UNCLE MERL'S BAR & GRILL
GAME SEVEN:
Well! I Got Good News and Bad News
By
Peter "Lou" D'Alessio
Copyright 2010
It was mass panic. You would have thought the world was already coming to an end. Ever since the announcement that Cobb would manage the team for the seventh and final game, the micro-universe of Uncle Merl’s Bar & Grill was in absolute toimearl… toimearl… TURMOIL! What Merl was trying to pull off hadn’t been fathomed, and he himself was acting oddly—even for him. Since the debacle of the Gas House Gang Uncle Merl had taken to disappearing for long hours on long walks, and it was always the same. A round-faced older black man would appear and Merl was gone with him to points unknown. But they hadn’t been seen since the last inning of the sixth game. The fact that they hadn’t come back to the bar in over twenty-four hours was taken by the dragons a sure-fire sign that the world was doomed!
There were other problems of greater concern—like the fact that we were out of quality dead players! After the sixth game, Campy had stormed in with two decades worth of sport pages and obituaries, and Max with a check list. For two hours Campy called out names and Max shuffled through the obits.
“Abbot, James!”
“Uh-uh!”
“Berra, Lawrence—Yogi!”
“Nah!”
“Chamblis, Chris!”
“Uh-uh!”
“Jiltin’ Joe Di…”
“We used him already!”
Well, at least they were trying.
Oddly enough, other key players had also disappeared. Charlie had been looking for Boreese. He’d last been seen wearing khaki shorts and a matching tee shirt and getting on an East-bound bus, which in Newark is a big deal in itself! Anymore east and your sitting in the Atlantic Ocean! Jonsey had also fallen through the cracks in the universe.
“Figueroa, Ed! Fisk, Carlton!”
“Uh-uh and nope!”
“Gooden, Doc!”
“Uh-uh!”
I was sitting quietly, going over my notes and wondering how the hell I got into this mess, when a shadow flashed by my face. It was Charley, with a couple of mugs of Uncle Merl’s.
“How long have those two been going at it?”
I looked at the infamous Budweiser clock. “Near as I can figure, about an hour. But around here, time doesn’t seem to mean too much.”
“Yeah! I know what’cha mean! What year are you supposed to be living in?”
“Henderson, Ricky!”
“No!”
Hendrix, Jimmi!”
“…Chris’sake! He ain’t a ball player, he’s a guitar player!”
“Yeah, but he’s dead. I figger maybe, the Star Spangled—”
“NEXT!”
“I’m not sure what year I’m supposed to be living in!” I said. “ ‘80s, ‘90s maybe?”
“That’s time lag. It’s got somethin’ to do with this stuff!” He pointed into his mug. “But don’t ask me what. You’ll get over it. Eventually.”
“Charlie, explain something to me.”
“Shoot!”
“What is this thing Merl has for Cobb? He was a jerk his entire life, and he’s still a jerk, even dead for nearly forty years!”
Charley rolled his eyes. “Damned if I know! But he must have somethin’ goin’. I mean we’re talking about Uncle Merl… a guy who knows God and the devil on a first name basis!”
“Yo! That’s another thing that surprised me! Any idea which stadium we’re playing in?”
“Don’t know that either. We beat ’em in the scoring, by one run. So we had the option on the park. But before anybody could suggest anything, Merl picked a place and sent it in to the Commissioner. Then he disappeared. Max thinks it’s Tiger Stadium. Campy says Chavez’ Ravine. I don’t think so. We’re going by bus.”
“Rizzuto, Phil!”
“Uh-uh!”
“…are you sure?”
“Believe me, Scooter ain’t dead—yet! Soon! But not yet!”
* * *
It was a ride to the ballpark just like I remembered it when Brother McReedy took the whole team to Yankee Stadium to celebrate our victory over Saint George’s. It was hot as hell outside and the AC was on a part-time basis. Even with the window open, the pungent smell of diesel fuel lingered on. I could almost hear him shout, “Keep it down back there!” Despite the extreme gravity of the game, there was a rather jovial feeling to the ride. It didn’t seem to matter to us that we didn’t know where our players were coming from—hell! We didn’t even know where we were going!
We traveled for about an hour. For a while Charlie and I chatted and supposed and speculated but in the end, I dozed off. Buses do that to me. I’ve never been able to figure out how long I was out, but when Charlie elbowed me awake, we were pulling into Shea Stadium—1969, the year of “Believe”! The year when long suffering New York Mets fans saw an ‘Amazin’’ rise from the worst ball seen in New York State since the Dodgers in their heyday, to the top of the National League culminating in their World Series Championship!
I shook myself awake as the bus cleared out. I climbed off the seat and sleepwalked into the noisy mob. The crowd moved quickly to the gates but from the corner of my eye I caught the blur of a hand frantically waiving a clutch of loose papers in my direction. It was Doc. Charley and I trotted away from the pack and headed towards him.
“Hey, Doc!” Charley shouted. “Where the hell have you been? We’ve…”
But Doc had already turned and was again heading for parts unknown. “Charley, get down to the dugout!” he screamed over his shoulder. “To the dugout!”
We pulled up to a halt. There was a hurt expression on Charley’s face. I don’t think he was used to being left out of the action. We made our way around and entered the maze of unknown tunnels to the dugout. The bunker was as empty as the locker room we had walked through.
“Jees, what’s the rush? This place is a ghost town… bad choice of words, huh?”
I shrugged, poking around to see any signs of reasonable life. The roster sheet for our side was posted, but there were no names written on it yet. Someone had posted Hell’s roster and there were some noteworthy changes.
“Man! Look at this! Old Scratch really has sent a few guys back down.” Charlie pointed to the names of the infielders. “Anarazel, Gaziel and Fecor? Who are these guys?”
