UNCLE MERL'S BAR & GRILL

UNCLE MERL'S BAR & GRILL

GAME FOUR:

The Return of the Georgia Peach

Peter "Lou" D'Alessio

“There is pandemonium in the press box today! Sports writers are rushing to telephones and teletypes and telegraphs to reach their papers with the news. At an owner’s request Manager Casey Stengel has released Yankee outfielder Earl Combs and acquired an aging Tyrus Raymond Cobb from the Philadelphia Athletics. Yes listeners, the Georgia Peach has rejoined the ball club!”

“Hello sports fans! Radio station KDKA invites you to join us here at Yankee Stadium for the fourth game of this remarkable series! And yes! The impossible has happened again. Casey Stengel has just announced the arrival of the one and only Ty Cobb. With Combs gone, the only vestige of Murderers Row left in the line up is the great Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, and even he seems to have lost a step or two. You can expect to see the young Dee-troit Tiger Hank Greenberg and the Saint Louie Cardinals’ own league-leading slugger Rip Collins share the first corner with Gehrig! And now we take you to our correspondent in the dugout, Max D’dragon and Brooklyn Manager Casey Stengel. Take it away, Max!”

“Mazel tov! Casey, this is a helluva ball club. You look to be in your h’right mind, so why ain’t you startin’ Greenboig at foist base?”

“Well, it’s swell to see you, too! Greenberg can drive ’em pretty good, but Gehrig can drive too! Why, jus’ dis’ affernoon I saw Lou drive up in a ’32 Caddie, ya know the one wid the wide wheels! And I expect him to walk too today! Wid the bad carbs on dose jalopies, you bedder believes you’ll be walkin’! Don’t forget, we got the league’s best home run hitter in Collins, at least I think it’s Collins under all that dirt! And that’s the ‘Gas House Gang’ for ya! Dem boys ain’t afraid o’ nuttin’, that’s why I picked ’em! So if I can convince Ducky Medwick not ta swing at ev’y pitch they throw at ’im, why, we’ll probably be okay! But wad’ do I know, they won’t be callin’ me the Old Professor for anudder thirty years! An’ anudder thing, jus’ for the record, I haven’t got any idea wad I’m s’pozed ta do wid Cobb! They should’ve thrown dat bum outa the game when he jumped into the stands and beat up on that guy wid no hands, or when he stabbed that negra feller in where’ever’it’was. And that’s why I’m the Manager!

* * *

Things hadn’t gotten off to a good start for me. I almost got into a fistfight with a writer from Philly for defending Uncle Merl’s decision to bring back Cobb. It wasn’t a popular point of view with the press at large, so they took a vote and barred me from the press booth. So I wandered into the radio box and got hoisted out of there for essentially the same reasons.

I was standing by a concession stand admiring the monstrous wax paper cup of Ballentine I had bought for a dime when I felt a bony arm slip in to mine. Before I knew what was happening I was being led down a ramp to the visitors’ locker room.

“Merl, why the hell is Cobb back?” I asked the shape that was dragging me behind it.

“Exactly!”

“Cut the Stengelese, Unc. I’m in a bear of a mood! I just caught two good beatings for sticking up for you and that lox!” There was silence for a few feet and then I felt a tug on my arm pulling me to a halt. The old shadow stood silent for a second or two.

“Cobb is the great paradox, as Arthur was. He’s the best and the worst that life has to offer in a human being. Baseball is the metaphor for life and Cobb may very well be the greatest natural force in baseball…”

“I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT!!!”

We jerked at the sudden shouting and turned. Behind us Campy was jumping up and down in blind rage. “Da minute I hoid you let Combs go, I knew it! It’s Arter all over again! Dammit, Moil, we bet the entire future of the human race on a baseball game, and you’re off fishin’ for da moral salvation of a devo! Moil! Da guy hates blacks! Da guy…hates whites, reds, and yellows! Dis guy hates evy’body!!! He dinks inflictin’ pain on people is a form a’ religion…”

The Campster was off. He was pounding and stomping the ground like Billy Martin protesting a ‘bad call’ at first base. And while he looked like your average Brooklynite he was still two or three tons and it was shaking the whole building like a small earthquake. Then he just deflated, standing in a kind of crumpled mass, huffing and puffing and staring angrily at Merl.

“If you save one, you’ll save them all,” Merl said calmly to the puffing dragon. He turned and walked away leaving Campy with his lower jaw frozen open. He looked like a guy who had just bet the ranch on a game already played and placed the bet on the wrong team. His face didn’t move an inch but his eyes followed Merl down the hall till he disappeared around the corner. Then the blood rushed back to his head and he exploded all over again.

