Good Enough to Dream

this time the writer was the owner and they were his boys of summer--his team, his problems, his pride

The first dream, full of innocence and sunlight, is to play the game. The dream shines, with that same eerie, morning light of promise, at Renton, Washington, along Spring Garden Road in Lincroft, New Jersey, and on West Arthur Street in Chicago. To play the game. To play the game superbly. To play with such a brilliant, sunlit, morning grace that the dream itself leaves you, at length, like Caliban, able to speak only fragments: "The clouds ... would open and show riches, ready to drop upon me...."

I remember versions of my small baseball fantasy from loving and faraway days when ballplayers wore uniforms of hot, baggy flannel and television existed only in the laboratories and fantasies of electrical engineers.

You could pitch, like Christy Mathewson, Van Lingle Mungo or John Whitlow Wyatt, and then the batters, aggressive, mean-spirited men--none seemed to have shaved that morning--quailed before your fast ball and your swift, snapping curve. Or you could hit, and now the pitcher became a foul, murderous brute who stared out of a storm-cloud visage. He knocked you down and cursed you with what people in baggy-flannel days described, in studied loathing, as "foul epithets." You stood against his fast ball, his swift, snapping curve, and drove a long, high drive that climbed the sky.

After that long-sounding thwack and a blur of base runners, you were borne shoulder-high by exulting teammates. In the crowd beyond, your father cheered and your mother brought both hands to her face, her cheeks glistening with pride. Somewhere else in the careful tapestry of the imagined throng sulked a regretful baby-doll face. It was the girl who had let you get away.

Out of the roughly 1,500,000 young men who graduate from American high schools every year, no more than 500 are signed to professional baseball contracts. The chances against your getting any contract at all, on the very lowest level, anywhere in organized baseball run about 3000 to one. The death of the baseball dream, with all its innocence and sunlight, comes early to most. You have to be very, very good to play professionally, even at a rudimentary stage, and few young ballplayers are that--very, very good.

For myself, I guarded dreams carefully. My father, Gordon, a teacher, editor and polymath, knew baseball, played baseball and coached baseball. Dad mentioned that he had played third base for the City College of New York in the season of 1923, and years later, when I had the means to check old City College box scores, I decided not to verify what he said. He wanted me to believe that he had played college ball, and I wanted to believe that he told the facts. Who needed truth, with all her tedious footnotes, breaking in on admiration and love?

I wanted above all things to play professional baseball, but there were insistent early hints that Joe DiMaggio and I were made of different stuff. For one thing, I was always small for my age. For another, my throwing arm was suspect. Although in later years I reached a respectable level of competence in softball, we are talking hardball here. Major-league hardball. I never came close.

My father developed a fine and rather relaxed friendship with me around the centerpiece of (continued on page 137)Good Enough to Dream(continued from page 108) baseball. Whatever my father's great concerns--high tariffs vs. free trade, his own career, angina pectoris, Stalin's megalomania or the rise of Hitler--he did not discuss such things with me. My father and I played catch and went to ball games. I listened to his baseball lore with full measures of affection and concentration. He knew the game. He could hit a ball 400 feet. And if he used the Socratic method, with the persistence of a youthful law professor, no one else has ever spoken to me with such kindness, concern, enthusiasm and love, all at the same time. When Gordon and I, father and son, walked in our baseball moments, Caliban's gorgeous cloud rode lordly above us, opening and showing riches ready to drop as softly as the leaves.... "That, when I waked, I cried to dream again."

•

The ballplayers were seated along wooden benches anchored to the floor, beneath two rows of orange lockers inside a stout blockhouse of a building. Forty years earlier, WPA workers had laid and cemented every brick. Only four of the players had so much as heard of the Works Progress Administration. "I either read it in history," said a catcher named Mark Krynitsky, "or my dad, or his dad, worked for the WPA. I don't know."

Light entered through two opaque windows backed by metal grilles, and fluorescent tubes glared overhead. The name of this team assembled in the weathered brick clubhouse was the Blue Sox and they played their home games in the historic community of Utica, New York. Historic but in a baseball sense obscure. Those sunlit boyhood dreams project you far beyond a drab clubhouse in Utica; you see yourself moving on winged spikes through carpeted--indeed, hallowed--dressing rooms in Los Angeles or New York City.

Still, the Blue Sox were professionals. Their abilities resembled the skills of major-leaguers far more than the enthusiastic fumblings you see among high school athletes. Professionals in a WPA clubhouse.

Most would be earning $500 a month. Out of that they had to pay taxes, rent, living expenses and meals when the Blue Sox played at home. The cars they drove were small or old or both. But the good athletes, the ones who would turn out to be good, felt pride in their professionalism. Poor, unpampered, they were professional ballplayers, the job description that covered Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Steve Garvey.

I was sitting in the clubhouse not as a journalist granted a privileged pass from the manager, as it were, in exchange for the promise of a favorable story. I was sitting there, bless my wallet, as principal stockholder and president of the team.

Since running a successful election campaign in the subsenior bunk at Camp Robinson Crusoe 45 years earlier, I had not been president of anything. I took my motto from William Tecumseh Sherman: "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve." Aside from that, I don't recall ever being offered any kind of nomination for any kind of office across all those decades.

Now, in the clubhouse in the warm June of 1983, I viewed my new-won presidency with resolute optimism punctuated by spasms--cellos playing in a minor key--of undressed and unarmored alarm. Those friends of mine who knew the least about baseball suggested that being president of a low minor-league club would provide me with an ultimate toy, far better than my latest stereo set, more fun even than the black Mercedes sports car that an entrancing lady had once offered up as an adjunct to a romance.

Other friends, who knew somewhat more about baseball--say, for example, that minor-league teams can go bankrupt--put forth temperate forecasts. "Best way to look at it," said one of those, possessed of a dogged literary manner, "is that you're taking over the Pequod. Now, maybe you're going to find that old white whale. But maybe you're not."

My cherished Brooklyn Dodger friend Carl Furillo, a veteran of 20 years of glorious professional ball playing, took a colder view. "You're taking over a minor-league club? In Utica? You're president? You'll be lucky if you don't have two ulcers by Labor Day."

What did a president do? I had been whipping myself with that question across most of the eight months it had taken me to find a ball club I wanted to rescue and run. I had known four outstanding baseball presidents, but they all seemed to do different things in different ways.

Distinct similarities link them--Branch Rickey, Bill Veeck, George Steinbrenner and Walter O'Malley. Energy. Intelligence. A feel for finance. A sense of adventure. A willingness to risk. Long hours. Hard work. Ego. But for each similarity you can find differences, sweeping all the way from individual character to style. O'Malley and Rickey were patient. Veeck and Steinbrenner are not. Veeck and O'Malley appeared to enjoy the cut and thrust of dialogs with the press. Rickey and Steinbrenner, in the same circumstances, preferred monologs. Veeck is a warm and compassionate man. The others had strong tendencies to bully.

Only Steinbrenner could succeed as dictator of El Salvador. Only Rickey could have substituted for Billy Graham as public-address announcer for God. Only O'Malley could have thrived as the political boss of a moderately corrupt metropolis. Only Veeck could run a circus, an art gallery, a bookstore or an opera company.