“Dam’ bad news!” a voice boomed behind us. “But I don’t care if they bring their whole family and all their pets!”
Charlie and I spun around to see Cobb. He looked older to me than the last time I’d seen him, and he didn’t seem quite so sullen. He looked like… like a man reborn to life, determined rather than defiant, energetic rather than angry, he looked like a regular Uncle Merl Special. But what did I know, I’d been drinking… heavily, near as I could tell!
“Now what the hell are you two little piss ants doin’ in ma dugout?”
But he was still a dick head.
“Doc Boreese said to…”
“Doc, huh? Okay. You two crackahs sit down ovah there and stay outa ma way.”
We slid down the bench expecting to see Cobb weave some sort of magic, creating a devastating line up out of thin air, but all he did was fish an old copy of the Police Gazette out of an old duffle bag. He then proceeded to sit in the middle of the bench and read it. As Shea began filling up around us, Cobb would glance up over the dugout steps and, convinced there were no significant changes, would lower his mug back into the newspaper.
Out on the field, Hell was warming up for the final confrontation. Satan had indeed cleaned house. He had removed Bathym from left field and, as Cobb had elected to play with the National League rules thus eliminating the designated hitter, inserted Yen Lo Wang into the spot. The trio of infielders he had brought up to play first, short, and third base, were far from what you’d call rookies. Lucifer had been saving them for a special occasion, and this was it. For a day gig, they were the keepers of Hell’s treasures, which they guarded ferociously without either troops or legions. On the field, it was easy to see why! Their movements were on the edge of blur—so fast, in fact, that Old Scratch had moved Abaddon off of second base and was using him as a fourth outfielder about fifteen or twenty feet off the second bag. As the trio sent the ball around the horn at speeds too fast to measure with the human eye, it started to look like there was more than one ball in play.
And still Cobb sat, without a nod, notice, or player in sight. Hell was clearing off the field and Ron Luciano, the great American League Umpire known for his wild body motions emphasizing his calls, came over to the dugout steps.
“Cobb! Where’s your team?”
Cobb never looked up. “They’re comin’.”
“Yeah? Well you’ve got four more minutes to submit your roster and line up or this game is forfeit.”
Cobb raised his eyes just high enough over the paper for the Home Plate Umpire to see them. “Keep your shorts on! I said they’ll be here, they’ll be here!”
Luciano raised his eyebrows as if to say something, but thought better of it, turned, and headed back to the plate. For the next three minutes and thirty five seconds Charley and I sat there in stunned silence.
Forfeit? Did he say ‘forfeit’?
With about twenty seconds to go, Cobb rose slowly and pulled a small batch of age-yellowed papers from his back pocket. He tossed the yellowed pages to the bench and walked calmly to home plate were where the Prince of Darkness and the Plate Umpire were waiting impatiently.
There was a look of relief on Luciano’s face. He reached out and snatched the card from Cobb’s hand and never even looked at it. “Ty, are your guys gonna need some time to get loose?” he asked.
Before Cobb could answer there was a startling shock of auto horns followed by hot jazz blasting from loud speakers on the hoods of the cars, raising a din to wake the dead. The centerfield wall seemed to unseam itself to allow the parade to pass onto the field and a swarm of men in baseball uniforms barnstormed themselves along in time to the music behind the slowly proceeding cars. As they drew nearer we realized that the uniforms didn’t say Dodgers or Yankees or Sox or Cubs. They had names like Crawfords and Homestead Grays, Monarchs and Chicago American Giants. A roar swept through Shea that easily rivaled the ruckus of Babe’s first homer at Yankee Stadium as the last five players entered onto the field—two Newark Browns and three Newark Eagles. Satan had brought his ringers, and Merl had brought his!
Cobb looked up at Luciano, who seemed to tower over him. “Nah! They’re loose! Hell, mos’ of ’em have already played a game or two today!”
Charley and I were dumbstruck as the sea of black faces swept in from the outfield. Without looking away Charley began fishing along the bench for the stack of yellowed papers. I heard the snapping and crinkling of dry paper and from the corner of my eye I saw Charley drag the stack in front of his face.
“Look at this! Rube Foster, John Henry Lloyd… James Bell!”
“James Bell? Cool Poppa Bell? That James Bell? Gimme those!” I snatched the sheets and fingered my way down the list. “This is almost every great black ball player from the first two decades of the twentieth century! McGraw!” I muttered. “There’re guys here right into the ‘50s, but this is John McGraw’s list!”
Despite a secret edict mandating that blacks not be allowed in the white game of baseball, McGraw had tried to infiltrate the ranks of the New York Giants with Negro ball players without much luck. Several months after he died, his wife found the list of players of the non-white persuasion McGraw had wanted for the team in the Polo Grounds, the Giants.
“Who’s that?” Charley pointed to a well-muscled fellow in a Homestead Grays uniform.
“Him? That, sir, is the only man in history to ever hit a ball clean out of Yankee Stadium! That’s the one and only Josh Gibson! Some figure he hit upwards of a thousand homers in his lifetime, and some of those traveled more than seven hundred feet! Now! You wanna hear about his strong point? You see that skinny kid there in the Kansas City Monarch’s uniform and the HOF embroidered on his sleeve? That is THE Satchel Page, a very young Satchel, but Satchel none-the-less. Those two tore up the Negro League for years.”
The kid was talking to his old friend Josh and gathering a crowd. “Damn, man. I was nice and peaceful, lyin’ on my death bed, an’ all a’ sudden, there’s this angel in front a’ me!”
“Wad he say, Satchel?”