“Oh gees! OH GEEZ!!! Here we go again! He wasn’t happy nearly wipin’ out ev’y dragon in da woild, dat crazy old goat ain’t gonna stop until he wipes out the whole human…”

Before he could finish, a door popped open and players began entering the hallway to move out to the field. Campy broke for the exit leading to the stands in a complete panic.

I wasn’t feeling too good myself.

* * *

The decision to put Casey Stengel at the helm was like drawing a wild card in a game of poker. He probably could help you, but he really wasn’t meant to be there. In about twenty years, Casey would have about the most miraculous decade in baseball history with his New York Yankees rampaging through pennant race after pennant race with some of the greatest players ever to step on the playing field. And with the flip of a baseball card, Casey would move across town to Shea Stadium and the New York Metropolitans, a team so completely forgettable Casey himself would publicly refer to them accidentally as the Knickerbockers not once but several times. They would become to losing what Casey’s Yankees had been to winning—synonymous. Even so, the lowly Mets were so much fun to watch lose, they often outdrew their competition in the Bronx. Why? Because Casey understood people, and what the game was for. At seventy years of age then, he was the ultimate ‘Boy of Summer’. Casey had coached any number of teams, but Merl wanted the Old Professor in the Yankee uniform of the ‘50s because of the power it represented even though he was managing a team from the ‘30s. Unbeknownst to anybody, Merl had traded off a fourth pitcher to get it. So who needed a fourth pitcher?

The heart of the team Casey put together was the 1934 Saint Louis Cardinals, the infamous Gas House Gang. Their pitching staff featured two brothers from Arkansas named Dean—Daffy and Dizzy. In one season they had accounted for fifty Cardinal victories between them—just as Dizzy had predicted. But if in the event the Dean boys did fall short, Casey had backed them up with the most overwhelming screwball pitcher of all time, the New York Giants’ great hurler Carl Hubble. There is little in Heaven or on earth more terrifying than seeing a high-speed screwball whirly-gigging down the alley right at you. It’s a kind of sadistic reverse curve ball that you pray brakes away from you. It is unpredictable and deadly in the hands of a Master. But its usage carries a high price tag—it devastates the arm throwing it. In the course of its Mastery, Hubble had actually deformed his throwing arm. But indeed he was its Master, the King of Screwballs. As Casey observed, he’d fit right in with the Gas House Gang, one screwball being equal to another.

I stood pressed against the wall watching them pass down the runway. Leo ‘The Lip’ Durocher, Frankie ‘The Fordam Flash’ Frisch, Joe ‘Ducky’ Medwick, Pepper Martin, Collins, Orsatti, the Dean brothers—what a crew! They were dirty looking, their uniforms being torn and patched and covered with dirt and tobacco juice and they sure as shit didn’t inspire confidence. They were, however, the perfect blue-collared team for a nation deep in depression, toughing things out to get where they had to go.

Casey had bolstered his roster up by cramming first base with the greatest batters of the decade, Gehrig of the Yankees, Collins of the Cardinals, and the Tigers’ Hank Greenberg. But outside of Ducky Medwick, most of the rest of Casey’s squad were singles hitters—if they hit at all. I think Casey’s plan was to win with small ball—a low scoring game won as much with fielding as with batting. Casey was counting on his pitchers not to give up the big hit and his infield to take away the small ones. With a little luck, one of his three heavy hitters would send one out of the park and put them up.

And then there was Cobb.

I stood at the doorway of the locker room. Cobb sat, shirtless, on the bench in front of his locker. He seemed to have lost some of his brashness. He looked more like a man at the end of a very long career. Whatever magic Merl had worked to make Cobb eligible to play had brought him back, but in the last year of his career as a player. He was slower, less aggressive. He didn’t know these players well and they didn’t care much about the senior’s reputation as a dyed-in-the-wool bad ass. No, Cobb was a man sitting at the edge of an abyss, looking into the void of old age. I was going to say something to him, but thought better of it. Cobb wasn’t the best advocate of player-fan interaction. He’d punched out more than one worshipper in his long career.

I found myself back in the dugout watching Gehrig taking some swings in the on-deck circle. Cobb had looked older to me, but Lou? Lou looked, for lack of a better word, different. The chronological day before, the bat that rested heavily on his shoulder today had flashed and chewed at the air like a baseball-eating piranha. It wasn’t there for him anymore, not on command like it had been. Baseball was losing its fun-like quality and was becoming hard work. There seemed to be a becalmed puzzlement on his face as he searched himself for a spark that he had lost.

Lou was dying and didn’t know it yet.