But Utica....I was in Utica, with a ragtag ball club, a shaky front office and a cash flow that would have made O'Malley weep.

"You knew all these executives?" my manager, Jim Gattis, said in my small rear office in the trailer that was the Blue Sox front office. "You actually knew them?"

"I had drinks with all of them except Rickey, who was dry."

Gattis smiled his strong-jawed smile. "Well, before this summer ends," he said, "you're gonna ask yourself what the hell you're doing in Utica. I guarantee it." Then he was gone to run a Blue Sox practice and, falling to earth, I went to work.

Beyond the prayers that the president of the New York--Penn League said he had offered in my behalf, I needed a crash course in the realities of minor-league baseball. As recently as the Thirties, minor-league teams were predominantly independent local operations. Businessmen in, say, Olean, New York, rounded up the best talent in the Olean area, bought franchise rights for perhaps $1000 and joined a league. They then had to purchase uniforms, balls and bats, find a manager and rent the local ball park, which was typically owned by the city recreation department.

For revenue, the operators drew largely from three sources--attendance, concessions and the sale of contracts of the better ballplayers to teams in higher-classification leagues. These are the minor leagues of myth and memory: The best from our town takes on the best from your town while we drink beer and watch with pleasure on a Sunday summer afternoon.

Today, most minor-league clubs are farm teams for the majors, and they generally exist as a three-way partnership. The major-league team, of course, supplies players, coaches, manager and a trainer. The owner-president provides the budget for the operating costs (bus, hotel rooms, balls, bats and telephone bills), sometimes with additional help from the parent club. The community supplies the permanent facilities, such as the ball park, the clubhouse and the lights, for a modest rental fee. Before you move into a town, you had better have in place all the facilities that you hope to get. Once a minor-league club is actually functioning, playing its games, the politicians figure that they have you and your money, so why invest another dime of city funds? In minor-league baseball, as in romance, the courtship phase is when you can best demand gifts.

As their price for player-development contracts--for meeting the minor-league team's baseball payroll--the major-league clubs impose certain conditions on their farm teams. In essence, they insist that minor-league baseball imitate major-league baseball in significant ways. They like ball parks with major-league dimensions. They love large crowds, not so purely to keep the minor-league team solvent as to acclimate athletes to the sounds of hoots and cheers.

And here is where the major-league replication ends. Major-league ball is a sport played to win. Minor-league ball is a sport played to develop major-leaguers. In essence, the farm club exists to ripen talent. If it wins games in the process, so much the better. The minor-league game may be thrilling, but the thrills are a byproduct of research and development. The 1983 Blue Sox, nobody's farm team, were unique. We played primarily, overwhelmingly, to win.

The Utica Ragtags, as I thought of them at first, had not become independent on ideological or practical grounds, like the 13 colonies 200 years before. They were independent because no major-league organization wanted to claim them. At the time, even the Falkland Islands were being claimed. But nobody wanted the Utica Blue Sox--until I showed up at Murnane Field, their home, in the spring of 1983.

There is no visually attractive approach to Murnane Field. It is set on a naked flat in a corner of southwestern Utica, without so much as a single tree to grace the scene. From one angle, you first see Murnane across a high school football field, observing the back side of the metal outfield wall, which cries for shrubbery and paint. From another side, Rose Place, you see slabs of plywood fixed to a wire fence, screening the playing area from those who have not bought tickets. Approaching the main entrance, you enter a dirty and rutted asphalt parking lot. The sentry box, where the ticket takers work, is faded blue.

I walked in on a chilly late-May morning and tramped across the infield to deep shortstop. The infield dirt was dark, rutted clay. Every ground ball would be an adventure. There were no covered stands, only steep, naked bleachers behind first base, and no seats on the left-field side. Weeds were growing tall beyond third base. I remembered a manicured California college field I had seen recently and the calm, beckoning ocean beyond it. At Murnane, I felt a sense of an ill-kept diamond set in the middle of an abandoned junkyard.

"We'll have everything fixed up in a few days," my general manager, Joanne Gerace, promised. "It'll look real nice."

So this was my ball park. After all the joyous times at Ebbets Field and Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium, I was assigning myself to work in an elephant graveyard.

"A little paint and some weeding," Joanne continued.

She stopped. "Bad, isn't it?"

I attempted to cheer myself by closing my thoughts to the drying mud and shaggy weeds. I imagined athletes performing on this wasteland.

"Those fellows I hear are coming back," I said, rattling off names I knew from my roster. "Jacoby. Moretti. Coyle. Are they really major-league prospects? How good are they?"

Joanne stood on her high heels in the infield and thought for a while. Then she said, "They're good enough to dream."

•

We would open on Sunday, June 19, playing an afternoon game against the Watertown Pirates at a new ball park set in an old fairgrounds 83 miles north of Murnane Field. From that day in June until September second, the New York--Penn League schedule did not offer a single day off. Not one. The players were supposed to play every day (or mostly every night), and I would have to work at my modest presidency every day and every night. There are no banker's hours in the minor leagues.

"You had better like writing if you intend to be a writer," Harold Rosenthal told me years before, when we both worked for the New York Herald Tribune, "because you're going to spend an awful lot of time at a typewriter." You had better like playing baseball if you're going to become a professional ballplayer, because you will play and practice, practice and play, until the game becomes a job and, after that, the job becomes the touchstone of your life. Nothing in my previous experience had prepared me for the way a single baseball season, lived from within rather than observed from without, takes possession of your spirit. Beyond reason, the team becomes an extension of your essence, your values, your competence, your very manhood, so that, also beyond all reason, certain victories become more than victories and make you feel that for all your faults, you are a profoundly good and formidable man. Conversely, certain losses would throw almost all of us into silent wells of despair. We had not simply lost a game; we had failed. White-faced and grim, each man felt isolated and even worthless simply because another ball club had scored more runs.

A baseball team, like any other group pressed into daily intimacy, develops a collective personality as it coalesces. This is, to be sure, the sum of the individual ballplayers, the solid citizens, the drinkers, the chasers, the loud and the silent, but it is more than that, as well. The character of a team also proceeds from interaction between the various athletes and the cliques that inevitably form. Finally, the team's personality is further shaped by the manager and the coaches and the response of ballplayers to authority.

There is generally no simple, satisfactory answer to the fan who asks, in ingenuous curiosity, what a certain team is really like. A team is happy and sad, bristling and fearful, open and secretive. In short, a baseball team is variable, affected by victories and losses, wives and girlfriends, hangovers, the schedule, the press, the management and the weather.

In the first month of the season, the Utica Blue Sox went 26--6, a phenomenal and unsustainable early pace. And as the team hurried up the mountain to first place, individual characters and the character of the team came into gradual delineation. Jim Gattis, the manager, had an obsessive need to control. He demonstrated this by holding meetings every day, which became occasions for assertive speeches. He seemed partial to a patterned kind of meeting in which he first praised the players for winning and then, anger growing, picked apart flaws in the previous night's effort. As Gattis complained, the players sat on the benches below the orange lockers and looked at their spikes.

This bothered him. "I wish there was somebody who'd lash back," Gattis told me. "I worry about this team. We've got too many easygoing guys."

"You can't expect them to be angry when they're playing .800 ball," I said.

