Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [71]
Somehow, though, we pecked away—a bleeder here, a dunk base hit there—to take a 2–1 lead after five innings. Tom Robertson pitched for our side, and he kept the Cubans close. In his younger days, Tom had been a top prospect with the Vancouver Mounties in the Pacific Coast League. He knew how to bear down in clutch situations. Pinar had runners on base in every inning, but Tom slipped out of trouble with a nifty changeup that continually threw those Cuban hitters off balance.
Tom pitched so well, so fluidly, I was stunned when Cy tabbed me to relieve him in the bottom of the sixth. Sweet Jesus, I thought, what madness is this? My teammates were hoping for a save from someone who had arrived at the park with less than three hours sleep and the previous night’s brews still foaming through his gut. I wrote in a previous chapter how pitching with a hangover frequently improved my performance. Trouble was, I had not yet reached the hangover stage; my brain still floated in pickle brine. And, boy, did it show on the mound. Within only a few minutes, all my pitches turned to mud. My breaking ball would not break, my sinker would not sink, my fast ball would not fast . . . oh, it was ugly!
Pinar tallied eight runs on twelve hits before I could retire the side, and they inflicted all this damage with third-rate bats constructed of inferior wood wrapped in masking tape. Baseball equipment comes at a premium in Cuba. We saw young boys near our hotel climb up trees to scrape the sap from the bark and shape it into baseballs for their games of catch. Entire teams might share only one or two vintage bats, a single pair of batting gloves, and a lone batting helmet.
The carnage might have been worse. Pinar battered us bloody even though their best hitter stayed out of the lineup. I had seen Luis Casanova play for the Cuban national team in Parma, Italy, six years earlier. At six foot six and 260 pounds, the right-handed-hitting outfielder resembled Roberto Clemente on steroids, a brutish slugger so strong, no ballpark in Cuba could contain his soaring blows.
Casanova cut an imposing figure in the batter’s box. He towered over home plate with most of his weight hovering above his rear foot and his upper torso cocked so far back, the bat head rested on his left shoulder. Whenever a pitch crossed into his hitting zone, he rotated his upper body at the hips and brought all his weight forward in one smooth, ferocious motion that produced a perfectly balanced swing with just enough uppercut to hit the ball for great distance.
During the Parma game, Casanova hit a 440-foot line-drive home run to right center. In his very next at-bat, he smacked another 440-foot bomb to left center. Such awesome power to all fields can render even the most confident pitchers into cowering sops. Lucky for us, Casanova declined to take the field against us once he saw our ineptness. He just sat on his team’s bench, sadly shaking his head at our feeble, lunging swings. This served as an excellent example of Cuban sportsmanship. Our opponents did not mind shoveling dirt on our grave, but they refrained from pissing on it.
My afternoon quickly settled into a dull routine: throw the ball and race over to back up third after some slugger creamed yet another fence-rattling longball. Yes, my pitching reeked, but the line score would have been less unsightly if our defense had not broken down. Cuba’s tropical climate extracted a toll from us gringos. The heat proved so debilitating that by the fifth inning it looked as though our team had manned every position with cardboard cutouts.
Except cutouts would have exhibited more range. I suspect Castro used us that afternoon as guinea pigs to test the efficacy of some new secret weapon, a Russian crab grass that wrapped around our ankles and held us fast. We ran after balls as if our legs had taken root. With better D behind me, the Cubans could not have scored so often that