for Michigan and, as I remember, hit .500. The Tigers signed him that summer.

All summer the radio kept going. I wrote letters while I listened to baseball. I might not know what the score was, but the sound comforted me, a background of distant voices. If rain interrupted the game, I didn't want to hear music; it was the sound of baseball radio voices that I wanted year after year.

Baseball is a game of years and of decades. Al Kaline's children grew up. Rocky Colavito was traded and left baseball and became a mushroom farmer and went back to baseball as a coach. Jim Bunning turned into a great National League pitcher and retired. Norm Cash had a better year at 35 than he had had in nearly a decade. And Kaline kept on hitting line drives.

And Jane and I met, and married, and in 1972 the sound of baseball grew louder: Jane loves baseball, too. The soft Southern sounds of announcers--always from the South, from Red Barber on--filled the house like plants in the windows, new chairs and pictures. At night after supper, and on weekend afternoons, we heard the long season unwind itself, inning by inning, as vague and precise as ever. The patter of the announcer and behind him always, like an artist's calligraphy populating a background more important than the foreground, the baseball sounds of vendors hawking hot dogs, Coke and programs; and the sudden rush of noise from the crowd when a score was posted; the flat slap of a bat and again the swelling crowd yells; the Dixieland between innings; even the beer jingles.

We listened on the dark screen porch, an island in the leaves and bushes, in the faint distant light from the street, while the baseball cricket droned against the real crickets of the yard. We listened while writing letters or reading newspapers or washing up after dinner. We listened in bed, when the Tigers were on the West Coast, just hearing the first innings, then sleeping into the game to wake with the dead gauze sound of the abandoned air straining and crackling beside the bed. Or we went to bed and turned out the lights late in the game and started to doze as the final pitches gathered in the dark, and when the game ended with a final out and the organ playing again, a hand reached out in the dark, over a sleeping shape, to turn off the sound.

And we drove the 40 miles to Tiger Stadium, parked on a dingy street in late twilight and walked to the old green-and-concrete fort. It is one of the few old stadiums left, part of the present structure erected in 1912 and the most recent portion in 1938. It is like an old grocer who wears a straw hat and a blue necktie and is frail but don't you ever mention it. It's the old world, Tiger Stadium, as baseball is. Hygrade Ball-Park Franks, the smell of fat and mustard, popcorn and spilled beer.

As we approach at night, the sky lights up like a cool dawn. We enter the awkward, homemade-looking, cubist structure, wind through the heavy weaving of its nest and swing up a dark corridor to the splendid green summer of the field. Balls arch softly from the fungoes and the fly shaggers arch them back toward home plate. Batting practice. Infield practice. Pepper. The pitchers loosening up between the dugout and the bull pen. We always get there early. We settle in, breathe quietly the air of baseball and let the night begin the old rituals again. Managers exchange line-ups, Tigers take the field, we stand for "our national anthem" and the batter approaches the plate. ...

• • •

My son, Andrew, is 18 years old. Today he telephones from college and I tell him what I am about to get into. He snickers. I am always doing things that he half wants to deny and half wants to boast about.

He recalls for me the time at Tiger Stadium when, in front of everybody, I dropped a home run that miraculously hurtled into my hand. We were sitting in right field, an upper-deck box, and a Kansas City left-hander swung hard and the ball sailed toward me as fat and spinless as a knuckle ball. I felt as if I were setting Explorer down on the moon--four, three, two, one--and then it hit. For some reason, I tried to catch the ball one-handed, and it bounced off my left hand with a fleshy crash, a noise like a belly flop from the high tower, and careened out, over the rail, to the grandstand below. Some 54,000 fans mixed ironic cheers with ironic boos. "Sign him up," I heard around me, and my palm blushed and puffed up.

"Have a good time," said Andrew on the telephone. "You're crazy."

Then my daughter, Philippa, who is 13, comes in for supper. I tell her where I am going. She asks if I can send her a crate of oranges. She is irritated that I am going away from a Michigan March to the sun of Florida, and to swimming. Suddenly at supper she looks panicked. "But Daddy," she says, "suppose you make the team?"

She has played the flute for a year and a half. "I have as much chance of making the team as you have of playing the flute with the Boston Symphony right now."

"Oh," she says. Then she laughs, but I can see that I have hurt her feelings. She has daydreams also.