“He say ‘Satchel, I know how you was always wonderin’ if there was baseball in heaven?’ I say ‘yeah!’ He says, ‘Well! I got good news and bad news for ya! Yeah, the good news is there’s baseball in heaven. The bad news, you scheduled to start the las’ game of the series—tomorrow!” It cracked up the small gang. There may have been obstacles between a win and us but obviously ‘nerves’ wasn’t going to be one of them.
“This is unbelievable, especially…”
“Especially,” I injected, “since Cobb is or was or might be a bona fide racist—one bed sheet short of a Grand Dragon, if you get my drift. What the hell is going on here?”
What the hell, indeed. Back at home plate, the Prince of Darkness was throwing a major league tantrum, jumping up and down and cussing up a blue streak at Cobb. Satan contended that the ‘team’ Cobb had brought in weren’t pros—maybe semi-pros, at best. I’ll give Cobb credit. He showed more patient consideration for Beelzebub than he had most people in life—until he’d taken enough. In a sudden flurry of motion, he raised a finger to his lips to shush the demon. When Satan had stopped flapping, Ty removed the finger from his lips and carefully pointed to the three embroidered letters on his sleeve.
“What’s the rule?” he calmly asked Luciano.
“Any and all persons entered into the Baseball Hall of Fame are entitled to be called into service for the purposes of a series roster.”
Ty blinked and asked, “So if I added Abbot and Costello…”
“They’d count as two men on your roster—no matter who was on first!”
Scratch didn’t appreciate the humor and blew a tube, and again Cobb went to his lips. “Now, numb nuts, if you’d ever been to the Hall, you’d know there’s one hell of a display on the Negra leagues—so stuff the crap and let’s get goin’!”
Cobb stood there with his thumbs entangled in his front two belt loops, looking for all the world as if he were waiting on an overdue bus. And again, Satan was tirading about semi-pros, and how professional means big money and… for the last time, the finger went to the lips and even the entire stadium, which had been following along, fell dead silent. You could’ve heard a rat take a leak… yeah, that quiet. Cobb turned his face to his dugout and shouted.
“Hey, Paige, how much you make the last season you played for the Indians?”
“I dunno, boss. ‘Round eighteen, I guess!” Satchel shouted back.
Cobb looked back at the Umpire. “That ‘last year’ he’s talking about, the average Boston Red Sox player made near sixteen! Damn, Ron, they took away Thorpe’s Olympic medals ‘cause he played baseball for twenny bucks a week for one summer. Said he was a pro! A pro for twenny dollars a week!”
Luciano looked back at the devil. “That’s good ‘nuff for me! PLAY BALL!”
Scratch was rocking mad. He was smoking and flaming and hurling insults at the Georgia Peach, who stood there with a very neutral expression on his face… until a thin, sinister smile seemed to spread across it and he turned and slowly walked back to the dugout—which really touched off Old Lucifer!
“That’s our Cobb!” Charlie muttered. “He can piss off the devil without so much as opening his mouth!”
Cobb had managed to piss off more than the devil in his lifetime. What had become very obvious in the dugout was that nobody wanted to play for him and they weren’t afraid to tell him that to his face. It was Gibson who put the cards on the table, telling Cobb in no uncertain terms what was.
“We ain’t here to play for you! We’re here ‘cause Uncle Merl asked us to play! Ain’t that so, guys!”
There was a multitudinous, “YEAH!”
“Ain’t gonna pay you no mind, ain’t that right fellas!”
“YEAH!”
“An’ we only takin’ orders from Rube Foster, right?”
“Wrong,” a soft voice from the rear of the pack interjected. It was Foster. Perhaps the greatest pitcher of his day in a day of great pitchers. When nobody was looking, Muggsy McGraw had hired him to coach hurlers and rumor had it, Christie Matheson’s famous ‘fade-away’ curve was Rube’s doing. Rube had gone on to become one of the greatest coaches in black baseball history, and a friend to John McGraw. It leads one to speculate on which the greater accomplishment was.
“Cobb’s our manager. What he say, we do! Anybody got any problems with that?”
As an uneasy silence hung in the air, I studied Foster’s face. It was less chubby and much younger, but Foster was the man Merl had been disappearing with.
“Aw’right, then,” Cobb said with an air of finality. “Rube’s pitchin’ and battin’ at the bottom. John Henry Lloyd, shortstop and leadin’ off, Charleston, right field and battin’ second…” The list of names Cobb rattled off qualified as legends in any man’s game. Oscar Charleston from the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers, Willie Wells of the Newark Eagles... I thought it was kind of funny. Outside of Satchel, most of these men hadn’t been allowed to play in the white leagues. Now here they were, facing down the devil.
Luciano called play and our team ran out on to the field, but Foster and Gibson never moved from the spot where they were sitting.
“Hey, Cobb!” I shouted. “I thought you said Rube was pitching today?”
Cobb never looked up from the sheet he was studying. His bony right hand lifted almost listlessly and pointed to the mound.
“He is!”
On the mound was Rube all right. Only it was Rube Waddell! George Edward ‘Rube’ Waddell. Behind the plate was his old catcher, Ossie Schreckengost of McGraw’s Giants. Cobb lowered the paper and peered out onto the field.
“Hell, he may be a little nuts,” Cobb acknowledged, “but he’s a damned good pitcher! We owe him from that second game. McGraw didn’t…”
A small tribe of Hell’s players had gathered outside their dugout and were playing with all manner of small, shinny toys and lighting various small fires. Waddell, who was more than just a little fascinated by the proceedings, was walking off the mound and straight towards the opposition. In the second game he had left the field in favor of chasing a fire truck—now he was going over to the other side! Cobb threw the papers in his hands down violently and raged out of the bunker.
“Waddell, you dum’ somna’ bitch! Get your skinny crackahs butt back on that mound and pitch, or by God, I’ll…” Rube froze in his tracks. Then he turned around and walked back to the mound. Tipping his hat brim humbly to Cobb, he focused in on home plate and awaited the first batter.
