Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [54]
He acted so pleased with himself, I could not tell him that the rules required you to touch the bag with your body before an umpire could call you safe or that his shoe violated our league’s uniform regulations. He could not wear that flap during a game.
Nearly dark. I put my arm around Tom and walked him to his car. As he pulled out I thought, There goes the real spirit of this league, another guy who does not want to grow old, hooked on a dream, hooked on the game. Ability stood as the only difference between him and us.
As the season entered its final weeks, the Super Sox played a game in Bobby Maduro Stadium in northern Miami. Another loss. During the bus ride back to Winter Haven, we stopped at a 7-Eleven to pick up beer and soda. Dalton Jones, a utility infielder with our club, and his wife, Barbara, parked behind us in the Mercedes Dalton had bought with his 1967 World Series share. We had just entered the store when we heard Barbara screaming in the parking lot. Some teenager had reached through the car window and grabbed her purse.
The thief ran through a gauntlet of players while making his escape. Not one of us former world-class athletes could put a hand on him. We chased the boy down the road, but he outdistanced the entire team without exceeding trotting speed. As we dragged ourselves back to the bus, tongues hanging, I realized the Senior Baseball Players Association was a tad too senior ever to succeed as anything more than a curiosity. The league folded midway through the following season.
10
THE CURSE
I sat at my kitchen table enjoying a tasty country breakfast on the morn-ing of April 1, 2001, when a house-guest handed me the sports page. My stomach somersaulted. An interview Boston pitching ace Pedro Martinez had given after throwing a spectacular game against the New York Yankees two days earlier caused my distress. One of the Boston beat writers had asked Pedro if he believed in the so-called Curse of the Babe, the legend that the Red Sox will never win a World Series because the baseball gods had damned the franchise for selling the sport’s greatest player to the Yankees back in 1918.
Pedro scoffed at the superstition. “Bring back the Bambino,” he said, “and have me face him and I’ll drill him in the ass!” That comment elicited a lot of laughs in the clubhouse but none in my home. I immediately tried contacting Martinez, but the Red Sox refused to reveal his phone number or convey my message. Big mistake. Somebody had to warn him about the danger.
Several weeks passed before one of my sportswriter friends offered to contact Martinez. Too much time had elapsed. Pedro was no longer Pedro. He had become Venus de Milo. The right-hander’s pitching arm had practically fallen off, and he would not throw another inning for the rest of the season. Losing him effectively ended Boston’s pennant hopes. Martinez had only himself to blame. He had forgotten that Babe Ruth had not only played the outfield when he wore a Sox uniform. He had also starred for the team as a great left-handed pitcher, one who relished coming inside on anyone who crowded the plate. That arm injury was the Babe dusting off Martinez with a slider at the chin.
In 2003 Ruth sent him sprawling once more. Pedro was pitching against the Yankees in the deciding game of the American League Championship Series. He looked dominating that night and carried a 5–2 lead into the bottom of the eighth. But Boston manager Grady Little failed to remove Martinez even though everyone else in Yankee Stadium could see that the exhausted pitcher could not face another batter. New York tied the game against Pedro and won in extra innings on an Aaron Boone home run to advance to yet another World Series. It was, in the minds of many Red Sox fans, the worst defeat in