"Maybe," Gattis said, "and maybe not. But what's their character going to be when they lose a few? I wonder how this team will react the first time they lose three in a row."

I thought we had enough good pitching to make extended losing streaks unlikely, but Gattis' question was a good one, and it stayed with him. He never became manic during the winning spurt, because he would not stop worrying about how everyone would behave when times grew tougher, which, he assured me, they definitely would.

"I'll tell you something," he said, as we ate a late breakfast at Pete's Parkway Diner ("Eat at Pete's, where the Blue Sox eat"). "Maybe you get tired of hearing my speeches. Maybe they get tired of them. I don't care. You're my boss and I appreciate that you got a lot to do, but I see a big part of my job as making sure we play with a surplus of intensity. I want them ready to play, not thinking about some movie or some girl, when it comes game time, and you don't have to tell me that it's hard to come up with maximum effort, game after game, night after night, when there's no day off, because I know that. Maximum effort. Intensity."

Gattis himself, it was plain to see, was burning with intensity.

Bob Veale, the pitching coach and a veteran of ten big-league seasons, was more aloof and more contained. He indulged in a little basso chuckle after victories and a small scowl following defeats, but in the manner of a former major-leaguer and a man who was within a few months of his 50th birthday, he knew how to drop his intensity when he left the ball park. "This game can give you a heart attack," he said, "and a heart attack is not what I'm looking to get. I can relax. That's how it is when you're black. Most black people are born relaxed."

Barry Moss, the player/coach who served as the Blue Sox' designated hitter, found himself in a perplexing role. Gattis wanted to show the other players that he indulged no favorites. Even though Moss had grown up with Gattis and even though he was his confidant and coach, Moss, the player, was a favorite target. Sometimes, during one of Gattis' daily sermons, he paused, turned to Moss and said, "Barry, in the fourth inning, you looked real horseshit chasing that low inside pitch." Pause. Inhale. "Real horseshit."

Barry batted .400 for the first month, so he did not look bad often at the plate. "Jim gets me a little confused," Moss said. "I know what he's trying to do. He likes pressure within the team, so that the players keep driving one another. He tries to get that by setting up different groups--sort of the hard workers and the fuck-ups. The names change. You can move from one group to the other. But right now I'm having a hard time deciding whether I'm one of the coaches or one of the fuck-ups."

"And if you had to make the choice?" I said.

"Oh, no contest," Barry said. "I'd be one of the fuck-ups. I may go on and coach or manage for years. But this can be my last season as a player. I want to remember it that way, as a ballplayer."

"The fuck-up .400 hitter," I said.

Moss laughed. He was pleased to be playing well.

The other athletes emerged a little more slowly but not, given time, any less vividly. Mark Krynitsky, our best catcher, had a Slavic face that I associate with actors who played American coal miners fighting to organize a union in long-ago movies that were heavy with social significance and now appear on television in stark black and white in the hour just before dawn.

Krynitsky, who was trying to complete work toward a college degree, came from Fairfax, Virginia. His family had labored in coal mines to the north during rugged times, he said. He was a slab-muscled 200-pounder, recessive off the field but a driving leader during games.

Ed Wolfe, our first baseman, a strong, quiet 23-year-old from Arizona, was deeply, profoundly, endlessly committed to rock music. He traveled nowhere without his glove and his ghetto blaster. The harsh sounds of rock worked as a tranquilizer. "It's tough," he told me one day, "being in a pennant race, and Gattis doesn't make it any easier."

We were canoeing on Hinckley Lake, 15 miles north of Murnane Field, after a noontime softball game against learning-disabled children at Camp Northwood. It was a gloriously warm July afternoon. At the edges of the lake, cedar and maple and white birch and wildflowers proclaimed Adirondack summer.

"You know I played for Gattis last year," Wolfe said. "I've played for a lot of managers and coaches, ever since little league. But I never met anyone who liked to rip like Gattis."

I wanted to let Wolfe speak his piece, since he spoke seldom and I could hear him now. The ghetto blaster lay on the shore. But I did not want to encourage ballplayers to complain to me about the manager unless they presented a specific problem I could remedy or a serious crisis arose.

"Jim does a lot of things well," I said. "If you think he rips, you ought to hear Billy Martin."

"Look," said Wolfe, who was working hard at first and hitting .330 at the time, "Gattis is the best technical batting coach I've ever known. Get into a little slump and he's right there. But the ripping every day. I mean, it's like he's good at baseball but he isn't any good at people."

I was left puzzled. It was possible that the diet of approbation Wolfe craved might have produced a smiling, relaxed first baseman and might even have snapped his dependency on hard rock. That first baseman, however, might have gone cheerfully about his summer trade, hitting .150.

"It's not a gentle game, Eddie," I told him, "when you're a pro."

Don Jacoby, our high-energy, hard-hitting third baseman, became the subject of an ethnic incident that amused me. Sandy Schlesinger, a New York lawyer who had bought stock in our team, called one day to announce that he was voyaging from Madison Avenue to Utica and that he looked forward to watching our fine Jewish third baseman.

"He's not Jewish, Sandy," I said.

"What? That's ridiculous. How can you not be Jewish if your name's Jacoby?"

"If your name was originally something else."

I wanted a Jewish ballplayer as badly as I wanted a Utica local to make the team. The better the mix, the better the gate. But neither want was satisfied. I had to tell Schlesinger that the closest we came to a Jewish ballplayer in Utica was Sandy Koufax, whose likeness was displayed at the Hall of Fame in nearby Cooperstown.

Jacoby was a patient batter--which is to say that he waited well, taking strikes that caught the black rims of home plate, hoping to see a better pitch to hit. His swing was compact and smooth, and that combination, the patience and the swing, made him one of the league's best hitters.

His natural defensive position was second base, but we had a second baseman who surpassed him. This led Gattis to position Jacoby at third. There Don suffered and did not improve. Since Gattis had been a third baseman himself, he brought personal passion to Jacoby's daily instructions.

They began easily enough. "Now, Donny, third base is basically a reflex position. You've got to react on reflex; there's no time to do anything else. It isn't like second. Are you with me?"

"Yeah, Skip," Jacoby said.

"But you have to think. The hitter. The pitch. The game situation. You should be moving, away from the line or toward it, and getting set even before the batter swings."

Jacoby nodded vaguely.

"I was a good third baseman," Gattis said, "and I'm slow, probably because I've got a big ass."

"You sure do," said Jacoby. "You got a huge ass."

The men were standing on the grassy knoll outside the clubhouse, where groupies were beginning to gather after our games. "Whore Hill" some of the ballplayers called the knoll. But in the Murnane infield, with its rippling base paths, things were not pleasant for Jacoby. Third base requires before anything else a kamikaze distance as short as 90 feet. Hard ground balls are even more trying. And the Murnane Field ground ball was a particularly dangerous breed.

But Gattis would make Jacoby a third baseman. He insisted that he would. Afternoons, at two o'clock, Gattis took a batting-practice bat, a taped-together batting-practice bat, and skimmed hard ground balls toward Jacoby. Then he shouted, "Down! Keep your head down! Keep your goddamned head down! Oh, Christ, Jacoby, will you look that fucking ball into your glove!"

Jacoby tried. But he could not do what Cox and Brooks Robinson and Graig Nettles did every afternoon of summer. He could not keep his head down and look the hopping baseball into his glove.

