Switch Pitchers Read online

  Switch-Pitchers

  By

  Norman German

  for

  Darnell

  You got to accentuate the positive,

  Eliminate the negative,

  Latch on to the affirmative,

  Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.

  —Johnny Mercer

  Prologue

  THE old pitcher sleeps on the hospital bed, arms across his chest in an image of death, lips pursing out at each expiration as if it might be his last. Suddenly, his glove hand jerks up to shield his face and he hollers himself awake.

  Sitting in a plastic chair, watching a soundless television on the wall, his youngest child asks him in the abbreviated language of father and son, “Nightmare?”

  Coming back to where he is, to who he is, the wrecked veteran nods slightly and smiles. “Line drive.”

  This is how it begins. With a dream.

  That is how it will end. In nightmare.

  PART ONE

  The Havana Home Run

  Chapter 1

  1952

  THE first time I saw him throw, a lump of sadness grew in my throat like a water-filled balloon about to burst into weeping. Not crying. Weeping, as in “Jesus wept.” It’s the feeling you get when you see something unspeakably beautiful: a painting, a woman, a trout, a god. Roberto was a god. Or, if not a god exactly, then superhuman.

  When he threw the second pitch, I knew my eyes had not deceived me. A chill tightened my scalp, then ran down to the base of my spine, tagged up and raced back, the electric ice spreading over my arms on that ninety-degree day in Key West.

  I had been a scout since 1943 and played for ten years before that, seven in the Majors. I had faced the best—Lefty Grove, Bob Feller, Dizzy Dean—so I knew I was witnessing something extraordinary when I saw the ball thrown so fast it looked like a continuous streak of white light painted from his hand to the plate.

  And they said his twin was just as good.

  It was March, 1952. Mr. Perini had sent me with a whittled-down Braves squad on a winterball tour of Cuba. I was supposed to check out Roberto Alemán, who had already posted a 9-0 record with the Havana Lions.

  Mr. Perini was tired of Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, raiding Cuba for its best players. Word got around that the FBI had enlisted Griffith’s scout, “Papa Joe” Cambria, to recruit Fidel Castro, a middling pitcher with a political agenda, in order to distract him from his communist agitation. That didn’t work, but Cambria kept picking up scrappy utility players at a dime a dozen, so Perini sent me down to run interference on Papa Joe. The boss didn’t know Cambria had been my road-trip roommate during my first year with the Miami Flamingos of the International League.

  Roberto Alemán was a right-handed speedballer, his brother Nemesio a lefty junker. I figured I’d give the southpaw a look, sign Roberto, and be on my way. I arrived to learn that he and his twin had mysteriously disappeared, so I was stuck on the sticky island bouncing from town to town in a rusty green bus hoping to catch him when he resurfaced. In the meantime, I endured watching second-rate players dash wildly around shabby fields trying to impress American scouts.

  I had two consolations. One was seeing Marianao’s Rogelio Martínez no-hit the Almendares Scorpions on February 7, my forty-fourth birthday. A no-hitter is the holy grail of baseball, a cruel game designed to insure the pitcher’s failure, so seeing a no-hitter, even a Cuban League no-hitter, makes you feel that a blessing you don’t deserve has descended on you from the God whose existence you doubted.

  My second consolation was visiting Dolf Luque, the Almendares manager, now a sun-baked sixty years old. In 1933, my first year with the Giants, he helped us through a tough season, then won the World Series–clinching fifth game with four innings of brilliant relief when he was forty-three.

  In early February, the team flew into Havana and played thirty games in thirty days, making the five-city circuit twice: Havana, Almendares, Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Marianao. We’d roll into a city in camellos—they call their buses camels—play a night game followed by a double-header the next day, then travel and rest and start over again. It seemed like fun the first week.

