Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [40]
A Russian player told me how he repeatedly had to stand on line for six hours or more just to purchase a bag of sandwich rolls. Boy, I thought, those must be some rolls! I love the glazed chocolate doughnuts they sell at Krispy Kreme—would practically kill for them. But if I have to wait more than five minutes to buy some, I’m off to the local deli to grab a box of Yodels.
Those lines trained the Russian ballplayers to move in only one direction—forward. They regarded shifting in reverse as an alien concept. If you took just one step back in a Moscow line, it added at least another hour to your waiting time. Given the shortages in this country, those extra sixty minutes could reduce you to using Pravda as toilet paper for a week. Of course, that alternative was considerably more comfortable than using the regular Russian toilet paper. Don’t get me wrong—it was a first-rate product if you needed something to sand down the grout in your bathroom.
So it never even occurred to the Soviet players to just reach back and touch first base with their foot before my throws arrived at the bag. I swear, had Czar Nicholas been a left-handed pitcher, Russia would still be an autocracy. He would have picked off Lenin and Trotsky long before the revolution gained any momentum. They never would have seen his move. Of course, the Communists could have countered that by sending Josef Stalin to the mound. Iron Joe, after all, had earned a reputation as the ultimate lefty; he picked off five million people in just two purges.
In subsequent games against a Red Army squad and other local teams, we found the Soviets poorly schooled in every aspect of baseball. These players could not bunt. The hit-and-run was too complicated for them to execute, and they continually played out of position on defense.
The Russian outfielders—most of them converted tennis players—exhibited excellent speed and wide range. Yet they muffed easy fly balls by closing their gloves too soon. None of them could throw. The best arm we saw belonged to an eighteen-year-old gymnast who arrived at the ball field wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers warm-up jacket. She gave her name as Katerina.
When I first met the Red Army manager he gushed, “Wait until you see our star first baseman. He has power like that big slugger you played with. You know, Jim Rice.” And, son of a bitch, the guy did hit like Rice.
Anne Rice.
During batting practice, we watched the first baseman and his teammates helplessly flail at one mediocre fastball after another. They lacked timing, balance, and plate discipline. But at least four of them had marvelous singing voices.
Most of the Russians were as powerfully built, tall, and thick-bodied as Barry Bonds. However, they took such long, slow swings, even a junkballer could blow the ball past them inside. You could get them to lunge at balls six inches off the ground or a foot over their heads. Not one of them had ever seen a breaking pitch. The first time I struck out a Russian with my curve, he stayed at the plate for two minutes with his mouth agape in shock while his teammates demanded that the umpire frisk me. They thought I had smuggled a trick ball out to the mound. None of them could comprehend how anyone could make a ball bend that way.
When the manager asked us to assess his batters’ skills, honesty compelled me to reply, “Your guys could fall out of a boat in the middle of the Moscow River without hitting water.” He finally agreed that the Russian baseball program would never progress unless the People’s Sports Committee imported American coaches to teach players the rudiments of the game.
I gently pointed out that the committee would also have to improve their teams’ dismal baseball fields. We played the national team at Lenin University on a diamond designed by Yugoslav engineers. These were the same people who had constructed the Russian perimeter to resist Nazi Panzer attacks during World War II. Our first clue that these engineers had