Cobb trotted back in and sat down. “You jes’ has to appeal to his sensitive nature sometimes,” he muttered and proceeded to count his shoelace holes. We sat there for a second in a queasy silence and then he spoke again.
“He was a great pitcher, but evy’body said he was crazy. I dunno, maybe he is! Alls I know is, he out-pitched Christy Mathewson for twenny innings and beat ’im. He’s that good! But in the long run, nobody wanted him ‘cause he acted the fool. An’ sure ‘nuff, that fool died on April Fools day…from pneumonia he caught helpin’ the victims of a flood.”
“Why Cobb, you sentimental old…”
My comment was cut short by a violent ‘snap’ in the area of home plate. Our heads shot up just in time to see Schreckengost throw the ball back to the mound. Luciano, the Dancing Umpire of the American League, was gyrating spastically behind the plate to make certain that everybody in the stadium knew the first pitch of the game to be a strike!
Old Rube was leaning hard into the pitch, and the demon at the plate was pulling away from the strike zone in fear of what might happen if he dug in. Again, the pitch cracked into the catcher’s mitt with a sharp, brutal snap.
“Ga’damn!” Gibson gasped, “I been a catcher ma’ whole life an’ I ain’t never heard a ball take leather like that! He gotta be throwin’ fireballs!”
Cobb just smiled thinly.
Waddell left the first three demons he faced standing at the plate. The sound of the ball hitting the glove was itself unearthly and it was setting the batters back in the box for fear that the crazy coot on the mound might decide a bean ball was in order. On the ninth strike thrown, a roar went up that again shook the earth. The fearsome smack of the ball into the mitt could be heard all the way up in Shea’s upper decks and the crowd loved it! They loved it in the dugout too, and they were waiting on the steps to let the crazy white guy know it.
Schreckengost, on the other hand, had gotten off the field as fast as his two legs could carry him, and he plopped down on the bench beside us. He removed his mask and chest protector and as he bent forward to undo his shin guards one foot slipped slickly under the bench and dragged a pan of water out from under it. As he pushed a little further forward his mitt slid off his lap and into the water. Ossie finished removing his gear and, carefully retrieving his mitt and sliding the pan back carefully out of sight, sat up unobtrusively shaking the excess moisture from his mitt.
“Makes a helluva pop when the ball hits the wet leather, don’t it!” he grinned coyly. “And it makes for a great ‘spitter’ after the third or fourth time the ball is pitched!”
* * *
Waddell wasn’t the only pitcher throwing the spitter today. Things were heating up on the field with the latest acquisition to Hell’s Hurlers. Old Scratch had brought up another biblical demon, Sammael, to pitch the last game. Word around the league was that Sammael ruled his domains with a poison-tipped sword. The meaning was clear. Unlike Rube, who probably didn’t even realize you could wring a couple of quarts of Perrier out of his pitches, Sammael’s number one toss was the spitter in whatever form was needed—the old Vaseline Ball, the Black&Decker-reworked-semi-elongated spheroid—ad infinitum. It was a great call on Satan’s part to bring in an unknown pitcher with a nearly impossible pitch to hit. And it would have worked if Cobb hadn’t out-guessed him and brought in a borderline Looneytoon with an arm like a rifle and a catcher who knew how to hot load the bullets! If Satan had been hopping mad because Cobb had shown up with the cream of the Negro Leagues, by the time Waddell came off the mound Scratch looked like a kangaroo with fangs. There was a rumbling through the dugout as Cobb’s players began concluding that maybe the old asshole actually knew things about playing the game that they didn’t!
For the next two innings there was a wet ball standoff. T’weren’t a fit day for man nor demon. Players were swinging at balls going off in all directions. If you did catch a piece of one, you ran the risk of drowning in the spray coming off the ball. But Rube was over-throwing and in the top of the third he was starting to slow. Anarazel tapped a cheap single off of him and he scored when Wang plastered one into the centerfield wall. Time was called as the Umps pried the ball from the wall with a screwdriver. The Umps called it a ground rule triple and Cobb pulled Rube and Ossie in favor of Foster and Gibson.
The new battery wasted no time. Foster was up one and two on the batter when he picked Wang off third with one of the smoothest moves Charlie and I had ever seem. Wang never had a chance. Cobb was jumping up and down, screaming and shaking a fist at Satan and his team. It was becoming obvious that, for whatever the reason, this was more than another baseball game to him.
“You ol’som’bitch!” Cobb shouted at his horned counter-part. “Mah ol’ bible-thumpin’ daddy tol’ me ‘bout you! We’re gonna beat your butt on the diamond, and then I’m comin’ over to personally beat your butt mah’self!”
That was all it took! The bench went wild, yelling, hooting and backing up Cobb’s insults and challenges with Bronx cheers and generally supportive blasphemies on his behalf. Cobb was rolling.
“An’ if you think Foster’s somethin’, you jus’ wait an’ see what I got in the wings, rearin’ ta go!” The bench re-doubled its efforts. It seemed like the entire world was going nuts around us. Charlie and I sat with our backs to the wall watching the riot unfolding in front of us.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Charley asked, all wide-eyed.
“Well, let’s see. We’ve got possibly the most viscous southern racist baseball has ever seen shouting insults at the King of Darkness, supported heavily by twenty black ball players that should be trying to hang him from the centerfield flag pole for all the dirt he did them when they were alive. Is that about it? Did I leave anything out?”
“Only the part about the whole world going to hell if we lose this game… but yeah, that’s about the size of things.”
Yep, that was the size of things. Cobb had spent a large part of his celebrity berating players like Poppa Bell and Rube Foster. Why they’d go to bat for him now was beyond my comprehension. He was, just in general terms, a butthead. Conversely, and perhaps even more astounding, was why Merl would place the final game in the hands of a manic like this. Even if there was a good reason to give Cobb the last shot, why he’d put together a team of black ball players was a greater mystery.