  On the return to Boston, we eased into Key West aboard a Peninsula & Occidental steamship. The layover was supposed to serve as R and R for the team, but a gaggle of loudmouth rookies got to drinking at the bar of the Casa Marina Hotel and made a bet with some semipro wannabe’s. So there I was, with nothing better to do than watch a bunch of arrogant recruits beat up the local talent.

  A few of our veterans had the sense to avoid injury in a game that meant nothing. Those stayed perched on the ocean side of the hotel’s veranda sipping pink and blue daiquiris, shooting the salty breeze.

  The field was the worst the new signees had played on since the sandlot days of their youth. Where there was grass, it sprouted defiantly in patches two feet high. The base paths were run to shallow ditches. The mound was pocked like a mortar-ravaged battlefield, the backstop nothing but patched and double-patched chicken wire. The warped boards of the stands were bleached by the south Florida sun. A couple of roosters, half a dozen hens, and countless biddies scratched for a meal on the field and under the bleachers.

  And yet, in the middle of this terminal island slung out in the Gulf Stream like an afterthought of the civilized world, there was Roberto Alemán, happy as a kid running the bases in Comiskey Park on opening day, about to ruin the best arm God ever bestowed on a mortal by throwing lightning in the first inning without a proper warm-up.

  There were maybe fifty people in the stands, mostly poverty-stricken Hispanic fanaticos trying to salve the squalor of their lives with the timeless magic of baseball, their festive clothing a self-conscious rejection of poverty: red blouses, yellow skirts, pink dresses, sea-green shirts.

  A few feet to my right, a weathered old man who smelled of swordfish sat with his legs crossed. “Excuse me,” I began. “Por favor, can you tell me who the pitcher is? The lanzador?”

  With his back relaxed against a splintered wooden step, a cigar parked in the side of his mouth, he spoke the words as if he were bored or bothered but too old to mask it. “Señor, that is El Diamante Negro.”

  I jerked my head toward the mound. “Well, kick me like a mangy dog. I thought it was The Black Diamond.” It was in fact Roberto Alemán. Instantly, everything I had heard about him collapsed into understatement. In two throws, I knew he was two players—the fastest pitcher who had ever lived and the fastest pitcher who would ever live.

  Whether he would be the greatest was another matter. What determines that is a strong work ethic over a long period of time, then control and hitter savvy, followed by a good catcher, run support, and a coach who won’t kill your arm by stretching your talent beyond the limits of the human body in order to meet his team’s short-term needs.

  And, of course, luck.

  The other factors can be worked on. Luck is the wild card. Ted Williams had a chance to be the greatest all-around player ever, but his luck ran out with World War II. That stole three of his prime years, then the Korean War shaved two more, and The Kid finally ran out of seasons.

  But who knows? What’s to say if The Splinter had remained stateside an unlucky injury wouldn’t have ended his career in midstream? Think, for example, of Mickey Mantle, the most God-blessed natural talent ever to play the game, blowing his knee out when his spikes caught on a drain during the World Series of his rookie year. Or think of the many slings and arrows outrageous fortune has used to cripple the boys of summer. Then return to late winter, 1952, and think of the lowly places where gods are born—mangers and barrios and such.

  The announcer for this makeshift game stood with a clipboard on top of the home team’s
tin-roof dugout, calling the players’ names through a faded red megaphone. That reminded me to pull out my pocket notebook and stubby pencil. But for the life of me I had no idea what to write down. As the third pitch smacked the catcher’s mitt like a rifle report, followed by the batter’s swing, the announcer called in Spanish, then English, “That’s the first of many K’s this afternoon. Down goes the tall Torgeson and up comes the next strikeout victim, third baseman Bob Elliott, the National League’s 1947 MVP.”

  Bob didn’t appreciate the introduction. He walked to the plate chopping his bat both ways like he was clearing a swath of stubborn weeds from his path. His at-bat was humiliating. Alemán set him down in four pitches: high and in for a ball, low outside corner, low inside corner, then a riser that whizzed in at the top of the strike zone and crashed the mitt shoulder-high with Elliott’s bat swishing under it by six inches.