Stengel had said that the Gang wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. Well! They weren’t! The first of four bench-clearings occurred when Bathym caught a chunk of a Dizzy Dean fastball. It got past the infield and far enough into the outfield to make it a close play at second. Only Collins, who had replaced Gehrig—Lou had taken himself out after just one inning—anyway, as The Duke turned on first base to start sliding into second (when you have a tail instead of legs, everything is a slide), Collins stepped on his tail and anchored it to the bag. It straightened Bathym out like a poker. By the time Cobb got to the ball, Hell had already swarmed out onto the field and the Brooklyn bench was rushing out to meet them.

It was a donnybrook of the first order as befitted the grand old sport and the unusual circumstances. It took Umpires Klem and Evans several minutes to pry Durocher’s throat out of Ahriman’s grasp. And while Leo-The-Lip’s arms were about six inches too short to reach the furry catcher’s face, he kept on swinging like the true competitor he was! However, as Ducky Medwick was to note shortly after the Umpires were able to pry the last hairy digits off a Durocher’s neck, Leo ‘The-Lip’ went hitless again.

Oddly enough, the only player not to join in was Cobb. He had sent the ball to second and then sat on the grass, shaking his head in disgust. This was not the same Cobb I had come to know and semi-despise. Despite Uncle Merl’s particular beliefs, I had come to see Tyrus Raymond Cobb only as living proof you could grow hair on the head of a dick… and he had worked hard to accomplish this end. In so doing he had isolated himself from life, let alone his teammates who simply chose to ignore him; and even though many of his contemporaries shared many of his traits, they preferred not to associate with him.

When play resumed, Bathym was on second, Collins was thrown out and Greenberg was in. And soon, the brawl resumed, only this time Hell wasn’t invited. The end of the inning saw Dizzy giving up two runs. It came very close to six runs but Cobb—old age, bad attitude, and all—made a spectacular grab of a ball heading for the 463-foot marker in dead center field with the bases loaded. The outfield had shifted but the ball had been pulled and was heading out of the park through the centerfield exit. Even though Orsatti had been closer to the ball, Cobb had outraced him from right field and climbed the wall to snatch back a grand slam from Hell.

Ty had outrun the younger Cardinal outfielder and the old guy in the Philly Athletics uniform had made one of the most spectacular catches the crowd had ever seen. They went nuts, hooting and shouting at Cobb’s momentary return to greatness. For a brief moment I almost had a fleeting pang of sympathy for the old prick. He had ripped a lightening bolt from the sky and swallowed Hell’s thunder, bounced off the wall and run off the field waving his hat to the cheering crowd as if the event was everyday fare.

But the sympathy I felt for him was gone before he even reached the bench. He had come up behind Greenberg and with a sudden shove in the back, yelled “outa ma’ way, Jew boy!” Big Hank had his heel on the top concrete step and the sudden shove spun him on his cleats and he dropped, dead weight, on his butt and bounced down the steps.

Before Hank had a chance to shout, “Oh, my back!” Casey had flown over the top of the fallen first baseman and grabbed Cobb by the shirt, dragging him into the dugout and shoving him against the wall. Stengel let loose with a verbally affluent barrage of ideas on his opinion of Cobb and his ethnic beliefs. The man who had invented Stengelese had selected a language which I personally hadn’t heard since the boys’ gym in high school. Mr. Cobb, being a man of few words, went to take a poke at his manager’s nose, but Yankee catcher Bill Dickey caught his fist and he and Cobb tumbled backwards.

Then the bench cleared.

It took four Umpires almost ten minutes to restore order as Hell stood on the first base line, mystified at the behavior of their opponents. It went down hill from there!

Hank was hurt, but continued to play. He didn’t have much choice; Gehrig and Collins were already gone from the game. But while Hank could still hold down the first corner, it was easy to see that swinging the bat was a problem for him.

Casey was in trouble. Not only had Cobb robbed him of his last working first baseman, he had wiped out the last big gun Casey had counted on. Oh, there was Medwick, but Ducky was given to swinging at balls thrown by pitchers in other ballparks. Even Cobb’s replacement, the Dodgers’ Babe Herman, could send one a country mile—if he could hit it! In fact, hit was what he was supposed to do, because he sure couldn’t play the outfield. Babe could drop a simple fly better than anyone in the National League. I guess that made it all right to play him in right field; since he wasn’t going to catch anything hit at him, it really didn’t matter if he was working in a field he never played before!

He couldn’t count on the big bats, so Casey went to the inside game with no one to pull it off. If he hadn’t kicked Cobb off the bench, he might have been a big help, but Stengel had put his foot down. Dean gave up another run in the bottom of the third and Casey pulled him for Hubble, and the screwballer shut them down; or at least started to when Pepper Martin got in a shouting match with Satan over an open canister of sneezing powder that had found it’s way into Hell’s dugout—and the benches cleared again.