• • •

Sunday, March 4

Practice begins at noon on Sunday, leaving time for church.

We arrive at Pirate City a little late. In the parking lot, we walk past a dense cluster of Mustangs and sportier objects. Then we see supercar, a huge Cadillac with a Lincoln grille, cream and red, only the red is rich and pebbly leather. Leather on the outside? No. it has to be vinyl. This is a car that doesn't take any shit. On the license plate we read the owner's name: Dock.

We find the public-relations man, Bill Guilfoile, who will look after us. He takes us to the clubhouse. Nervously, he separates Jane from the rest of us, asking a little old man to take her to the stands. Women are not allowed even near the clubhouse.

It's a damp morning, even at noon. The sun starts to burn through. I feel helpless and foolish as I see the little groups of players, young and lean, walking lazily, gathering in the outfield. I wish I were somewhere else. Or possibly someone else.

Guilfoile introduces us to Tony Bartirome, who is the trainer, to the man who runs the clubhouse and to the equipment manager, who seems incredulous of measurements. I think a 42 might be best. He shakes his head. A 40? The head keeps shaking. I start to shake. A 38? He can find a 38.

Yet once again. I lament obesity. I weigh 226 pounds. Within the past year, I have weighed 238 pounds and 204 pounds. Why can't I keep away from Taco Boy, Arbie's, McDonald's, Burger King, Scottie's, Jack-in-the-Box, Red Barn and H. Salt? Why can't I stay at a nice, comfortable 187? I feel so melancholy about my bad eating habits that I am suddenly overwhelmed with hunger. I look around in panic. There is not a soggy bag of French fries in sight.

My reverie is interrupted by a suggestion. It will take him a moment to find a uniform; why don't I go out among the players and look around, while he gets the uniforms? So I do. Gerry stays behind in the clubhouse, finding reason to talk longer with club officials. I am frightened.

Out the clubhouse door, I see the players gathered in center field. I walk toward them over the damp healthy outfield grass, aware of my tourist costume: striped Bermudas from J. C. Penney, leather sandals with a peace sign over the instep and a short-sleeved shirt. The only other people out here are wearing baseball uniforms.

I stay on the outskirts of the group in (continued on page 243) fathers playing catch (continued from page 140) center field, maybe 50 players in a group shaped like an amphitheater, with Bill Virdon, the manager, talking softly to them, outlining the day's activities. A few players stare at me, mildly curious--normally, the fences keep out people who look like me--and then look away.

Just as Virdon finishes, a large black player with 17 on his back walks over to me, slaps me gently on the stomach and says with mock concern, "Say, you better do some laps!" Suddenly everybody is running. Number 17 beckons me to follow. I start off. I run. I start in the middle of the pack but soon drag to the rear. As we pull around third base, I see my first fans. They look puzzled to see a civilian doing laps with the players. Jane is grinning and hiding at the same time.

As for me. I am elated. By the time I have done 100 yards, my body hurts but my spirit flies. I know that when number 17 challenged me, he was teasing; taking him literally was teasing him back. By the time I struggle back to center field at the end of the second lap, I am exhausted, but I feel like a free man. Or a feel that illusion of freedom a drunk man must feel when he runs onto the field at Yankee Stadium eluding police and tries to shake the center fielder's hand while 40,000 fans boo and clap.

More of the players turn and look, now. Number 17 sees me struggle in (he's half an hour ahead of me) and looks surprised. "You really did it," he says.

Calisthenics begin. I stand in the back row, near a player with a vacant expression and lots of hair (later. I find out he is Bob Robertson), and bounce up and down swinging my arms, bend, stretch, lie down and do it all again. During a pause in the calisthenics, an older man in front of me (a coach named Mel Wright) turns around and says, "Some fine running out there."

"They didn't lap me!" I say.

"It's been a long time since anybody's been lapped out here," he says. "Thought it was going to happen for a while there."

Calisthenics again. Bob Robertson is working hard. Suddenly I see two civilians with cameras dangling all over them. They gesture at me to move closer to Robertson. I oblige and continue my exercises. They bend into their reflex cameras and snap away. I am a novelty photograph.