  The Cuban beisboleros have a word for Roberto’s pitching: fulminar. It can mean to strike like lightning, or to hurl insults at someone. And that’s what Roberto was doing—with a vengeance, hurling baseballs at these Big League batters like insults. Because I imagine he was tired of hearing about the Yanqui dollars he could make in American ballparks. Playing in Havana’s El Gran Estadio probably awed the young man climbing the ranks, but after seeing the flush, winterball Major Leaguers, he must have wanted to test his fastball against their best bats while getting a taste of mucho dinero to boot. Now, here he was, marooned on the island, enjoying himself by shrinking Big Leaguers down to size with his astonishing gift.

  For the third out, the laughing, angry Cubano put down our young Del Crandall, six feet, two inches of catcher. I told Mr. Perini a stringbean like that wouldn’t be able to unfold from his crouch in time to throw out a slow runner with a sore foot. But, no, he wouldn’t listen. Said we were after him for his bat. Ha! I was glad the boss wasn’t here to see Del fly-swatting the empty air.

  Waiting for the visiting team to take the field, I tried to imagine what had gone down in the bar the night before: some hustler who knew Roberto had bet our heady rookies that the semipro Key West Wreckers could beat them in a seven-inning match. By noon, the Wreckers had scrabbled together only four teammates to our Braves’ five position players and three pitchers. A smattering of teenage isleños excitedly volunteered to fill the open spots on both sides, so it was impossible at game time to tell which was the home team and which the visiting. After a short argument, everyone agreed to call Roberto’s side the home team.

  When the players passed each other taking and leaving the field, you could see how poor the natives were. Their uniforms were ill-fitting, some too small, most too large, all topped off by moth-eaten felt caps in various stages of decay. Several players split uniforms, so the home team’s big right fielder wore a tight top while the visitor’s shortstop sported its baggy bottom. A few players ran awkwardly across the hard infield in clown-shoe cleats. Saddest of all were the catcher’s tools of ignorance: shin guards molded from hammered tin, chest protector nothing but an old washboard, mask fashioned from a football helmet strung with coat hangers.

  This desperation parading as hope, hope in its first dress rehearsal.

  One curiosity—almost a compulsion—caught my attention. After every swing, the umpire raced to sweep off the plate. Whether this was his own obsession or a quirk of Roberto’s, I never discovered, but he was determined to keep the plate as clean and white as the day it was broken out of the box.

  I knew it was going to happen. Taking the mound for our patched-together team was the Braves’ new star, Dick Manville, six feet, four inches of down-home country boy. Fast but scarecrow-awkward, he came out trying to match Roberto’s speed, and I was afraid he might yank his straw arm from its socket. Manville had average speed for an apprentice, but throwing so soon after Roberto he looked like he was lobbing changeups. Still, if our batters were no match for the Cuban’s Zeus-like arm, their batters were no match for real Major League pitchers, even if they were rookies. Manville retired the side with an infield fly bracketed by strikeouts.

  In the top of the second, our cleanup man, a gringo the locals had adopted as a father figure, stepped to the plate. He was clearly given the slot as an honorary position. Way past his prime, he sported thinning iron-gray hair and a proud beer belly, and swung like a girl at the first pitch. He stepped out of the unmarked batter’s box and glared at Roberto.

  “Will you cut the show-offy crap and pitch one in here so a man can hit?” He adjusted his shorts, pinched the bat between his thighs, then spit on his palms and chafed them together. Returning to the plate, he worked his huaraches into the two depressions marking the batter’s box and stirred the sweet part of the bat in the heart of the strike zone. “Right here,” he said. “You put one right here, you egg-sucking son of a hyena, and I’ll drive it down your throat.”

  Roberto laughed, swept the rubber with his right shoe, and went into a theatrical, double-pump windup that ended in another embarrassing swing that put the fat man in the dust.