Gattis became frustrated and angry. One afternoon, while hitting grounders, he shouted at Jacoby, "Coward!"

Absurdly harsh, I thought. Abuse is not a teaching tool. After a bit, Gattis and I sat in the dugout.

"The lights are not great in the New York--Penn League, Jim, right?"

Gattis became watchful. "What are you getting at?"

"You've got a ballplayer, Jacoby, who stands in against 90-mile-an-hour fast balls in bad light. He's hitting .397. When pitchers throw at his chin, he won't back off an inch. The guy can't make it at third base. So you shout at this ballplayer, who'll hit the roughest fast balls, you shout, 'Coward.' And maybe ten of his teammates hear what you shout."

"It's a complex fucking game," Gattis said. "You can be brave in one area and afraid somewhere else. You remind me of my brothers. They think they know the game. I know the game. That's why I'm managing. And I say Jacoby is a coward at third."

"So switch him and Eddie Wolfe," I said. "Wolfe plays better third than Jacoby and Donny's OK at first base."

"No," Gattis said. "I'm gonna make Jacoby a third baseman."

He stood up. In a minute, he was hitting more ground balls to third and repeating the word coward in a low, angry way.

I'm gonna make Jacoby a third baseman.

My ballplayers were in Class A because they had not developed major-league skills. In time they might. They had not yet.

Neither, I suppose, had my manager.

•

For a time, our starting shortstop was a solemn, stringy young Californian named Shawn Barton, who talked to himself in intricate ways. Waiting on deck to hit, Barton muttered, "You're gonna get your pitch. Nah, that curve was nowhere. Your pitch is coming. Here it comes. Give it a ride." He'd be kneeling as he spoke, very softly, so that from a distance you saw his lips move but heard no sound. Shawn sprinted on and off the field and, between innings, fielded imaginary grounders to his right or left. He was solitary, courteous and a curiosity to the other ballplayers. They were sufficiently puzzled by his behavior to spare him needling for a while.

"This is how I always play," Barton told me. "I keep myself, you know, pumped up." He did not look you in the eyes when he spoke. "Little things, you know, and I don't bother anybody with what I do. Like, after an inning, I run in hard, because I like to be the first player to get to the dugout." It was a race he ran with swift determination against no rivals.

Gattis and I puzzled over Barton without solving him, this being Class A baseball first and group analysis only coincidentally. "But you got to wonder," Gattis said. "All that funny muttering. Do you think, maybe, if it wasn't for baseball, Shawnie might be holding up banks?"

Whatever, Barton was a loner who never seemed lonely.

He always had himself to talk to.

Larry Lee, the second baseman, was nicknamed Francis, because of his vague resemblance to an erratic character in the Bill Murray movie Stripes. (Murray was the most famous of the minority shareholders in the Blue Sox, and the ballplayers wondered whether or not he would travel from Hollywood to watch them and his modest investment. He never did.)

Actually, Lee was the quiet, occasionally droll son of a college teacher in San Luis Obispo, California. Larry wore his black hair in the manner of Prince Valiant and had a look suggesting both intelligence and softness. Curiously, he made a few mental errors at unfortunate times, but when Gattis berated him, he showed no softness. Attacked, our resident pageboy struck back like a Dead-End Kid.

Our starting outfield--one of our starting outfields--was the shortest you could find anywhere in professional baseball. Daryl Pitts, Ralph Sheffield and Rocky Coyle each claimed to stand 5'7". Their real height was closer to 5'5". They were all good ballplayers, but one reason we had them proceeded from an obvious rule of major-league scouting. Scouts look for size.

Pitts was the one Blue Sox who was always broke. "That alimony, man, it eats you up," he said one day after borrowing lunch money from me in the men's room of a dreary roadside diner.

"How much alimony are you paying, Daryl?" I said.

"Eighteen hundred a month."

"I've paid alimony, Daryl. Gattis has paid alimony. How the hell can you pay $1800 a month alimony when your salary is $500 a month?"

"You beginning to see the problem, man," Pitts said. "Got stuck bad when I had a job as a truck loader. I was making more. We got a team lawyer can maybe go to the judge for me and explain."

"Where's the judge?"

"Los Angeles."

"Our team lawyer is in New York."

"You see," Pitts said. "Everything's a problem."

Sheffield was a smiling, stylish center fielder who had minored in drama at Pepperdine and promised that he would give the team "my famous Richard Pryor imitation" when enough players pleaded to hear it. Sheffield worked that particular game--"I really want to be wanted"--so hard that when he finally began a Pryor act on a bus, the others shouted him down.

Shelf had small, even features, a glistening style and, as Barry Moss reported to me after a long conversation, a sense that he was the second coming of Willie Mays. He was always running out from under his cap and snaring line drives with graceful dives. At this point, at least, he was a pearl of undiluted charm.

Rocky Coyle, the third of our short, gifted outfielders, was an Arizona native who suffered from (or thrived on) extremely intense religiosity. He was married and a father and had somehow found the means to bring his wife, Debbie, and his son, Joshua, to Utica. Coyle traveled with a Bible. I had a faint concern that he might reveal, with preaching, lamentation and exhortation, that he was an evangelical zealot. He was not. Rocky read Matthew and Mark and the Psalms without enlisting the rest of us to do the same.

But Gattis said excessively religious ballplayers bothered him. "I'll put it to you brief," he said. "They lose. Then they say God meant for this to be."

Probably the most assertive player around the free-beer bar we set up for the Blue Sox was Willie Finnegan, the fastest, wildest pitcher on the club. In our early rush, John Seitz, Mike Zamba and a rather solemn right-hander from Tucson named Dan Roma established themselves as reliable starting pitchers. Jim Tompkins was a gritty middle relief man. Roy Moretti was supreme at the end game. We had other pitchers, of course, and wild Willie Finnegan ranked near the bottom. Veale, who had been wild in his youth, viewed him as a reclamation project. I recalled pitchers who had spent a decade mastering control. And while we marveled at Willie's speed, we didn't pitch him.

Since he wasn't allowed to pitch, Finnegan had to find a compensatory factor. It was his tongue.

"When I get in there," Willie would say over a Matt's (the local brew), "anybody leans in on me, you better keep those doctors ready at Faxton Hospital. I'll break his jaw."

Or "I got a heater"--fast ball--"and under these lights, they ain't gonna see it. They'll be lucky if they hear it."

His voice was pure New York, or the part of New York that used to be called Hell's Kitchen. He enjoyed talking tough, and his take-no-prisoners chatter, night after night, might have unnerved Muammar el-Qaddafi. As the season developed, you could recognize it for what it was: bravado. The tougher he talked, Finnegan reasoned, the more likely he was to be told to start a game.

We were tied with the Little Falls Mets for first place on July second, when Veale and Gattis, in cabal, decided to start Finnegan against the Mets in Utica.

"You pick the pitchers," I said to the manager, "but if I were doing it, I'd use somebody else. Save Finny for a weaker team. Watertown."

Gattis looked distressed. "This can work," he said. "Anyway, Veale thinks it's a good idea."

Finnegan stood 6'2" and weighed about 185, but three hours before game time, the toughness slipped away. He was smoking cigarettes at an emphysematous pace.