The loosening up over, I feel wholly unloosened--like an unraveled sweater. I struggle back to the clubhouse and put on number 43, the road uniform of a coach (coaches have bigger stomachs) named Don Leppert. I meet Bill Mazeroski, gray and leathery as an old greyhound, tough and funny. I meet Steve Blass, who points midsection at Gerry and me and shrieks: "Look at those boilers!" Learning quickly that we are a bunch of writers, Blass asks plaintively, "Maybe you guys can tell me, what should I do when I grow up?" Blass is 31, has been the Pirates' best right-handed pitcher for several years past.

In uniform, my sense of calm and control increases. I feel as if I could walk into bullets. I am aware that my happiness now is as absurd as my earlier terror.

• • •

Outside, the players have split into many groups, practicing different parts of the game. Some players throw lazily together, loosening their arms. Everyone must do this, every day. If you don't loosen gradually, you will pull a muscle. Others, already warmed up, start to hit against the mechanical pitcher in a little Quonset hangar next to the clubhouse. Distantly, figures run on the four diamonds of the practice field, raising dust. Since it is closest, I go to the batting cage.

The sun is high and hot. Number 17 is leaning against the net, watching Manny Sanguillen take some cuts. From my hip pocket I pull--as surreptitiously as I am able; 38 pants on a 42-inch waist make subtlety difficult--my press book on the Pirates. Number 17 is Dock Ellis, owner of the Cadillac with the Lincoln grille and the red-leather trim outside. I remember him; he is a right-handed fastball pitcher, and in 1971, at the All Star break, he was the hottest pitcher in the National League while Vida Blue was the sensation of the American. He made waves when he said the National League wouldn't start him. because they would never start a brother against a brother. Naturally, he was called a radical, though it seemed mere realism; he turned out to be imperfectly prophetic, since Dock started against Vida: Maybe it was a good example of the rhetoric of the self-defeating prophecy. Later, he made more waves when he complained that the Pirates wouldn't hire him a bedroom with a long-enough bed.

I was pleased that it was number 17 who had slapped my belly.

Manny Sanguillen's face is very mobile, his eyes and mouth swimming like fish. When he sets himself for the pitch, he becomes as tense as a sprinter at the starting block, listening for the gun that will snap him loose. Extraordinary held-back power: total tension, releasing total power; and then absolute relaxation. When Sanguillen drops the bat, takes off the batting helmet and strolls out of the cage, his whole face lapses slaphappily into humor, he joshes with his friends, a little Spanish and a little English mixed.

"You want to take a turn?" Someone is talking to me. It is a blond young man in uniform, a nonroster player.

"Sure," I say. The sudden jolt in my chest starts as fear and ends as excitement. Sanguillen beckons me and I step inside. The structure is long and low, with a curved roof and an open end (with a wire net) where I had been watching. At the other end, a machine pitches out of the shade, while one of the coaches feeds baseballs into it.

I stick a hard hat onto my head, the protective flap over my left ear. It is difficult to find one big enough, because of hair. I pick up a couple of bats until I find a light one. I know that I will have difficulty meeting the ball, and a light bat will at least be easier to move. Give me a Willie Stargell bat, 38 ounces, and I will have difficulty lifting it off my shoulder and will gradually sink and topple under its weight.

Outside, I hear ballplayers exhorting other ballplayers: "Come here! Watch this!" I spread my legs wide apart, far back in the box, in order to have more time to pick up the ball. I stick my head forward, over the plate. "Stand back!" shout three or four voices in unison. Gene Alley, I am quickly told, had his hand broken two years ago by this same machine.

I thought they took them out and shot them if they did something like that.

I take a practice swing. It's as if I dropped my pants in an old burlesque house. Screams of laughter, hoots, catcalls, more shouts to distant ballplayers to come and get a load of this.

But I am too concentrated on the task at hand to allow myself to feel humiliated. The coach loads the machine with baseballs: loading the killer, the mad-dog machine.

I touch the first ball. I graze it as it hurtles past, wrist-high, inside and supersonic. A cheer breaks out behind me. I miss the next one, more cheers. The next one comes in waist-high and outside, and I swing early but a little high. I bat it into the ground. Still, I get enough of it so that my right hand feels broken into several parts.

Now that I have the secret, I dig in. I relax. The pitching machine, as if I have made it angry by hitting a ball so that it goes forward, rears back and blows a fast ball at my head. That thing dusts me! The bean ball! It sticks one in my ear!

