Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [39]
The village looked like it had been deserted long ago. We did not see a single passerby. Goats snacked on scraps in a narrow alley. We came upon some cars, sorrowful heaps long past running. A horse-drawn milk cart missing its driver sat on the side of one road. The only modern vehicles were unattended tractors or pickup trucks. Not one of the houses wore a TV antenna.
Jay and I decided to rejoin our team. Just before heading back, we heard the sound: muffled chanting somewhere at the end of the road. We followed those voices to a dingy white wooden church. Inside, dim candlelight cast an amber glow over the pews jammed with townspeople. Painted wooden icons of the Virgin Mary and the saints glimmered on the walls. The unmistakable fragrance of incense drifted over us, but we smelled another odor beneath it, something dusty and fetid.
We stood in a hallway behind the pews. As the bishop spoke, members of the congregation sobbed. Since we did not understand the language, neither Jay nor I had any idea why the parishioners had gathered. Terwillinger leaned over to whisper something in my ear when suddenly his eyes grew large and his body turned rigid. He nudged me to look at the table to my right.
That was when I saw the corpses. Someone had stacked them like so much cordwood one on top of the other in a corner. We had stumbled on a funeral; the deceased had passed away during a coffin shortage. Ushers came down the aisle to carry the bodies to the altar. As they loaded the dead on plywood planks, Jay and I tiptoed out through the door. The scene so unnerved us, we said nothing to each other during the entire walk back to the fortress. We would not stray again for days.
When my teammates and I finally played baseball, we faced the Russian national team. The squad’s roster included many of the country’s top young players, and they expected to steamroll us. Imagine how stunned they were when our motley group beat them 7–0 in the first game.
I picked up the win even though the Russians put seven runners on base with two squib hits and five walks. But none of the players scored, and with good reason—I picked off every one of them. Obviously, these players had never seen a left-hander with any kind of move to first base. No one had taught them how to time a pitcher’s motion. The moment I raised my front foot, some Russian player would blithely take off for second without even noticing that I had not yet started my windup. A quick toss to Bob Wagner at first, the relay to second, another runner erased.
The defeat and those baserunning blunders humbled the Russians, but they positively freaked when I removed my cap for a joint team photo. All that gray hair got the whole team howling. These twenty-somethings could not believe that this old American guy had just shut them out. They badgered one of their coaches to ask for a second shot at me in the game we were scheduled to play two days later. I agreed.
Pitching on short rest, the old American guy pitched another two-hit shutout, walking only a pair this time. And once again I picked off every Russian who reached base. Obviously we had stumbled upon a glaring vulnerability in the Soviet attack that even the Pentagon had yet to uncover: Russians could not back up.
This shortcoming was symptomatic of their economy. Most Muscovites spent their lives waiting on long queues just to buy the basics such as meat, bread, canned goods, or toothpaste. In some cases unpredictable distribution made it difficult to obtain even abundantly produced items. We saw a group of testy Russians flip over a car in a Moscow street and set it on fire after the local state-run retail outlet ran out of cigarettes.
The cigarette company had plenty of tobacco to produce more packages. But the trade union that manufactured the filters had staged a work slowdown, and the truckers who carried the products to market had refused to drive in sympathy. The retailers could not guarantee when the next