Barry Moss said, "Finny's worrying me a little. A pitcher shouldn't go out on the mound as if he were a boxer going into the ring. Control. Calm."

At 7:15, Finnegan began to warm up with one of our reserve catchers, Steve Sproesser. He threw harder and harder, and the ball popped so loudly into Sproesser's mitt that fans wandered toward the bull pen to see the fast balls.

Exertion reddened Finnegan's Irish face. "Hold it," Veale said in his drill-instructor tone.

"Just two more pitches," Finnegan said.

"Hold it," Veale said, half an octave deeper.

"OK." Finnegan put on his jacket and started toward the dugout. The beer-bar jawbreaker was now going to have to dance a two-step with real life.

He walked the first batter, Stanley Jefferson, a prime Mets prospect. Jefferson stole second. Finnegan filled the empty space by walking the second batter. By the time the half-inning ended, we were two runs behind. By the end of the second, we were down five. The Mets would win it, 8--2.

Gone by the third inning, Willie marched to the clubhouse and his cigarettes. "Friggin' Gattis," he said. "He made me throw pitchouts. I got trouble with control and he's making me pitch out." (It was, of course, friggin' Gattis who had given him his start.)

"And my girlfriend came up. She's a great girl and all, but that pisses me off. When I'm in the heat of battle, stay away."

He continued to mutter and rant. "I just wanted to beat those suckers for first place, but until I throw my breaking stuff for strikes, they're going to do what they did tonight. Damn. I stunk out the yard."

He took his uniform off slowly, so slowly that he was able to finish two cigarettes while he undressed. At the end of the game, he reappeared at the beer bar. "He won't start again," Gattis was saying.

"If you don't start Finny again," Jimmy Tompkins said, "you're messing with his life. I'm glad I don't have to make that decision."

"We can spot him somewhere," Veale said.

The losing pitcher sipped beside his girl, and beer restored bravado. I heard him say, "Nobody can stop the Finny Express."

But, to be sure, the next morning would come and, with it, a slight headache for the Finny Express. Thinking of Willie, who was young but not so young as before this failure, I mused that baseball in Utica, summer of 1983, had found a way to pose a frightening question: How can you get older without getting more scared?

•

Rocky Coyle took to calling out the stars of each game and demanding applause. Rocky would order a golf clap (quiet), a tennis clap (louder) or a concert clap (rhythmic, in the manner of European audiences urging an encore).

Gattis had a parlor trick that he played on many bus-ride nights. Place six beer cups on the floor--the manager had to look away during this process--invert them and conceal a coin under one. Gattis would then turn, kneel, work his right hand back and forth over the inverted cups and, invariably, select the one hiding the coin. We suspected Moss of flashing a signal, but we never caught the sign. And Gattis never missed.

Moss organized the most elaborate instance of our bus-ride merriment. Following Finnegan's Wake on July second, the Sox worked their way back into first place and made the first extended trip, to Jamestown and Batavia, in the western part of the state. When we swept Jamestown, a Montreal farm, we moved a game ahead of Little Falls. The trip to Batavia next day turned into a kangaroo court.

Bailiff Rocky Coyle stood up as the bus rode north on Route 60, past summer-green farms and hills, and spoke into the driver's microphone.

"The Utica Blue Sox' first kangaroo court"--there never was another--"will come to order. No talking. Judge Daniel Gazzilli presiding. All rise, please."

Everybody stood and then sat down.

"The prosecuting attorney will now read the cases. Anyone accused must stand trial. He will be granted five minutes for himself or his defense counsel."

Moss rose. The bus rolled smoothly. It was not hard to keep your footing. He spoke in carefully austere tones.

"Case number one. The Blue Sox versus Shawn Barton for wearing his stirrups as high as his knees and for continually talking to himself in a psychopathic manner."

Laughter. Barton grinned and blushed.

"Case number two. The Blue Sox versus Daryl Pitts and Larry Lee for wearing kneepads at their ankles during batting practice.

"Case number three. The Blue Sox versus Ralph Sheffield for continually throwing equipment, notably after striking out, and for swearing at children alongside the first-base dugout.

"Case number four. The Blue Sox versus the pitchers for not carrying the trainer's gear.

"Case number five is the Blue Sox versus Michael Zalewski for not abiding by his contract with the court. The court has determined that to be employed as traveling secretary and statistician, your physical body must be maintained within 20 years of your chronological age. The prosecution further charges, Mike, that your body is that of a 65-year-old woman. It also alleges that your body is hazardous to your health."

Defense attorneys could be selected by defendants from the balance of the team. Or one could elect to defend himself--as many players did. These deliberations came alive with pleasure. The players could mock one another harmlessly and get back at their stern and volatile manager and his front-office cronies.

The bus pressed northward toward Batavia, site of a factory that manufactured a cloth guaranteed to clean your automobile as thoroughly as a car wash. Advertisements for this product began, "Does your car get shameful dirty?" That would be Batavia (and two more early victories for the Blue Sox), but amid the laughter and the fellowship, we might as well have been rolling east toward Eden.

We did not lose many games we should have won on that road trip. Over the next few weeks, we seldom lost at all. On July 21, squarely in first place, we started Mike Zamba against the second-place Little Falls Mets. Mike's arm was not as "live" as some. His forte was intelligent pitching. He knew how to move the ball from spot to spot, how to change speeds, how to keep a hitter from swinging in a groove and how to disrupt the hitter's timing. If Mike had Wild Willie Finnegan's fast ball, he would be working in the major leagues today.

We scored a run first, but it was a grinding kind of game, close and tense most of the way. When Zamba tired, we went to Roy Moretti, our bull-pen ace, in the last half of the eighth inning. Roy got the last four outs in overpowering fashion. A pop fly. A tap to the mound. Two swinging strike-outs, including a formidable Mets prospect named Ed Williams.

Both teams had played splendid baseball; there was a major-league feel to this particular game. When the Blue Sox won it, 7--4, our lead over Little Falls reached an even seven games. Our winning percentage, .813, was the highest to be found anywhere in organized baseball.

As we rode the bus back to Utica and Rocky Coyle called for various shadings of applause, we drank beer, joked and smirked. Jim Tompkins broke out his guitar and began to sing a country song. The scene about me was young, beautiful, alive. Hearts and voices moved to the joy and tuneful singing.

Whatever Thomas Wolfe declaimed--and Dylan Thomas set down in his glorious tale of a Swansea park--I was going home again, to my own boyhood. In the dark bus, happiness filled my eyes with unseen tears.

Tompkins, the cowboy pitcher, crooned the words:

"Goin' home,

Goin' home

To the place where I was born."

But time, which takes survey of all the world, can never stop.

The next day, we collided with reality.

•

No one can really explain what happened next, but, quite simply, fortune turned. We had been both good and lucky in playing .800 baseball, and now the team lost some of its competitive edge and some of its good luck all at once.

In a style of writing that was popular 50 years ago, one blamed such change of circumstance on angered gods. Whatever the metaphysics of the Blue Sox' situation, I can only report that a skilled and rugged Class A ball club, out front by seven games, proceeded to come unraveled.