While I am picking myself up from the muck of the floor, I hear torrents of laughter rising around me. Now the whole team has assembled to see me bat. It seems as if someone has quickly dispatched a bus to Sarasota and assembled the White Sox also. I have become an immensely comic figure; the mantles of Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx, possibly of Chico and Harpo also, have descended upon my plump shoulders. Every motion I summon is intrinsically risible. I cannot move a finger, I cannot blink an eye without plunging 100 athletes into hysterics. Possibly Tony the trainer will have to subdue them with tranquilizer darts.

When I stand up, I feel more determined than ever. I murmur something to comfort myself. (As I recall, my exact words were, "Fuck them.") I dig in and stare. I concentrate. The ball flings out. When it is perhaps halfway, a voice close to my ear and a little behind me shouts, "Swing!" I do what I am told. I hit the ball solidly and it goes on a line back at the machine, goes back to the hole it came out of and strikes the machine. I am even! The ballplayers sing out a cheer. I set myself again and the voice tells me "Swing" again, and I swing and I connect again.

The first lesson. In a moment, when the coach is picking up baseballs to refill the machine, I look around. The voice at my ear is Dock Ellis, grinning like a jack-o'-lantern. "You're doing real good," he says. "Going to make the team." Then he moseys off. So do most of the rest of them, but I take another 20 cuts or so, missing a few, fouling and tipping a few, hitting a few cleanly, trying always to start my swing early and guide it toward the ball as I am swinging. (Keep your eye on it.) Finally, my hand hurts so much that I stop.

Later in the day, my hand looks like an inflated red rubber glove.

• • •

The day drifts on. I borrow a glove from a ballplayer who looks 16. He is practicing base running. Then when he wants to field, I give him back his glove, but he offers his backup glove. He tells me I can use it all the time. Very kind of him. His locker doesn't have a name over it, but it is right next to N. McRae, and his glove has L. Wrenn lettered on it.

There are no doors or locks on the lockers. Everything there for the stealing, but stealing is not a problem. The lockers of the older and famous players--W. Stargell, S. Blass--are full of shoes and mail, tons and tons of mail to answer. I feel an impulse to steal one of Willie Stargell's shoes. Imagine it bronzed and hanging from the mirror over the dashboard of the car! I resist the impulse.

• • •

When I drag-ass back to the Sea Horse Beach Club, where I'm staying, I go to bed. It is 4:30. I sleep. At 6:30 I try to get up. None of my limbs work. I cannot bend any part of my body. My right hand looks like a peeled muskmelon.

I roll onto the floor and begin to move my legs very slowly. After half an hour, I am able to walk and go out to eat, provided I use my left hand for opening doors, greeting strangers and lifting menus or glasses. Walking is difficult. A bone spur in my left heel is acting up, and I have to walk tiptoe. Walking tiptoe does strange things to shin muscles. I realize that tomorrow is going to be ghastly. But this discomfort is only there, like the Gulf of Mexico; it is a place where I am living, for the moment. No big deal. The big deal is that I feel so happy.

At dinner, the visiting impostors begin to know one another. Jim Wooten, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, talks about playing baseball in high school. John Parrish, a doctor, has arrived and watches us all with an alertness that has no threat to it. Suddenly, sitting at the table trying to cut my beef with my left hand. I hear Parrish ask me, "Did your father play baseball?" I never learn why he asks me, but it lets things suddenly loose in me that I have had dammed up for years.

My father and I played catch as I grew up. Like so much else between fathers and sons, playing catch was tender and tense at the same time. He wanted to play with me. He wanted me to be good. He seemed to demand that I be good. I threw the ball into his catcher's mitt. Atta boy. Put her right there. I threw straight. Then I tried to put something on it. It flew 20 feet over his head. Or it banged into the sidewalk in front of him, breaking stitches and ricocheting off a pebble into the gutter of Greenway Street. Or it went wide to his right and lost itself in Mrs. Davis' bushes. Or it went wide to his left and rolled across the street while drivers swerved their cars.

I was wild. I was wild. I had to be wild for my father. What else could I be? Do you want me to have control?

