He left. The kid cinched his towel around his waist and started back to the locker room. I said, ‘I see that shaving cut’s all better.’
He stopped dead in the doorway, and although his back was to me, I knew he’d done something out there. The truth was in the way he was standing. I don’t know how to explain it better, but … I knew.
‘What?’ Like he didn’t get me, you know.
‘The shaving cut on your finger.’
‘Oh, that shaving cut. Yuh, all better.’
And out he sails … although, rube that he was, he probably didn’t have a clue where he was going.
Okay, second game of the season. Dandy Dave Sisler on the mound for Boston, and our new catcher is hardly settled into the batter’s box before Sisler chucks a fastball at his head. Would have knocked his fucking eyes out if it had connected, but he snaps his head back – didn’t duck or nothing – and then just cocks his bat again, looking at Sisler as if to say, Go on, Mac, do it again if you want.
The crowd’s screaming like mad and chanting RUN IM! RUN IM! RUN IM! The ump didn’t run Sisler, but he got warned and a cheer went up. I looked over and saw Pinky in the Boston dugout, walking back and forth with his arms folded so tight he looked like he was trying to keep from exploding.
Sisler walks twice around the mound, soaking up the fan-love – boy oh boy, they wanted him drawn and quartered – and then he went to the rosin bag, and then he shook off two or three signs. Taking his time, you know, letting it sink in. The kid all the time just standing there with his bat cocked, comfortable as your gramma squatting on the living room sofa. So Dandy Dave throws a get-me-over fastball right down Broadway and the kid loses it in the left-field bleachers. Tidings was on base and we’re up two to nothing. I bet the people over in New York heard the noise from Swampy when the kid hit that home run.
I thought he’d be grinning when he came around third, but he looked just as serious as a judge. Under his breath he’s muttering, ‘Got it done, Billy, showed that busher and got it done.’
The Doo was the first one to grab him in the dugout and danced him right into the bat rack. Helped him pick up the spilled lumber, too, which was nothing like Danny Dusen, who usually thought he was above such things.
After beating Boston twice and pissing off Pinky Higgins, we went down to Washington and won three straight. The kid hit safe in all three, including his second home run, but Griffith Stadium was a depressing place to play, brother; you could have machine-gunned a running rat in the box seats behind home plate and not had to worry about hitting any fans. Goddam Senators finished over forty back that year. Jesus fucking wept.
The kid was behind the plate for The Doo’s second start down there and damn near caught a no-hitter in his fifth game wearing a big-league uniform. Pete Runnels spoiled it in the ninth – hit a double with one out. After that, the kid went out to the mound, and that time Danny didn’t wave him back. They discussed it a little bit, and then The Doo gave an intentional pass to the next batter, Lou Berberet (see how it all comes back?). That brought up Bob Usher, and he hit into a double play just as sweet as you could ever want: ball game.
That night The Doo and the kid went out to celebrate Dusen’s one hundred and ninety-eighth win. When I saw our newest chick the next day, he was very badly hungover, but he bore that as calmly as he bore having Dave Sisler chuck at his head. I was starting to think we had a real big leaguer on our hands, and wouldn’t be needing Hubie Rattner after all. Or anybody else.
‘You and Danny are getting pretty tight, I guess,’ I says.
‘Tight,’ he agrees, rubbing his temples. ‘Me and The Doo are tight. He says Billy’s his good luck charm.’
‘Does he, now?’
‘Yuh. He says if we stick together, he’ll win twenty-five and they’ll have to give him the Cy Young even if the writers do hate his guts.’
‘That right?’
‘Yessir, that’s right. Granny?’
‘What?’
He was giving me that wide blue stare of his: twenty-twenty vision that saw everything and understood almost nothing. By then I knew he could hardly read, and the only movie he’d ever seen was Bambi. He said he went with the other kids from Ottershow or Outershow – whatever – and I assumed it was his school. I was both right and wrong about that, but it ain’t really the point. The point is that he knew how to play baseball – instinctively, I’d say – but otherwise he was a blackboard with nothing written on it.
‘Tell me again what’s a Cy Young?’
That’s how he was, you see.
We went over to Baltimore for three before going back home. Typical spring baseball in that town, which isn’t quite south or north; cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey the first day, hotter than hell the second, a fine drizzle like liquid ice the third. Didn’t matter to the kid; he hit in all three games, making it eight straight. Also, he stopped another runner at the plate. We lost the game, but it was a hell of a stop. Gus Triandos was the victim, I think. He ran headfirst into the kid’s knees and just lay there as stunned, three feet from home. The kid put the tag on the back of his neck just as gentle as Mommy patting oil on Baby Dear’s sunburn.
There was a picture of that putout in the Newark Evening News, with a caption reading Blockade Billy Blakely Saves Another Run. It was a good nickname, and caught on with the fans. They weren’t as demonstrative in those days – nobody would have come to Yankee Stadium in ’57 wearing a chef’s hat to support Garry Sheffield, I don’t think – but when we played our first game back at Old Swampy, some of the fans came in carrying orange road-signs reading DETOUR and ROAD CLOSED.
The signs might have been a one-day thing if two Indians hadn’t got thrown out at the plate in our first game back. That was a game Danny Dusen pitched, incidentally. Both of those putouts were the result of great throws rather than great blocks, but the rook got the credit, anyway, and in a way he deserved it. The guys were starting to trust him, see? Also, they wanted to watch him slap the tag. Baseball players are fans too, and when someone’s on a roll, even the most hard-hearted try to help.
Dusen got his hundred and ninety-ninth that day. Oh, and the kid went three-for-four, including a home run, so it shouldn’t surprise you that even more people showed up with those signs for our second game against Cleveland.
By the third one, some enterprising fellow was selling them out on Titan Esplanade, big orange cardboard diamonds with black letters: ROAD CLOSED BY ORDER OF BLOCKADE BILLY. Some of the fans’d hold em up when Billy was at bat, and they’d all hold them up when the other team had a runner on third. By the time the Yankees came to town – this was going on to the end of April – the whole stadium would flush orange when the Bombers had a runner on third, which they did often in that series.
Because the Yankees kicked the living shit out of us and took over first place. It was no fault of the kid’s; he hit in every game and tagged out Bill Skowron between home and third when the lug got caught in a rundown. Skowron was a moose the size of Big Klew, and he tried to flatten the kid, but it was Skowron who went on his ass, the kid straddling him with a knee on either side. The photo of that one in the paper made it look like the end of a Big Time Wrestling match with Pretty Tony Baba for once finishing off Gorgeous George instead of the other way around. The crowd outdid themselves waving those ROAD CLOSED signs around. It didn’t seem to matter that the Titans had lost; the fans went home happy because they’d seen our skinny catcher knock Mighty Moose Skowron on his ass.