Waddell had once out-pitched Christy Mathewson, and Foster had out-pitched Waddell. Perhaps because time and space didn’t mesh under humanitarian stars, Foster, no matter how well he pitched, could never cross the color line, could never take Waddell’s job. So Foster took his name. It was the same with many of the others. John Henry Lloyd became the black Honus Wagnor—Gibson, the Black Babe Ruth. The racist press had always said they were playing lesser teams. The way I see it, a ball hit 750 feet is a 750-foot home run. I don’t care if you hit the ball off of Sandy Koufax or a guy in a wheel chair; it’s still 750 feet. Babe hit many a ball high and hard in the house he built—but only Josh Gibson ever hit one out! As far as I know, to this day, Josh is still the only man to hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium. It went back and fourth for half a century, black teams challenging white, white teams challenging black. In exhibition, in the 438-recorded games, the guys playing lesser teams out-played their white counterparts 309 games to 129. Cobb knew all this and, like it or not, for whatever reasons, he had come to terms with it and it was a ‘past’ thing.
The present was right in front of us throwing wicked curve balls at the wicked and blowing them down like autumn leaves caught in a typhoon. If one of them was lucky enough to catch a piece of what Foster was offering, the infield swallowed it up and it died there. I don’t know if it was Rube Foster on the mound or Cobb’s riot act at the devil, but the unlikely alliance of twenty-one black baseball super stars and one overbearing old southern egotistical white maniac had become a solid team—a very aggressive team that, in its own strange way, had already gotten used to sticking it in the devil’s face.
* * *
There were two outs in the bottom of the third inning when Foster stepped up to the plate. Sammael’s first offering was perfect—right on the knuckles of Rube’s throwing hand. He doubled over his hands and dropped to his knees. Cobb’s palms slapped down hard on his legs. “I’ll give the som’bitch credit, he did it right! Got ’im on the first pitch!” He jumped up angrily, looking around the bunker. “Bell! Take first and run for Foster.”
A rather average looking fellow rose carefully from the bench and moved ever so slowly towards the steps. A white hand caught him on the shoulder and jerked him around. Cobb glowered into the face with the same explosive anger he had shown in his playing.
“Poppa Bell, you get me that run back, you hear me? You get me that run back before Charleston reaches first base, and I’ll kiss your bottom in the front window of any store in town you name!”
Now…not taking everything said as gospel, old Tyrus’s meaning was clear. It sounded like the workings of a small machine as a unified chorus of ‘whoooaaa!’ swept through the dugout. Bell cracked a grin and turned away from Cobb, I guess to keep from cracking up right in his face. He choked a couple of gulps of air in and turned back to his manager. “Deal!” was all he said, and ran into the field with Cobb trotting behind him.
At home plate, Jew-baby Floyd, the Monarch’s semi-trainer, was bent over Foster and looking worried. “Mista Cobb, middle two, broke clean!” Cobb looked at his star pitcher whose face was contorting with pain. It didn’t look to me like bodily pain, but the agony of the soul that a great player feels when he sees his career being ripped away. For one brief instant I believe Cobb was actually moved.
“Hell, Rube, I’m real damned sorry.”
“The hell you are!” Foster spit out through a forced grin. “You ain’t never been sorry ‘bout nuttin’ in your life!”
“Rube, I can’t say as that’s a lie, but I will get even.”
Foster didn’t need the help but Cobb had a hand under his arm and walked him off towards the exit tunnel. As he turned to walk away, we saw Foster’s head turn and Cobb stopped walking. Foster’s lips moved and Cobb’s figure just stood there listening. As Rube disappeared in the tunnel, Cobb’s eyes scanned the field as if he was looking for a sign from God. Not finding it, he turned and looked into the dugout. A cold chill swept through it and the chattering and banter native to the terrain tumbled off into space. There was a terrible expression on Cobb’s face, cold and dark.
“Damn,” Charley spit out, “I think they really pissed him off this time!”
Yes, they had!
Then it seemed to pass. He walked somberly back to the bench and sat down hard. His face seemed relaxed, but those thin lips of his were so tightly pressed together you couldn’t slip a greased toothpick through them. We were all kind of pulling away from him on the bench when he suddenly sprang to his feet and dashed towards the steps. A bunch of players jumped up to grab him, but he stopped abruptly.
“Poppa Bell! I want you show dese somsa’bitches what we do! Who we are!”
Bell pulled the short brim of his cap down low and leaned forward, watching the pitcher for a sign of weakness. Sammael, who had been watching calmly on the mound, went into his stretch. Bell stepped off the bag and shuffled slowly away, his body angling for second base but his eyes never leaving the pitcher.
Sammael was a good seven feet tall, sporting a wild black beard that hung to the letters across his chest. Each arm was the size if a normal man’s leg with fingers that seem to stretch to infinity. Poppa Bell was a clean miss of six feet. It had mismatch written all over it.
Bell got thrown at twice before the first pitch to Oscar Charleston. Bell hadn’t had much of a lead on either attempt but almost got picked off both times.
“This is the guy that once stole home from first base?” Charley grunted.
There was a smattering of laughter along the bench.
“Cool Poppa Bell is Cool Poppa Bell!” It was Paige. “When he wants to get gone, he’ll go. An’ nuttin’ around here is gonna stop him!”