But I was, myself, the control on him. He had wanted to teach school, to coach and teach history at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, and he had done it for two years before he was married. The salary was minuscule and in the Twenties people didn't get married until they had the money to live on. Since he wanted to marry my mother, he made the only decision he could make: He quit Cushing and went into the family business, and he hated business, and he wept when he fired people, and he wept when he was criticized, and his head shook at night, and he coughed from all the cigarettes, and he couldn't sleep, and he almost died when an ulcer hemorrhaged when he was 42, and ten years later, at 52, he died of lung cancer.

But the scene I remembered--at night in the restaurant, after a happy, foolish day in the uniform of a Pittsburgh Pirate--happened when he was 25 and I was almost one year old. So I did not "remember" it at all. It simply rolls itself before my eyes with the intensity of lost memory suddenly found again, more intense than the moment ever is.

It is 1929, July, a hot Saturday afternoon. At the ball park near East Rock, in New Haven. Connecticut, just over the Hamden line, my father is playing semipro baseball. I don't know the names of the teams. My mother has brought me in a basket and sits under a tree, in the shade, and lets me crawl when I wake up.

My father is very young, very skinny. When he takes off his cap--the uniform is gray, the bill of the cap blue--his fine hair is parted in the middle. His face is very smooth. Though he is 25, he could pass for 20. He plays shortstop and he is paid $25 a game. I don't know where the money comes from. Do they pass the hat? They would never raise so much money. Do they charge admission? They must, or I am wrong that it was semipro and he was paid. Or the whole thing is wrong, a memory I concocted. But of course the reality of 1929--and my mother and the basket and the shade and the heat--does not matter, not in the memory of the living nor in the bones of the dead nor even in the fragmentary images of broken light from that day that wander light-years away in unrecoverable space. What does matter is the clear and fine knowledge of this day as it happens now, permanently and repeatedly, on a deep layer of the personal Troy.

There, where this Saturday afternoon of July in 1929 rehearses itself, my slim father performs brilliantly at shortstop. He dives for a low line drive and catches it backhand, somersaults and stands up holding the ball. Sprinting into left field with his back to the plate, he catches a fly ball that almost drops for a Texas leaguer. He knocks down a ground ball, deep in the hole and nearly to third base, picks it up and throws the man out at first with a peg as flat as the tape a runner breaks. When he comes up to bat, he feels lucky. The opposing pitcher is a sidearmer. He always hits sidearmers. So he hits two doubles and a triple, drives in two runs and scores two runs, and his team wins, 4--3. After the game, a man approaches him while he stands, sweating and tired, with my mother and me in the shade of the elm tree at the rising side of the field. The man is a baseball scout. He offers my father a contract to play baseball with the Baltimore Orioles, at that time a double-A minor-league team. My father is grateful and gratified; he is proud to be offered the job, but he must refuse. After all, he has just started working at the dairy for his father. It wouldn't be possible to leave the job it had been such a decision to take. And besides, he adds, there is the baby.

• • •

My father didn't tell me he turned it down because of me. All he told me, or that I think he told me: He was playing semipro at $25 a game; he had a good day in the field, catching a ball over his shoulder running away from the plate; he had a good day hitting, too, because he could always hit a sidearmer. But he turned down the Baltimore Oriole offer. He couldn't leave the dairy then and, besides, he knew that he had just been lucky that day. He wasn't really that good.

But maybe he didn't even tell me that. My mother remembers nothing of this. Or. rather, she remembers that he played on the team for the dairy, against other businesses, and that she took me to the games when I was a baby. But she remembers nothing of semipro, of the afternoon with the sidearmer, of the offered contract. Did I make it up? Did my father exaggerate? Men tell stories to their sons, loving and being bored.

I don't care.

Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the back yard, violent and superficial. Baseball is the generations, looping backward forever with a million apparitions of sticks and balls, cricket and rounders and the games the Iroquois played in Connecticut before the English came. Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growing, age and death. This diamond encloses what we are.

This afternoon--March 4, 1973-- when I played ball and was not frightened, I walked with my father's ghost, dead 17 years. The ballplayers would not kill me, nor I them. This is the motion and the line that connects me now to the rest of the world, the motion past fear and separation.

• • •

March 5

The next morning, it takes me an hour of little movements before I chance the big movement of lifting my knee up. Out at the park at ten--up since seven--I am able to run the two laps. Barely. I start out, as I plan, at the head of the pack, and by the time I get to home plate, at the middle of the first of the two laps, I am last.

