Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [51]
In the fifth inning, our catcher, Gary Allenson, fell with a pulled hammy of his own while sprinting to first base on a groundball. One inning later, our backup catcher, Doug Simunic, stumbled as he chased a bunt and grabbed the back of his thigh. Another hamstring pull. So many of our players dropped on the field, I looked into the palm trees across the street from the stadium expecting to find snipers perched on the branches.
Our first baseman, Pete LaCock, bravely offered to sub behind the plate. Reliever Pedro Borbon took the mound for us, and he threw his sinker down and in against the Pelican’s predominantly right-hand–hitting lineup. Not an easy ball for even the most experienced receiver to handle.
LaCock took a unique approach to his new job. He did not consider it important to actually catch any of Borbon’s sharply breaking bastard pitches just so long as he got his mitt in the general vicinity of the ball. So many sinkers eluded LaCock, I finally said to him, “If you mix in a catch every now and again, you might be able to confuse the opposition. On second thought, don’t even set up a target. Just let the ball hit the backstop. You can grab it on the rebound.”
We lost the opener, 9–2. The good news: only four of our players left the game injured. The bad news: our roster carried just twenty names, and at that rate the team would go under in less than a week. After the Pelicans recorded the final out, every light in the stadium dimmed until darkness enveloped the field. Players had to grope their way back to the clubhouse. We all thought power outage until that first explosion behind the centerfield fence ripped through the night. Fireworks.
Oh, sweet Jesus, I thought, can’t this team do anything right? The concept was simple enough. The home team does not ignite rockets and flares unless it wins. What part of that sounds difficult to grasp? The fireworks display troubled one other person in Winter Haven besides me. A woman who lived across the street from our stadium owned a poodle. The sonic boom from the display so panicked the dog, it ran through a plate glass door, and the falling shards sliced the animal in half. Within days, the distraught owner threatened the team with its first lawsuit.
After that, things started to go bad for us.
Fergie Jenkins, a 284-game winner during his major-league career, took the mound for the second game of our series against the Pelicans. He pitched strongly and allowed only one earned run in five innings before collapsing to his knees. The forty-five-year-old right-hander crawled around the diamond, dry-heaving and gasping for breath. We thought he had suffered a heart seizure or a stroke. Turned out Fergie had swallowed his chaw of tobacco.
I had to relieve him with little warm-up, and the Pelicans made me pay. They scored four runs before the inning ended. They hit so many hard line drives down the left field line, our third baseman, Butch Hobson, tried to call time so he could go into the clubhouse and strap on catcher’s equipment for protection. A dismal first outing. The Winter Haven fans impressed me, though, by yelling their support even while the Pelicans pummeled every pitch I threw. “Take the pitcher out!” they gleefully chanted. Had I been sitting in the stands, they could have added one more voice to that choir.
We lost that game 12–2 and dropped four more before notching our first win. As the defeats continued, the Winter Haven troops started grousing. Several players complained to Mitchell Maxwell that I was too disorganized to manage a baseball team. They claimed