Sammael had sneaked a curve ball past Charleston and then sent Bell headlong back to the bag twice more. Each time Bell made it back by hairs. On the next pitch, Bell charged, faking a steal. Ahriman sprang up and cocked his arm as if to throw to second base. Poppa Bell froze and the two beings stared and silently dared each other to ‘go first’. Slowly, Bell walked backed to the bag. The monstrous backstop hung, ready to throw, until Bell was solidly on the bag. When he was convinced Bell was firmly anchored, his body relaxed and he began the motion to throw the ball back to the mound. The ball hadn’t left his paw-tips when Ahriman realized the errors of his ways.
Bell had taken off from first like a sprinter out of the blocks and was hauling ass faster than a speeding bullet for second before the pitcher even knew he was gone. Whether it was panic or over-confidence, Sammael, instead of holding the ball and conceding second base, wheeled around and threw. I honestly believe Poppa Bell had counted on that. The throw was low, right at the bag, low and hard. Abaddon had to charge in from his shallow outfield position and stab at the ball to keep it from going into the outfield. He had to drop straight down and tumble onto the bag, but to his credit, he came up with the ball and threw with a frightening velocity to third base. But Poppa Bell wasn’t doing too badly himself! Unlike Cobb, who ran with a practiced perfection, Bell ran with reckless abandon. It reminded me of the way a cop ran in pursuit of a thief. His face strained as his body pushed harder and harder, but his eyes never drifted from the third baseman.
He knew! He knew where the ball was coming from and where and when it would reach the glove waiting to tag him out. My God, it was happening in half the blink of an eye, but Bell knew!
The ball collided with the mitt, not in the webbing but flat on the palm. The sound of the hide, the leather and the bone beneath the leather was a grim crack, full of fury as Bell went into his slide, which was at a wild angle. As the third baseman drove forward to meet him, Poppa seemed to roll and slide away from the baseman’s momentum and away from the bag. Bell had to reach behind him and grab the bag with his hand, sliding towards the outfield, as the third basemen tumbled past him.
Shea was rocking! On a lazy throw back to the mound, Poppa Bell had stolen not one but two bases right under the demons’ noses, and the crowd was exploding with approval. Both benches weren’t doing too bad themselves, players and coaches jumping up and down and the most ballistic soul in the whole ballpark was Cobb.
“GREAT GOD ALMIGHTY! DID YA SEE THAT???” the great base stealer of the American League screamed at Satan’s dugout and at the crowd.
But Poppa wasn’t finished yet! Sammael went into his stretch and Bell was gone! Paige had been right, there was nothing anywhere that was going to stop Bell. He was stealing the plate, pickin’ up and puttin’ them down with a demonic vengeance of his own. He was better that halfway home before Sammael threw to the plate. For one brief moment I thought it was going to be Cobb all over again, and I had a vision of Poppa being embedded in the catcher’s leg and being tossed around like a rag doll.
Bell’s sudden jump had surprised Sammael and he had double-pumped the throw. The hurried pitch began to knuckle away from the plate and Ahriman had to stretch towards first base. He was stretched out pretty good and braced pretty solidly expecting Bell to try and run him down the way Cobb had; but Poppa Bell dove headfirst, right through the huge catcher’s spread legs and well below the tag.
Cobb went wild. He ran out to home plate and picked his runner off the ground, threw him over his shoulder and walked back to the dugout screaming, “Ga’damn! We got us a ballgame!”
“Yeah,” I footnoted to Charley, “thanks to Poppa Bell!”
Cobb was still near delirious when he reached the bench. “Let me tell ya som’thin, boys. I had someone even better than Poppa lined up to pinch run for us! Stole 201 bases in 1946, playin’ for Racine!”
“Racine!” Gibson blurted out over the crowd noise that was call for Bell to come again. “The Belles? A woman?”
“Hell, yes a woman! She’s that damn good!”
“Well if she that damn good, how come you didn’t bring her up?”
“She ain’t dead yet, ya damned fool! Now get up in the batter’s circle!”
Gibson never made it to the plate, but when the inning was over the game was knotted at one. Cobb was going nuts and the rest of the team was catching whatever he had. Half of a century of hate and mistrust were being put aside for the thing called baseball. All sight of the reason the game was being played was lost in the game itself.
“Paige! Get your skinny chicken ass up and throwin’. You’re in for Foster!”
Young Satchel Paige was a tall, thin kid with long seemingly muscleless arm. In this place and time, some would call him rookie, and this rookie was frozen in motion. With the likes of the two Rubes on the team, he wasn’t expecting to actually get in the game.
“Dammit, Paige!” Cobb screamed, “I need you now, not in ten years from now!” He grabbed his young pitcher by his sleeves and lifted. “Gibson! C’mere! Raise yer right hand!” he demanded. The great catcher rose and lifted his throwing hand as if he was taking an oath of office. Cobb snatched the great paw and bent all the fingers back down except for the pointer.
“You see that, Paige? That’s the only pitch I want you to throw! Number one! The fastball! You got that?” Those cold piercing eyes locked onto the youngster’s eyes and lit them with the same fire. Satchel nodded and walked to the mound.
* * *
In the top of the fourth, he made it look easy, taunting the batters, telling them where he was planning to throw it and then throwing it past a swinging bat. He was making it a real show. There was a fire there, a real love of the game, of the pitched baseball and a defiance that was resilient and knew no bounds. And when this tall, skinny rookie with a slingshot for an arm put the side out in ten pitches he strolled back to the bench as if he were a Master of the Universe. Sitting down next to his manager, he cockily admitted he’d have ended the inning sooner—but the Luciano had missed a call!
* * *
There wasn’t a whole lot of difference between Gibson and Ruth. So often ‘best’ is a term defined by those who never were, are, or will be. They—Babe and Josh—were best defined in their own terms. Their mistakes on the diamond were often better than the defined best of the next man up.