And every day, in fact, I get slower. My legs feel heavier and heavier. Both ankles turn weak, as if I had twisted them recently, though I haven't. Neck and shoulder muscles, from swinging the bat, get creakier and creakier. Only my right hand hurts less, and my heel. Tony pats an inch and a half of foam rubber in the heel of my left shoe, so that the bone spur gives me less trouble. Otherwise, everything simply gets worse. And people continually ask me how I feel. Pirate City is a convention of hypochondriacs. Everyone monitors his muscles, the shape he is in. Coaches and players alike express astonishment at my deplorable condition. That second morning, Dave Ricketts. the bullpen coach, who had apparently managed to avoid noticing it the day before, blanches in the clubhouse: "Boy, are you out of shape!"

The younger players seem proud of their easy condition, as if youth were virtue. The young players tease the older ones who puff, especially all the old relief pitchers with little potbellies-- Ramon Hernandez (33), Dave Giusti (34). Still, the old ones are on the roster. Most of the young ones will spend the summer in Charleston, West Virginia, or Sherbrooke. Canada. And only one in five will become a big leaguer. And when that fortunate one in five has made it, he will begin to puff and he will hear the hungry generations behind him, hurrying to tread him down.

• • •

The players are calling me Abraham.

Dock Ellis turns around, sees me. "Hey. Abraham." he says, "you really a poet?"

I tell him yes. He shakes his head. It takes all kinds.

"Now I see what you guys are doing." he says, referring to a piece in the paper. "You guys ought to get more involved."

"How do you mean?"

"You ought to play a game with us."

I tell him we'd like to, but they won't let us. They're afraid of injury and, anyway, the manager figures the ballplayers ought to take spring training seriously; we'd just get in the way.

He shakes his head. "I'd like to pitch to you," he says. "It'd just be like B.P. Except you wouldn't hit me."

"What do you mean?" I say. "Of course I'd hit you."

"Naw," he says, grinning.

"I'm sure I could hit you."

"Well," he waggles his head, "OK. But if you hit me"--he pauses a little--"then I hit you!"

• • •

Jane keeps notes of fans' comments. One day I wear Bob Johnson's road uniform. Two very old men, puzzled at my appearance, consult their programs. "Bob Johnson," says one of them. "Two hundred and twenty-five pounds, six foot two." (These statistics are rather close to my own. However, Johnson is not yet 30 and has arranged his body in a more athletic fashion.) The two old men are silent for a moment. Finally, one says, "It's funny how that hair on the face can be so deceptive."

We develop personal fans. Jane hears an old woman exclaim, "Oh, I just love that one with the beard!"

When I return exhausted from batting practice, a man and his wife stop me. "You going to be out again tomorrow?" Yes. "Good!"

• • •

I talk some more with L. Wrenn, whose glove I wear. He is 18, from a little town in Indiana. He'll be 19 in April. Luke is his name. He lives all year in a room at Pirate City, answering the switchboard part of the time for his keep. He graduated from high school last June, was drafted by the Pirates, goes to a community college here--and plays ball. Last fall, he played in the instructional league.

Eighteen! My son, Andrew, is 18 and will be 19 in April.

• • •

I train, work out and hang around. Each day is more painful than the last. Each day I am more happy.

One day I am late. I miss laps. Dock Ellis spies me sneaking into the clubhouse. He is already back there, to see Tony, after calisthenics are over and done with. He looks at me and speaks in excellent high dudgeon: "You think you can come in here any time you want to? You think you can come out here half an hour late? Five laps! And a fifty-dollar fine!"

All day he keeps adding more laps.

I refuse to do them.

When I get dressed and creep like a guilty thing onto the field, the others accost me. Jim McKee, a tall young pitcher with spectacles, is astonished to see me. "Abraham! I thought you got your release!"

• • •

March 7

In the first exhibition game, at McKechnie Field in Bradenton, in the first game of the home season in the grapefruit league, the Pirates play the Detroit Tigers. Al Kaline! Bill Freehan!

I am allowed to suit up for the game and to sit in the dugout with the Pirates. I tell Luke Wrenn. He says, "You're going to sit in the dugout?" He shakes his head. "You're going to hear some language you've never heard before," he says, "I'll tell you. Last fall I was really surprised. I'd never heard anything like that before. Of course, I suppose a lot of them had been playing all summer and they were pretty tired."