Casey Stengel offered a characteristically cogent description of a slump. "It's when the hitters ain't hittin'," he said, "and the pitchers ain't pitchin' and the fielders ain't catchin' the ball." Always self-protective, Stengel did not add, "And when the manager ain't managin' great, neither."

We did not collapse like a game animal felled by an elephant gun, but little things and then larger things began to go wrong. Larry Lee neglected to dive for a grounder back of second base, and the ball carried through and cost us an important run. Gattis tried Moss at first base and he made two errors in one game. Tompkins temporarily lost mastery of his best pitch, the knuckle curve. Our hitters cooled in clutch situations. The horrible hops of Murnane Field began to bounce against us. Frustration gripped Gattis, and after a while frustration gave way to simmering anger. Each loss seemed to make his personality more contentious, and we would lose a lot of games.

By all the history and logic of baseball, we were too hot not to cool down. Teams simply do not play .800 ball across a season. The 1927 Yankees, with Gehrig and Ruth in their primes, played at a .714 pace. The 1953 Dodgers, who had a pennant secured soon after Labor Day, played .682. The 1954 Cleveland Indians, who won 111 games, played .721. Nobody maintains .800. But we were an emotional bunch in Utica, and neither history nor logic tranquilized us when we were beaten.

The pressure Gattis felt was increasing the way the pain of a toothache increases, simply by persisting day after day. The amiable character Gentleman Jim faded in the summer heat. Now the season without a day off gripped him and the games night after night scraped his nerve ends raw.

After the two annoying losses to the Oneonta Yankees, we fell into a .500 pattern, mixing defeats and victories about equally. For most of us, a sense of fun persisted, even though we were losing the sort of games we had earlier rallied to win. We still had the lead. It was up to Little Falls to catch us. But our bad games tore at Gattis and our good games never seemed quite good enough. He ripped the players night after night, creating a jagged breach between the team and the manager. A few devised a nickname for him. It was one word, derisively spoken: Dad.

It became more and more difficult for me to reach Dad Gattis. He saw himself as the captain of a dissolute crew, and he didn't want any coaching from the commodore. It was his crew. The nature of my conversations with him altered. They became rather like Gattis lectures instead of discussions.

Curiously, this was the season when George Bamberger resigned as manager of the last-place New York Mets, telling reporters, "I probably suffered enough."

Someone in Utica asked me if I thought that comment, coming from a professional baseball person, was unmanly. I didn't. I thought that it was frank. Each day, I watched our manager, who had a good grip on first place, suffer intensely. I imagine he dreamed of horrifying abysses into which he saw the Blue Sox falling, dragging him into purgatory with them.

We swept two games from Geneva, a last-place club, but Little Falls kept winning and our lead did not grow. Then we lost two straight games to the Newark Orioles at Colburn Field. Newark was developing into the strongest team in the western division of the league. (At the end, they won their division by ten games.) Gattis told the players furiously that they had to beat good teams as well as bad ones if they expected to finish first, and then he shouted at them in general frustration. Little Falls kept winning. When we left Newark on August fifth, our lead, with a month to go, was down to a mere three and a half--no longer large enough to make anybody truly comfortable.

The times were tense, but I had organized a promotion that could briefly relieve stress. On August sixth, before a home game against Little Falls, five young women, wearing white bathing suits, high heels and brightly colored capes, gathered at home plate for the finals of the Miss Utica Blue Sox contest. After Fred Snyder announced the names, each girl spoke briefly on why she wanted to be Miss Utica Blue Sox and told a little about herself. Then she dropped the cape and walked to first base in skimpy bathing suit and skin past whistling fans and smiling "judges"--Tompkins, Jacoby, Gattis and myself. Gattis insisted on being a judge. So did I.

The contest beautified barren Murnane; but when it was over, Little Falls pounded us, 10--3. Our lead shrank to two and a half games. Neither player meetings nor fierce speeches from the manager seemed able to stop our steady, infuriating slide toward second place. We had now lost another three in a row and nine of our previous 16 games. The mood within the team was grim and prickly. Gattis fumed alternately at the players and the front office. The extended Blue Sox family was squabbling in whiny ways. The team had lost its winning touch. And now our bullpen stopper, Moretti, began to talk about packing up and going home.

•

Like the existence of many other wanderers, a minor-league ballplayer's life is touched with schizophrenia. He leaves his home environment, his family, his friends and sets forth to play baseball with strangers. He can win fame and glory (though not much money) far from home, but when he returns, no one knows what he has done. Where the high deeds of major-leaguers sound and resound in the press and on television, a minor-leaguer's triumphs and disasters usually draw local attention but no more. After an exhilarating pennant race, full of crackling ball games and ovations, minor-leaguers go home to an empty greeting: "Say, where have you been for the past few months?"

Back in Victoria, British Columbia, Roy Moretti was, he said, a sales manager in a Chevrolet agency. He was obscure but made a comfortable living. Here in Utica, he was a superb right-handed pitcher, nicknamed the Canadian Goose, idolized, famous and underpaid. When Roy was right, which was most of the time, we needed only to carry a lead into the eighth inning. Then he'd come in and save the game. He was the linchpin of the pitching staff, confident, always ready to work, uncomplaining and proud without being haughty. He was a good pitcher who knew that he was good. But he was also a husband in a troubled marriage.

He'd been playing baseball for a long time. In fact, when he was small, Moretti told me, he had cracked the little league at seven, by lying about his age. Now, 20 years later, he was wondering if his life in baseball would lead him anywhere but to divorce court. His wife, Heather, was a registered nurse, with a good job and a wide circle of friends. "They ask her what she's doing with a man who leaves a good job in the summer to play a kid's game in a town they don't know for a team they never heard of and for $500 a month." Utica heroics meant little, if anything, in the Canadian West. Our greatest games, Roy's greatest games, were festive occasions in Utica but were generally unnoticed by the national media. Roy had reached an age where a man is expected to get serious, and Heather Moretti and her friends, 3000 miles away, hardly regarded pitching for the Blue Sox as a serious endeavor.

"We can win the pennant, Roy," I said. "You want to be with a pennant winner, don't you?"

He nodded but said, "I kind of get the feeling my marriage ought to come first."

"Has she said, 'Come home or we're through'?"

"Not in those words. She's very lonely. She hasn't used those words yet."

"The team can give you a hand flying her into Utica."

"She can't get away from her work as a nurse."

"You love Heather?" I asked.

"A lot," Moretti said.

Then I didn't know what to do. Could I argue that he should stay and risk divorce, with all its torments, self-doubt, loneliness and lawyers? Not very convincingly. Should I tell him that he had already done a great deal for the Blue Sox and that he should fly to Heather without guilt, without worrying about his teammates and with my blessing? I didn't want to say that, either.

I said, "The whole team looks up to you, Roy."

"I know that. I appreciate that."

"I want this pennant badly, just as badly as Gattis," I said, "but I can't tell you to stay and lose your marriage. I can't say that."

Roy nodded and tapped me on the shoulder in a gentle gesture of affection. We exchanged troubled looks and, in Robert Frost's phrase, we were men together.

On August eighth, Roy saved a victory over Watertown, keeping our lead at two and a half games, stayed up most of the night making farewells to other players and, on August ninth, flew home to Victoria.

I thought, in a spasm, There goes the pennant. And after all the work that all of us had done. But part of my job as president was to absorb pain silently and to keep my doubts and anxieties to myself.