Gibson got fooled on the first pitch, an inside curve, but still managed to drive it to within an inch of defined ‘gone’. Only Uggae slithering up a wall and hanging there like a slug on a barn door to extend himself like a child’s toy and pull the ball back stopped it from leaving. The bottom of the fourth had its first out.
If there was any insight to Cobb to be had, it was the final two outs in the bottom of the fourth. Cobb had built the ultimate inside game—bunting, stealing, double steals. It was a running game, exciting and fast. The white Leagues had started favoring the long ball, the home run, in his day. It caused him to despise Babe Ruth and Jimmy Foxx. Tyrus Cobb saw baseball as a war, a game of strategy. Guys like Rube Foster tended to see it the same way. The Black Leagues had their share of long ball hitters, but like Cobb, they knew the value of the inside game. How odd it was that when the cards had been placed on the table for him, Cobb had run straight for those he had maligned in life because they played the game that he knew best. The lower half of the inning passed away without a run, but Cobb’s men had loaded the bases and sent Satan to the mound twice. I think it thrilled Cobb to see Lucifer made frantic by his runners.
As the teams traded field for batter’s box, Doc came rolling in. He was soaked and huffing and puffing, but seemed more concerned as to the whereabouts of Jonsey and Merl than having us fill him in on what was going on with the game.
“How’s Cobb holdin’ up, Charley? Anybody try to knock his teeth out yet?
“Knock his teeth out? There’s talk of pressuring the Pope to get him Sainted!”
“Yeah”, I added, “he’s been exhibiting near human traits! What the hell did you guys do to him?”
Boreese, still wiping himself down with a towel, looked at me with a marked degree of cosmic uncertainty. “Uncle Merl got to’im. Him and Foster have been workin’ him for the last twenty years. It’s amazing how a man can change when he’s getting on in years.” Doc dropped his eyes to end the discussion. He put the towel down and grabbed Charley by the arm and started to rise. “C’mon, they got a couple of seats saved for us. We’re done for the day.” Doc pointed overhead, obviously towards the first box behind the dugout. I stood on the steps and peered over the concrete. Sure enough, there were all four of the boys. I turned to say something to Doc and Charley, but they were gone.
* * *
Satchel got through two thirds of the fifth inning and then got into trouble. Scratch had his speedy infielders laying downs bunts and two of the three made it to base. In a spectacularly ballsy move, Satan called for a double steal and got away with it. Wang got a cheap single driving both runners home, and with Ahriman standing at the plate with two balls and no strikes and the score now 3 to 1, Cobb went to the mound. Us bench jockeys sat waiting to see who’d he call up from the bullpen, but Cobb never moved. He just watched his young pitcher walk dejectedly to the bench. But as Satchel went to sit, the strange again reared its head. Paige seemed to spin through himself, and it cleared the bench for ten feet in all directions. Satchel never broke stride, passing through himself and walking back to the mound.
He was older—much older—and wearing the uniform of the Cleveland Indians. The crowd went berserk! Cobb was relieving Paige with Paige. Satchel had taken about five steps and stopped. Still facing the mound and Cobb, he called out to the bench behind him.
“Yo! Number 42!” A young Jackie Robinson looked up nervously, but said nothing. “Son,” Paige’s head swung on his shoulders, “you got no idea what’s in store for you! Best learn to think cool thoughts. Lord knows, you’re gonna need ’em!” With that, he sauntered towards the mound.
The PA system blasted over the now roaring crowd. “In for Satchel Paige is… SATCHEL PAIGE!”
It looked like Satan had been shot out of a cannon. At first we thought he was going to start a fight, but he ran straight towards Luciano and went into a Billy Martin act that Billy Martin himself would have been proud of, violently protesting that you couldn’t substitute a player for himself!
Cobb looked at his pitcher and signaled to him not to leave the mound. He strolled calmly towards home plate pulling a small pile of papers out of his pocket as he walked. The closer he got to the plate, the more pronounced the evil looking grin spreading across his puss became.
“ ‘Scuse me!” he interjected into the one-demon riot. “Is there some sorta problem here?”
There was smoke blowing out of Satan’s ears now. “PROBLEM?” he screamed at the Georgia Peach. “HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU PUT IN THE SAME PITCHER YOU JUST TOOK OUT?”
Cobb’s head pulled back and he lifted the sheets of paper he held to eye level. “Sez right here… let’s see… Oh! ‘Any player who has played for more than one team can play in each uniform in his closet, but must appear as he did in said uniform.’ Sez here, too… ‘any player who has been elected to the Hall of Fame and hasn’t been used in a starting capacity, may appear IN a starting capacity in that uniform…OR as a designated hitter… OR in relief pitching capacity!’ ” Cobb slapped the papers in the palm of his hand and dropped his arms to his side. “Somewhere in all that is Satchel!”
Luciano looked over at Satan and before the senior demon could rebut Cobb’s argument, shouted, “PLAY BALL!” Scratch turned away and, with fists shaking angrily in the air, walked back to his encampment.
Cobb looked back at his man on the mound and walked back to the bench. The now mature Satchel shook his head and looked down at his shoes with a grin. Then he began his warm up throws.
“Hey Josh!” he called between pitches. “Remember those three other fingers Cobb told you not to use?”
“Yeah, Satchel. Why?”
“You better loosen ’em up. Baby, you gonna need ’em!” Paige finished his warm up tosses and waived Ahriman back into the box. “Now, let’s see! The big man already has two balls and no strikes. I’ll tell you what, big man, jus’ to make it interestin’, I think I’ll give ya a belt-high fastball! What you think, Josh?”
Gibson just grunted and lifted his mitt to a line level with the batter’s belt. Without further hesitation, Satchel just let’er rip.
“Steeee’hrike!” Luciano shimmied and twisted. Gibson pulled the ball from his mitt and offered it to Ahriman for inspection. The behemoth just growled and Josh threw the ball back.