Listening to Luke, even watching his face, is like being in touch with my grandfather's America. One could think of Norman Rockwell--but there is nothing coy and no kitsch about Luke. He is not nostalgic. He is Luke Wrenn, from Concordia, Indiana. And if we asked Central Casting for a type to play an 18-year-old rookie from a small town in Indiana, they would never find anyone who looked and acted the part so well. Luke is funny and gentle and honest and naive, and he is determined to be a major-leaguer. He has read every biography of every baseball player in the Concordia library. He knows what they did. He is an outfielder and he knows that the Pirates have good outfielders. If he can just hit. "If you have a good stick," he says, "they can't keep you down."

His face, even, is not like the face of a city boy or a suburban boy. His face makes a sound like a train whistle heard in the middle of the night far away. It is a steam train.

• • •

I sit in the dugout, next to Luke, and wait for the game to start. I suspect I seek out Luke because he is the only person there as naive as I am.

We are at the far end of the dugout. At the end nearest home plate is the water fountain. The water fountain! I remember Red Barber in 1940: "Leo goes over to the water fountain, gets himself a drink. ..." Above the water fountain, the day's line-up is Scotch-taped to the wall. Also against the wall, there is a fierce NO SMOKING sign, by order of the National League. Still, all during the game, the players smoke. They lean back into the dugout when they smoke, so that fans (or Bowie Kuhn or somebody) won't see them.

Just before the game begins, the umpires climb into the dugout. Explosive greetings, among ballplayers and umpires. "What you been doing all winter?"

"Oh, refereed a couple hockey games. Drank a lot of beer. You?"

"Yeah. Nothing much."

"And I moved. Left Toledo, Ohio, and moved to Syracuse, New York."

"You shouldn't of. Toledo is a good pussy town."

I find myself surprised: I thought that the players were fierce sons, the umpires gloomy and forbidding fathers. They're exactly the same.

• • •

The game. Richie Hebner hits a home run. Everybody in the dugout shakes his hand, though I feel foolish when he looks up and sees it is me. "Jumbo," he says.

Bob Johnson gets hit. Bill Slayback is wild. Manny Sanguillen misjudges everything in right field. The Tigers win it. It's poor baseball and nobody seems to care. As for me, I am perched in the center of a universe of bliss.

By the middle innings, rookies are playing most of the positions. But not Luke. He keeps walking up and down in front of Bill Virdon, but the magic words go unspoken. Meantime, a Detroit Tiger 18-year-old has driven in a run, somewhat aided by Manny Sanguillen's fielding. And another outfielder throws to the wrong base. And in the dugout, no one offers criticism. In fact, the only chatter seems to come from Tony: "Strike his ass out!" When a rookie center fielder for the Pirates lets a fly ball by Rich Reese drop behind him for a double, Bill Mazeroski spits three times in rapid succession. That is about as emotional as we get.

From the shade of the manager's corner, the field looks tranquil, the long lateral green stretching out forever in the afternoon, 342 feet to left field, 433 to center, 373 to right. But Bill Virdon stands with his foot up, and stares, and does not relent. He is terse. "Bob?" he says. "Left field." And Robertson picks up his glove and jogs out.

I decide to drink the water from this fountain of my youth. I lean toward the water and experimentally twist the knob. A mighty jet stream vaults out, water that could have made the Olympics, and splashes all over Virdon's right leg. He looks over his shoulder at me--and here I am apologizing again, awkward as a virgin--calmly and silently, and then turns back to the field.

I get the idea he thinks I am goofy.

• • •

All afternoon, off and on, I talk to Luke, sitting next to him in the dugout. He wants to know about my writing. Maybe I can help him, someday.

How?

Well, just in case ... he is keeping a diary of his experiences, and perhaps if he is lucky, someday. ... Then he talks about how, last October, he watched the Pirates and the Tigers in the play-offs, and here he is.

He is another son. When you are a teacher, you get used to having extra sons. Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, the long arc of the years between. Yet I also have my own son, who does not resemble Luke. My own son belongs to 1973, not 1923, reads Castaneda, not biographies of baseball players, frets over no one's dirty language, hitchhikes everywhere and accepts everything except policemen, of whom he cherishes a firm and well-documented distrust.