"Come on, Jimmy," I said to Gattis. "We're gonna make it without him."

"Bet your butt we are," Gattis said.

Our eyes met, full of apprehension.

Without Moretti, the relief burden switched to Tompkins and several others, who performed well. We hit hard and we played hard and we did not collapse. Instead, we played .500 ball. So, fortunately for our side, did Little Falls. We held our narrow lead. Nobody talked about Moretti. Like combat pilots, the players did not dwell on those who were missing. That would have depressed us all. On August 16, we defeated Elmira, 23--4, establishing our lead at an even three games. Early that evening, my telephone rang. Moretti was calling from Victoria. "It's OK now with me and Heather," he said. "I can come back, if you want me."

He would return on August 18. When he left, our lead had been two and a half games. By the time he rejoined us, the lead was two. The Blue Sox had survived his absence. His marriage, Moretti reported cheerfully, was surviving the season.

•

The Blue Sox knew how to play baseball and how to think. Gattis' speeches, whether mild or diatribes, reminded the Sox to play intelligent and intense baseball. It was important, even essential, to keep reminding them. Minds can wander amazing distances over a game and over a season. But because the Blue Sox were a year or two older than any other team, the players already knew better than most what they had to do. That knowledge, that experience, as much as our four hitters at the ready on deck, grinding their teeth and pumping their bats impatiently, was why we reached the middle of August in first place. After a stretch of .500 ball, though, we split the last of three double-headers, falling a full game behind Little Falls as we did. Afterward, we boarded the bus for a long and rather difficult trip home.

I sent someone to fetch a small bottle of Scotch--for staff morale, I said--and to buy cases of beer for the players. Gattis and I worked on the Scotch until it seemed that we had won three double-headers, not split them; until it seemed that we still owned first place. This was a night when a few athletes smoked pot, while others urgently told them to open some windows so that management--Gattis, Moss, myself--did not catch a whiff of the stuff in our seats up front. We never noticed.

This night, on this long bus ride, the players' anger at the way Gattis had treated them erupted in a song composed and sung by Jimmy Tompkins, the bard of Austin. Tompkins called it Ode to Jim Gattis and based the words and melody on Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.

Gattis was sleepy with Scotch as the bus rolled along the New York Thruway, but I could hear Tompkins' lyrics clearly.

There ain't no use in screamin' on the bus, Jim,

When we lose another game.

No, there ain't no use in screamin' on the bus, Jim,

'Cause we can't hear what you say.

You are a psycho and no friend of Larry Lee.

You have no class, no originality.

One more week, this will all be history.

But don't think twice, it's all right.

Jimmy Don Tompkins was somewhat angrier (and certainly more eloquent) than most of the Blue Sox. He had come from poor beginnings and had fought his way into the University of Texas on good intelligence and a fast ball swift enough to win him an athletic scholarship. His father ran a gasoline station in Austin. Jimmy wanted to pitch in the major leagues.

He was having a decent year at Utica, but he was also 24 years old. A decent year, as opposed to a great year, in the New York--Penn League portends journey's end for a 24-year-old ballplayer.

Tompkins' Ode to Jim Gattis contained more than his personal dismay. It represented the thinking of a substantial number of Blue Sox who believed, right or wrong, that Gattis' abuse was muddying their outlook, spoiling their prospects, dirtying their dreams.

The bus continued to journey along the Thruway. The pot smoking subsided. Almost everyone went to sleep. I remembered the poignant joy of the earlier night when Tompkins had sung after we had beaten Little Falls and our spirits had soared into flight. I could hear Bill Veeck's strong voice reminding me, "The game is supposed to be fun."

It was less fun now than it had been. Some nights were hard and stony grinds. Oh, the magic was still there. But stress--the unrelenting stress of a close pennant and the bumpy stress of egos in collision--was crowding fun out of the game. The stresses worked on Gattis and the players in different ways, so we had silly jokes and somber songs. Some players, like Tompkins, had bet their futures and their most desperate dreams on 12 baseball weeks in Utica. Not every dream was coming to a happy pass.

Rolling somewhere east of Rochester and west of Syracuse at three A.M., I concluded that the game was supposed to be fun for the fans.

Seen from within, lived from within a pennant race that slashes about you like the boiling, misty river under Niagara Falls, baseball, where everyone wants to win and only a few can be winners, is something else.

For all its glories, baseball is a brutal business.

•

The Blue Sox' obsession that we had to win infected me as surely as it dominated Jim Gattis. With the season's end fast approaching, I noted that a Korean passenger plane, flight 007, had been shot down over Russian airspace, killing everyone aboard. I thought, One more move in the nuclear chess game that the U.S. and the Soviet Union play each day. That stress would pass. The real game was here at Murnane Field, which had become the center of my world. The great issue was whether the Blue Sox won or lost. If that makes little sense in retrospect, it still was so for most of us during the final week of the season. We didn't want World War Three to break out just then, because it would have disrupted the pennant race.

For the rest of the season, the five nights from August 29 through September second, we would play all our games against the Watertown Pirates. The Pirates were a young team and they had started abysmally, but by this point, they were learning how to win. Twenty-one-year-old ballplayers, if they are any good at all, can improve quickly. By the end of August, Watertown had become tougher, sounder, more aggressive.

At long last, we had come to the part of the season in which, Gattis said, the ballplayers could be left alone to motivate themselves. Under the master plan that Jim tried to follow--and did when he could keep his emotions in check--the daily routine would now be free of harangues. "If the ballplayers can't get themselves up and do it every night," he said, "with a possible pennant less than a week away, then they aren't real ballplayers. I guarantee it."

Indeed, our manager became more quiet and less visible, except for one afternoon when he suddenly began to throw handfuls of Murnane Field rocks toward an umpire.

After we beat Watertown in the series opener, the Pirates played hard and skillfully the next night, and we went into the ninth inning with some problems. Little Falls had already won its game, defeating Batavia, and Watertown was beating us, 5--2. Another damnable fall from first place loomed, with subsequent disorder, recrimination and sorrow. But desire, in powder-blue uniforms, had never burned more brightly under the Murnane lights than in the ninth inning that evening.

We came back to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth, as much by will as by skill. Our players' drive to win, their stout refusal to be defeated, was almost tangible. You could feel it rising from the field into the steep, bare bleachers. We were, and would remain, essentially in a half-game situation. For most of the four remaining days, we would either lead by a half--an extra game that Little Falls had played and lost--or trail by a half. That is about as close as both the mathematics and the climate of a pennant race ever get.

As it began to drizzle in the bottom of the tenth, we pressed our attack and loaded the bases with two out. Ed Wolfe walked toward the batter's box. The skies opened. Deluge. The umpires met in the downpour and called time. Despite Gattis' conviction that New York--Penn League umpires were storm troopers in blue, he didn't argue. It was raining that hard.

We sat in the clubhouse, abusing the cumulo-nimbus clouds. They lingered heedless overhead. No one said much to Ed Wolfe. He walked about in nervousness for a few minutes and then, clutching his portable radio, escaped as best he could into the cacophony. The downpour never let up, and the chief umpire informed me that he was suspending the game and that we'd have to resume it from the precise point where rain had stopped us, as part of a semi--double-header tomorrow. We ended the evening essentially tied for first.