It sat three to zip until the top of the sixth, when Medwick caught one of Emma O’s fastballs and bounced it off the left field wall for a double. He was sacrificed over to third, then Frisch singled him home. In the bottom of the eighth, Hubble loaded the bases with two walks and a hit batter, but pitched his way out of it. Casey, who’d been chattering away since the beginning of the day, had begun to grow silent, and there was an air of impending doom in the Brooklyn bunker. Things were not looking good, especially with the bottom of the order coming to bat.

Orsatti popped out, but Leo The Hitless got jammed inside and caught the ball a few inches above the fist. It hit the ground about twelve feet from the plate and casually rolled towards third base, a bare three inches from the foul line. Sixty thousand people including Ahriman, who was inching up behind it, watched the ball roll closer and closer to third expecting it to cross the line and go foul. But it stopped rolling while still on the playing field and Durocher was safe at first! Casey pulled Hubble for a pinch hitter, Joe Cronin, a short stop from the Red Sox. It got Leo a little twitchy being the short stop so far, but Cronin was the closest thing Casey had to a pinch hitter with even the possibility of pinching a hit. Meanwhile, back on the mound, Emma O was being pulled for a relief pitcher. Obviously, O felt he still had it working and refused to surrender the ball until Lucifer caught him by the throat and choked it free. We waited to see if Satan was going with a righty or a lefty. When old Scratch shook both fists at the bullpen, we knew he was going with both. Sure enough, out came Kali. She wasted no time, getting Cronin swinging.

There was an unexpected roar from the crowd. It echoed from the bleachers to the boxes and shook the stadium. Casey had pulled the on-deck batter and a fat old man in the uniform of the last-place Boston Braves wobbled towards the plate. It was Ruth! His hair was graying, he was slow and heavy and you could tell his legs bothered him, but it was Babe! I looked over at Casey.

“He was a free agent. So I picked him up,” he shrugged.

“Casey, that’s the best pinch hitter you could…”

Stengel raised his hands in a stop motion. There was to be no discussion. “He’s still Babe Ruth!” he said with a tone of finality.

Babe had been taking pay cuts to stay with the Yankees, waiting for a chance to manage the team. When the offer never came, Babe returned to Boston to finish his career with the lowly Boston Braves of the National League. There were veiled offers that if he played for the Braves he’d one day manage them. But that day never came. The rule was clear, however! The Babe had one more uniform in his closet so here he was, digging in at home plate.

The first pitch was a buzz bomb that whizzed over the inside edge of the plate. “ONE!” called Klem, throwing out a hand to indicate a strike. Babe looked over his shoulder at the senior Ump as if to say, “You’re Kidding?”

“I’m sorry, Babe,” the man in the blue suit said. “She hit the inside corner.” Babe just nodded and faced the mound again.

The next pitch went super-sonic and crashed into the catcher’s mitt with a crack that could be heard all the way to the upper deck. It took Klem about four seconds, but finally he dejectedly called, “That’s two!”

Ahriman lifted his mask with his throwing paw and looked over his shoulder at the Umpire. “What?” he grunted. “Say it so we can all hear it!”

Now, Bill Klem was winding down his own career. He had done this too long not to know a rub when he got one. He would have let it pass normally, but this was to his mind just an obvious attempt to humiliate Babe—and that had gotten his goat.

“I said…THAT’S TOO FUGGIN’ HIGH TO BE A STRIKE! IT MUS’ BE A BALL! BAWWOOOONNNEEE!!!” Klem shot out a finger indicating ball and Ahriman’s mask went straight up in the air like it had been shot from a cannon. He jumped up and turned, howling like a wolf. It was like waiving a flag in front of two bulls. Both benches poured out onto the field again. When the smoke cleared, the count stood at one and one.

If Kali had been insulted by having to face a wobbling old human, Klem’s decision that her second pitch was a ball had really pissed her off. It showed! She was talking to herself, moving on and off the rubber and pounding the ball angrily into her mitts. And just like in her first outing, she was becoming prone to errors. She made the mistake of sending the next pitch right down the middle of the plate, despite the catcher’s sign for a breaking ball. A strike, no ifs, ands or buts! Babe let it go by.

Kali’s confidence was coming back and her fourth toss was a long curve that was breaking away from the plate—Babe jumped at it. And just that quick, it was gone. Gone from the instant Babe’s bat had touched the ball. It climbed and climbed and came to rest in the upper mezzanine. He could hardly run the bases, but the Bambino had tied the game with one swing of his bat.

He stepped out of the dugout twice, but the fans refused to let the game continue until he had shown himself a third time. The Brooklyn team was going wild as hope was springing eternally again in the hearts of men!

That ended with the first pitch Daffy Dean served up in the bottom of the ninth. Abaddon drilled it, and hell had evened it up.

Love it? Hate it? Comment in the Forum!