  Now the batter was furious. Grimacing to show off a fierce set of teeth, he stood, spit a couple of times while slapping at his clothes, then repositioned himself in the box. “You smug little pendejo,” he said, “all I’m asking for is a little fairness. Who couldn’t strike out a well-fed viejo like me? Just take twenty years off that heater, mariposa, and I’ll show you what I can do to it.”

  Roberto smiled good-naturedly and held up the ball. “Okay, here it comes, abuela. You want I should pitch it underhand?”

  “Just shut up and put it over the god-bloody plate.” He waved his bat where he wanted it. The old fellow didn’t look like much now, but he must have been one hell of an athlete in his day. He was as barrel-chested as Babe Ruth but instead of the Bambino’s spindly legs, this man had massive calves, like each had swallowed a cantaloupe.

  Roberto went into a slow windup and delivered a straight, batting-practice fastball that sailed in around eighty miles an hour. The man took a mighty swing, screwing himself into the dust, and managed to chip a blooper over the first baseman’s head. Already playing shallow, the right fielder came in hard on it and would have made the throw-out, but the first baseman had drifted back too, and Roberto was laughing so hard at the bungled play that he forgot to cover the bag.

  When the big man reached first, he made a motion toward the mound, flipping his hand out from his chin. “Now,” he called to a black boy in the dugout, “where’s my goddam drink,” and the boy hustled out a frosty glass. The man took a long pull at the peach-colored concoction, then lifted it high towards Roberto, announcing, “The great DiMaggio is himself again!” The crowd roared its approval at the jest, and the pitcher turned to his work with a smile.

  Unfazed, the sun-cured old man sitting next to me said, “You can have your DiMaggio. Me, I’ll take Dihigo for my peseta.”

  “Martín was playing the same time I was,” I said, “so I never got to see him in action.”

  “Ooh, he was something.” As if an old friend had died, and along with him the world they knew, the old man shook his head in regret. “A foot taller than anyone in the league. Hit, run, catch, throw—he had it all. Pero these americanos not even know how to pronounce his name. Sad. It is not hard. Like this: DEE-go. DEE, then go. DEE-go. It is not hard.”

  Martín Dihigo was the best Cuban player ever to sweat in a monkey suit, but the old man had clearly deified him into a hero who couldn’t possibly exist in this world. On the other hand, I would also have called the old man a liar if he had described Roberto’s pitching and I hadn’t seen it myself.

  Out on the mound, Roberto had thrown two fastball strikes and decided to mix it up with an outside-corner curve. Even though the curve was weak, the batter, expecting a fast one, swung ahead of the ball, his lunging follow-through spinning him in front of the catcher’s line of vision. The runner on first took advantage of the confusion to try for second. From his short lead, he took off sideways, carefully slide-running to prot
ect his drink from spilling. The catcher’s throw beat him by twenty feet, but the man kept coming on. Just as he neared the base, he threw the drink in the second baseman’s face, then eased a foot safely around his glove and tagged the bag.

  Both bleachers exploded with applause. The old man next to me snorted. The drinkless base runner called “time,” then grenade-hurled his empty glass toward the dugout, where it hit the white dirt and rolled in a half circle. “And that, mis amigos,” the man called out dramatically, “is what is known as a slow steal!” Standing on top of the base, he took a deep bow, like a proud matador after an especially dangerous but beautiful kill.

  The old man lowered his cigar to his feet and bumped the ash against the edge of a board to knock it off.

  “This great base stealer,” I commented, “he’s shaped a little like The Babe, eh? Has his arrogance, too, no?”

  The old man looked out at the runner, now hungrily eyeing third from a crouching stance off second. He turned to me, exposing a leathery face pocked with black sun cancers. “We have our own immortals to match those of you. Dihigo we call El Inmortal. But we have others. Cristóbal Torriente, he outslugged your great The Babe Ruth on his visit to Cooba.”