Bad as another double-header might be for our tired pitching staff, we ended up with something even worse and almost without precedent: Rained out again, we had no game the next night and a semi--triple-header at Watertown on September first.

•

We had first-line, if somewhat arm-weary, pitching ready for the triple-header. We would use Moretti to finish the suspended game, then start John Seitz and Mike Zamba in the two others. Little Falls would be playing the Oneonta Incompetents, so to be practical, we felt we had to sweep the triple-header. As I told Gattis, "The way things are going, we better just take it three games at a time."

In Watertown, Wolfe, who'd been on deck when the rain halted the game, told me that he had been unable to sleep the night before. "Coming into that bases-loaded situation," he said, "it all depends on me. I never been through anything like this before. I want a hit. I want to get it over. A single up the middle on the first pitch. Wouldn't that be nice? But I'll take anything: wild pitch. Passed ball. Please, just not an out."

The bases were refilled, the game resumed and the entire team stood up and cheered when Wolfe walked in, with two outs, to hit. His face was pale. He fouled out to the right fielder.

Moretti--implacable, unflappable Mighty Mo--struck out two Pirates in each of his first two innings. Then, in the 12th, Brian Robinson walked, Sheffield scratched a single and Moss walked, loading the bases again. Who was the hitter? Eddie "Bases Loaded" Wolfe. By this time, color had returned to his face. He hit a sacrifice fly and we won the first of three, 6--5, working Moretti for two innings--longer than we wanted.

Although Roy insisted that he was ready to start the second game, we elected to send him to the bull pen. We would save him for another short burst of power pitching should a suitable situation develop. It never did.

Watertown took a quick 3--0 lead and we never caught up. The Pirates beat us, 4--3. We had fallen a full game behind. If we were defeated in the third installment of the triple-header, the pennant race would end right here.

With our defeat, we had lost what someone called "control of our own destiny." Even if we won game three and won again the following night, we would finish second unless Oneonta found a way to defeat Little Falls.

Gattis had nothing to say during the second intermission. The players were quiet, disappointed. If we were going to fold, this seemed to be the time and this slightly misshapen country ball park, Alex Duffy Fairgrounds, seemed to be the place.

But Zamba pitched beautifully, keeping his slider low and away and curbing the Pirates' enthusiasm to lean into it with good inside fast balls. In the fourth inning of game three, we scored seven runs and we won the ball game, 8--4. Taking two thirds of the triple-header, we stayed half a game behind the Little Falls Mets.

•

At one P.M. the next day, I found Gattis, dead-voiced and grim, trying to pencil a line-up. He sat alone at a table in the motel dining room. "It's not coming out right," he said as I joined him.

"Moretti pitches," I said.

"That's the easy part."

"Little Falls has to lose," I said.

"I got an intuition that they just might do that," Gattis said. "Hey, we're not the only guys who're feeling pressure."

We sat silently. In essence, Gattis was trying to create a flawless line-up out of a Class Single A roster. But every Class A roster is inherently flawed. The player you want the most always seems to have moved up to Double A. Strain twisted at Gattis' strong-featured face.

Moss took a seat opposite us, felt the tension and had the good sense to say nothing. At length, Moretti appeared. "Hiya, fellers." He looked calm and enthusiastic. He tried twice to start conversations, and when his efforts failed, he picked up a Watertown newspaper and began to read the major-league results.

It was a long wait until game time.

The early-evening air was cool and clear. It would get cold. I wrapped myself in my Blue Sox jacket and took a seat just off the playing area, near the dugout.

Rocky Coyle led off a line single to center. He stole second. Gattis was batting in the second spot. He made a lunging swing and hit a bounder to the second baseman. Despite fading reflexes, Jim knew how to hit. By going to the right side, he advanced the runner. But Ed Wolfe tapped back to the pitcher. Two out and a man on third. Then Barry cracked an outside breaking ball sharply down the third-base line. We had a run.

Moretti struck out two Pirates in the first and another in the second, when he gave up a pop-fly single to left. He was commanding on the mound, working quickly in the urgent chill, as though he were impatient to dispose of this hitter and start devastating the next victim. By the end of the fourth, we had a 2--0 lead.

It is customary in the New York--Penn League (and all professional baseball) to announce or display the scores of other games. But when Steve Sayers, the bearded, lethargic general manager of the Pirates, heard that Oneonta had opened a lead over Little Falls, he forbade his public-address man to announce the score. "It could encourage the Blue Sox," he said, "and make them play harder."

I commissioned Mike Zalewski as our communicator. "Open a telephone line to Oneonta," I told him in the press box. "Keep it open all game long."

We dispatched a bat boy to hurry from the dugout to the rooftop press box, like an Olympic torch bearer, and bring us back the news from Oneonta. Amazingly, the Yankees moved ahead of Little Falls, 6--1, after four innings. All these days, these weeks, these months, had come down to the fractions of two games.

Moretti was performing magnificently. Two more strike-outs in the fifth. Struck out the side in the sixth. Two more strikeouts in the eighth. Going into the ninth, Roy had himself a two-hit shutout and our 2--0 lead looked lovelier than spring.

Then Ron DeLucchi whipped his bat into a high fast ball and slammed it 400 feet over the center-field wall. There was a moment of shock. Our impervious pitcher had been scratched. Hercules was human.

"Forget it, Roy," I bellowed. "All you gotta do is get the next man." That was roughly akin to reciting the alphabet to an English scholar. Moretti took three deep breaths, recovering. He got the final out on a grounder to Brian Robinson.

We had won another ball game that we could not afford to lose. Under pressure that would have flattened lesser teams, we had won five of our past six, including two out of three in that wretched triple-header. But we had not won the divisional championship. Zalewski bellowed that Little Falls was coming back at Oneonta. I considered planting a spear in his foot.

Still in his spikes, Gattis clattered to the press box and began to call the Little Falls game, batter by batter, down to the rest of us on the field. The clubhouse man dragged out cases of champagne. We stood in the Jefferson County cold, listening to Gattis' shouts and watching his hand signals.

"Nobody touch that champagne," I ordered, "until Oneonta gets the final out. Anybody who jinxes us gets dismembered."

Oneonta had scored again, 7--1, but Little Falls came blazing back with four in the eighth. Our players were tramping in jittery circles. The Watertown g.m. kept the public-address system alive and insisted on announcing inconsequential awards to his last-place ballplayers. Mozart. I was trying to hear Mozart. And this man kept playing Spike Jones.

With two men on base for Little Falls in the eighth inning, Stanley Jefferson, the all-star center fielder, pulled a 390-foot drive that carried over the left-field fence, foul by a yard. I was thankful that I was not there to see it. Then Jefferson popped out and Oneonta hung. The Yankees won the game, 7--5. Up in the press box, Gattis threw his hands into the air in exultation.

Players erupted on the field. Champagne erupted on the field. Moss and Mark Krynitsky hoisted me to their shoulders. The players formed a circle and chanted my name. Even Bob Veale joined them. They chanted my name over and over and over.

I looked at the faces of my smiling, roaring summer friends.

I have known worse moments.

"Poor, unpampered, they were professional ballplayers, the job description that covered Mickey Mantle."