“Now let’s see! How ‘bout the ol’ ‘Midnight Rider’ jes above the knees and on the inside a’ the plate!”
“TWO!” screamed the Ump as the ball whizzed by the batter’s knees, a strike by an inch.
“Two an’ Two! Now we’re cookin’! What ta do, what ta do?”
“Hey Satchel,” Gibson shouted, “this is getting’ borin’! How’s one at the top a’ the zone, right where he likes ’em? Let’s see if this guy can hit!”
Paige stepped off the mound and looked around, letting the crowd know that he was thinking of another way to torture the demon. “Why not!” He shouted back to his catcher and stepped back on the rubber. Paige set himself and let fly. It flew in a straight line about belt high, then suddenly shot up to the letters on the batter’s chest. Ahriman took a cut that spun him completely around as the ball slipped under his bat and into Gibson’s waiting glove.
Satchel hadn’t even waited for the call. He was so certain he had gotten the batter, he’d turned and headed to the dugout before the pitch reached the mitt.
In the bottom of the inning, Cobb managed to load the bases on bunts and sacrifices and then sent Louis Santop in to pinch hit a shot that should have gone through for extra bases. But the short stop sprouted wings—literally—and pulled it down. Cobb almost got thrown out protesting the play but Robinson and Willie Wells grabbed him by the belt, hoisted him off the ground and dragged him back to the bench, kicking and screaming all the way.
* * *
Robinson made it in at second in the top of the sixth, but never saw any action. Paige got two out swinging and Poppa Bell chased down a shallow pop fly. Through it all, Cobb had become uncharacteristically a cheerleader of the first order. His team had played splendidly so far. While they had done little damage score-wise, Satan’s fur was turning gray! But while Cobb still believed in the Art of Baseball, the speed game, it was getting late in the game and he needed runs. He’d take a long ball, a homer, if he could get one—and he knew just where to start looking. He started pumping Gibson up, to the point where I thought Josh was going to erupt.
Sammael seemed to get better with age and we couldn’t even bunt on him in the bottom of the sixth. But with two outs and nobody on, Gibson stepped up to the plate, dug in and promptly got a little chin music. Missing his face by inches, Gibson backed off the plate like he’d been hit by a punch and spun to the ground. He pushed himself up from the dust and without words, got back in the box.
The great club he carried rose perfectly erect. Josh twisted the handle like he was trying to choke it. Then it tilted backward, and he waited. The pitch was high, inside and a strike but he let it pass. The next one wasn’t so lucky.
You could see it coming a mile away. Josh stepped into his stroke as if he had one chop with an ax to fell a mighty oak tree. The sound of bat hitting ball rivaled the Babe’s in the third game, only Babe’s ball had struck the upper mezzanine and crushed. Gibson’s ball rose and rose and when we all thought it could not go any higher, it rose some more.
Great events, whether in sports or anything else, are described in many ways, usually how they looked or felt or impacted on the life around it. In Baseball, it is the element of sound, of wood striking horsehide or hide hitting leather, which signals the magnitude of an event. The sound of Josh touching off the horsehide had signaled an extraordinary event. The bench seemed to be launched to the edge of the dugout. From our vantage point we watched, dumbstruck, as Gibson’s dinger passed from earth into God’s hands and disappeared over the centerfield wall, never to be seen or heard from again!
Josh never saw the ball disappear into the wild blue yonder. He simply watched it until he knew it was gone, dropped his bat and chugged around the bases. I will go to my grave believing that Gibson didn’t really care what the ball did after it crossed the invisible line. It was just something he did, and only part of something he was.
* * *
It settled into a pitcher’s duel, the gangly Paige holding his own against the dark behemoth. Satchel wasn’t pacing himself and it was tiring him. Hell tapped him for a pair of singles in the top of the eighth, but he hung tough and pitched his way out of it.
Sammael was having his problems, too. Robinson, who had a clear ‘hit-away’ sign, fooled everybody by bunting with two strikes on him and then beating the play to first. Everybody in the park, from the batboys to the fans, knew Jackie was going to try and steal, and he wasn’t trying to hide the fact that it was a primary concern.
It became a game of nerves between runner and pitcher. Robinson began jumping off the bag, faking an attempt and diving back hairs ahead of the ball. Sammael was holding him to short leads but it was making him crazy. When Robinson’s dancing help raise the count on the batter to three balls and one strike, he took off for second base and got in under the tag. He hadn’t dusted the dirt off the seat of his pants before he started it again.
Edging off the base, diving back, Robinson was locking up the game. He was causing so much chaos on the base paths that Satan called Abaddon in from his short centerfield position and put him back on second base to try and stop Robinson’s unsettling actions; but with the pitch, a fourth ball to the Newark Eagle’s great shortstop Willie Wells who was batting for Satchel, Jackie was gone again. Unlike Poppa Bell, he decided to take the third baseman out at the ankles. Anarazel found himself sprawled out over the infield with the ball rolling slowly towards second base. Robinson jumped up and would have tied the game right then except for the monstrously fast play of Gaziel at short.
Jackie was doing serious damage. He was driving Hell’s battery crazy by threatening to steal home, and it was allowing Wells to get into the action. Willie stole second standing up without a throw from the catcher. Sammael had pitched out and Willie had almost begged the catcher for the throw over, but Ahriman had played the game since the dawn of time. He knew the heavy injury would come from third, not second base.
It was only a stay of execution… perfect execution. Cobb called for and got a hit and a run. Charleston put one right over the second baseman’s head into the spot in short center that Jackie had carved out. In a heartbeat Robinson was across the plate and Wells was being waved around third. Only a perfect strike from Baal Zeval cut him down at the plate.
Robinson had built a run in the bottom of the eighth and the game was locked at three all!
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