Therefore, Luke, if he is 1923, actually resembles my father more than he resembles my son. The moment I think of it, I realize that all along I have thought that he looked like photographs of my father.

• • •

March 8

The day after the Tiger game, the Pirates play Minnesota at 1:30. I am exhausted after my morning workout--it is almost the end of my brief career; I am prepared to hang it up; I am a broken man--and I decide not to go to the park for the game. It would be such a letdown to sit in the stands, after I had been in the dugout the day before. Late in the afternoon, however, I wander down to the ball park anyway. Who can stay away?

The Pirates are down, 2--0, going into the seventh. They score five runs to lead, 5--2, and take the lead into the ninth, when Minnesota scores four more runs to go ahead, 6--5. When a left fielder makes a good throw to third base, holding a runner to second after a single, I notice that it is Luke. Really, I am surprised. I didn't expect him to play, not even in the ninth inning of the second exhibition game of the spring. After all, even he keeps his ambitions modest and reasonable. He expects to play this summer in Bradenton, in the Gulf Coast League, the team lowest on the Pirate ladder. He hopes to be noticed enough to be sent a bit higher up, class A, maybe to Salem, Virginia, in the Carolina League. He is in uniform now only because he lives at Pirate City all year long. The players practicing in Pirate City now will soon move to McKechnie Field and Luke will stay behind at Pirate City with 200 other minor-leaguers.

So I'm surprised and pleased to see him in a game.

He comes to the plate in the last of the ninth, one out and a man on second. He hits the ball cleanly, a line drive just out of the reach of the second baseman. The ball goes into the alley in right center and scores the tying run, and Luke stands on second base with a double after his first time at bat in a Pirate uniform. The next batter hits a ball on which Minnesota manages to commit two errors, and Luke comes home with the winning run.

In less than a minute, Luke is surrounded by cameramen and reporters and by kids getting autographs. He keeps grinning. Eighteen years old.

• • •

March 9

This morning is my last. Heavy with fatigue and melancholy, I arrive at the clubhouse to find the rain starting. The team bus idles outside the entrance. In theory, the Pirates are driving to Lakeland, where they will play the Tigers again. Dock is going to pitch. He tells me that he always likes pitching against the Tigers. Good games, he says, grinning; lots of throwing at hitters.

But not today. It's raining in Lakeland, too, and the bus is waiting for word of a cancellation. The bus will never go. I look inside the bus. Smoke and card games. Some of the players, like Dock, wander around outside in the rain. A few run in the mud. Others start to take batting practice with the insane machine in the Quonset. There is an air of restless improvisation, like summer camp when the rains come; what will we do?

I go inside to find Luke. He is dressing by his locker, and when he sees me--and he knows what I am going to say--his face loosens into a smile as broad as a barn. No ambiguities. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, this morning, has taken full measure of his obscurity for journalistic purposes and headlines the game:

"Bucs Call on Wrenn

For A 7--6 Triumph"

He accepts congratulations without pain and can still talk about where the ball went.

The photographer, Bob Adelman, unfamiliar as yet with the arduous path to the majors, asks Luke if this means that he will make the team. For someone with Luke's encyclopedic knowledge of baseball, this is a stupid question. (Luke knows how long it took Ted Williams, where he played in the minors and his batting average for the month of July 1936, in class-B ball.) But he answers the question politely. No, he says, it doesn't mean he'll make the team. Maybe it means he'll get to play in class A, where he wants to play. Of course, he says, with his head vanishing under a sudden cloud of daydreams, if they took him on a road trip and he hit 12 for 12. ...

• • •

I decide not to try to work out in the rain. I change from my uniform back into Bermuda shorts and sandals forever. I look for people to say goodbye to. Standing among the lockers, I feel a pinch on my calf. I look back. Ramon Hernandez looks innocently into space.

Oh, my teammates! How can I leave them?

Here is Dock, who shakes hands and says with great formality and gentleness that it has been real good to know me, and that I should look him up at the ball park. I start to walk to the car, slogging through the instant mud. Then Luke runs up. One more thing! If he does make it, sometime, world we please write him for tickets? He sure would be pleased to see us again.

And I him, and my father and my son, and my mother's father when the married men played the single men in Wilmot, New Hampshire, and my father's father's father, who hit a ball with a stick while he was camped outside Vicksburg in June of 1863, and maybe my son's son's son, for baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.