Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [47]
Being with him at a ballpark, you get the feeling that he has seen ten thousand games. And he has. In his book, he relives the games of yesteryear as though he were present with them in time. Writing the book about his grandfather, tearing into thousands of box scores, recreating ecstatic moments until now only preserved in those tiny fossilized boxes of little numbers, has plunged him into a matrix world of baseball’s deepest delights. It is so easy to follow him there. He long ago stopped worrying about who was playing, who was winning; he doesn’t keep score, meaning he doesn’t score the game, except in his head. Hank just wants to see good baseball, and he doesn’t care about the league, the team, or the venue.
He can’t remember when he last paid to see a big league game. Since the Senators left his hometown, Washington, D.C., way back in 1971, he spent the intervening years until the big game’s return attending minor pro league games, professional league games, and wherever organized baseball is played. He wants to be where the beer is cheap and the peanuts are salty. He even general-managed Bethesda’s Big Train, named after his grandfather, their first year in the Clark Griffith League, a league of NCAA baseball prospects that plays a forty-game season in midsummer between spring and fall semesters. It’s great baseball.
Want to know what Hank has to say about being a GM? “It was terrible! It turned baseball into work! I want to enjoy the game, not suffer through it like it’s some kinda job!”
Walter Johnson was terrified that his amazing fastball would one day kill a man, so he rarely threw inside. When the great Ty Cobb realized this, he started to crowd the plate. He got more hits off Johnson that way than anybody else. Others weren’t so brave. Cobb remembered it this way, “The first time I faced him I watched him take that easy wind-up—and then something went past me that made me flinch. I hardly saw the pitch, but I heard it. The thing just hissed with danger. Every one of us knew we’d met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.”
Will Rogers speculated that if Johnson had played for the mighty New York Giants he most likely would not have lost a single game in eighteen years.
Thomas’s biography of his grandfather is pure baseball beginning to end. Unlike other baseball classics—like Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, dripping with nostalgia and ripe with sublime social commentary, or Thomas Boswell’s How Life Imitates the World Series, which is a baseball voyage of discovery with the 1979 Baltimore Orioles, both must-reads—Thomas’s book is history told from inside the lines, and, as any good history book should be, is packed with sources: sixty-nine pages of footnotes, a ten-page bibliography, a comprehensive index, fourteen pages of the great pitcher’s stats, and pages and pages of personal game-day photographs from the family collection.
“The publishers and even the printers thought I was crazy to insist on so many pictures, but they help bring the story back to life,” he insists, and he’s right. Best of all, Walter Johnson arrives in D.C. on page 37. No foolin’ around with preliminaries, we get right to the games. From there we are treated to a history rich and wide, and tons of baseball.
When Clark Griffith managed the Nationals, if there wasn’t a pennant on the line—and more often than not, there wasn’t—the last home game of the season would be a “joke game.” Fans loved it. Outfielders were called gardeners. The right gardener would perch up on the Bull Durham sign, swinging his legs, or roam around the infield completely out of position. Johnson played in center during joke games, but when called in to pitch an inning or