Brittle Innings Read Online Free Page A

least read the funnies to kids over the radio and gave the antibaseball nuts what-for. I never stopped to think he had three major-league clubs in his own city, that maybe greenbacks and greed had as much to do with his defense of baseball as a love of the game. Or maybe it was just LaGuardia hanging tight with the Yankees’ pinstripe Mafia: DiMaggio, Crosetti, and Rizzuto. Who knows?
    Okay, okay. How’d I get from a sagebrush town like Tenkiller to a peanut-growing burg like Highbridge? From the Red Stix to the Hellbenders, a scrappy gang in the low minors? After all, the war emptied the big leagues’ farm systems. The Selective Service Acts, a.k.a. the draft, carried off so many able-bodied young guys it nigh-on to wiped out the minors.
    For a couple of reasons, though, I was a candidate for a farm club, if the farm clubs survived.
    First off, I played crackerjack ball. As Dizzy Dean used to say, “It aint bragging if you can back it up.” I could. In the twenty games the Red Stix played that spring—a couple were exhibitions—I made only one official fielding error. Even that boot you could’ve argued. Our scorekeeper charged it to me on a hard drive I knocked down and scooped to Toby Watersong for a force at second. Toby had to reach a bit, and he dropped the toss. The error could’ve been mine, it could’ve been his. But Toby’s uncle happened to be keeping score that day. So what? No sweat, I figured. And still do.
    You hear a lot about good-field/no-hit players: whizzes at hoovering up grounders and turning double plays, but zilches at the plate. I could hit. That spring I had thirty-six bingers in seventy-five at bats, including a game against a semipro oil-company squad that didn’t count in our division standings. A .480 average, seventy points higher than Ted Williams hit when he became the first major leaguer since Rogers Hornsby to pass .400.
    I didn’t lead the Red Stix in batting, though. Franklin Gooch did. Goochie pitched, played center field, and ran like a scorched jackrabbit. He outhit me by over thirty points. Day after he graduated, he enlisted in the Marines. In June of ’45, he died on Okinawa on Kunishi Ridge, shot through the eye by a Jap sniper. I still have the letter Goochie wrote me from the field a month before the sniper got him.
    Sorry to stray. But Goochie’s story ties in, sort of. The second reason I was a candidate for the minors, gangbuster stats aside, was I wouldn’t turn eighteen until after the ’43 season. My birthday’s in November. Even though I was single and a high-school grad, I wasn’t yet draft bait. Even at eighteen, I’d probably end up classified 4-F: unfit to serve.
    I had a speech problem. Sometimes, I refused to talk. When I did t-t-talk, I st-stammered. Out would come broken phrases, like bursts from a half-jammed machine gun, then nothing. Sometimes the nothing, even when Coach Brandon yelled at me (maybe especially then), stretched on and on. So I sullened my way through school, eyes peeled and hackles up. Almost every other way, physically, I was normal, but my speech problem gave folks the creeps. If the Army docs didn’t find some physical reason for it—a cleft palate was out, and my bruised vocal cords should’ve healed long ago—Mama figured they’d cull me as a borderline nut case. A GI has to have a voice, if only to yell “Lookit!” when an infiltrator chunks a grenade into a buddy’s foxhole.
    A third thing put me on the road to Highbridge. A couple that came to all our Red Stix home games was Colonel and Mrs. Clyde Elshtain. The colonel’d retired as an Army supply officer to become a big-shot procurement specialist at Deck Glider, Inc. Mama suspected he may’ve tugged a few strings to help the Tenkiller factory get its conversion contract. The real baseball fan of the two, though, was the missus, Tulipa Elshtain. Swear to God, that was her name: Tulipa . At fifty-something, Miss Tulipa still walked and drawled like a Gone With