Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [79]
Brad kept his grounds crew equipment and two small refrigerators stocked with soda pop and frankfurters inside that stand. He crossed the field to shake hands as soon as he saw me. Brad was a slightly balding man of average height and athletic build, as lean and corded as a sprinter. His nose was peeling, and every inch of skin that his clothing did not cover glowed red. Hard to believe he had ever spent a day indoors.
After greeting me, Brad appeared to be everywhere, a one-man grounds crew, trimming the grass, laying down chalk along the baselines, dragging the infield, setting the bases, fixing the mound, and lining up the batter’s box. He even threw batting practice to both sides and umpired every game.
A PA system played music throughout the afternoon. We heard Dan Fogarty’s “Centerfield,” Terry Cashman’s “Willie, Mickey and the Duke,” and several renditions of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Brad even slipped on a tape of Abbott and Costello performing their famous “Who’s On First” routine. Real mainstream fare, which did not surprise me. This was Arlen Specter’s turf, Republicans mostly, and these people had generally conservative tastes. You would not hear too many requests for the Goo Goo Dolls or Busta Rhymes in this part of the country.
It all seemed so ideal, Norman Rockwell could have been standing off to the side capturing the scene on canvas. Except my fears about that omen proved correct. Brad was one great guy—Tug McGraw, who had pitched for him the year before, had told me you could not find anyone with more respect for the game. A successful entrepreneur, he had started this business more out of a love for baseball than any longing for profit.
That said, he expected to fetch back a large return on that $2,500 investment. That first afternoon he had me pitch a complete game between two teams from local towns. Or rather, he had me pitch two complete games; I stayed on the mound for both sides. It would go on that way for most of the weekend.
I saw the irony in this arrangement. Throughout my professional career I had railed against the designated hitter, that symbol for baseball’s age of the specialist. That was Buckminster Fuller’s influence exerting itself. I had once heard Mr. Fuller declare that all forms of specialization bred extinction, a theory that struck me as one of the great universal truths.
Yet here I was the designated pitcher, doomed to stay on the mound till the final inning, never allowed to take my turn at the plate. The ultimate one-dimensional chucker. I not only pitched for both sides that day, I ended up notching sixty-four innings by the time Sunday evening rolled around. Neither Bartolo Colon nor Curt Schilling, the closest things this generation has to the workhorse pitchers of yesteryear, throws that many frames in an average month.
How did my arm survive the strain? Wasn’t easy. The physical abuse was bad enough, but pitching that much in such a short time can batter your brain as well as your arm. To do it successfully, you must possess the emotional makeup of someone who likes to repeatedly hit himself in the thumb with a ping hammer. I’m not masochistic. So to meet this challenge I transformed myself from a pitcher into a master actor from the Japanese Noh theater. Every gesture I made on the mound that weekend assumed significance; any waste in my motion vanished.
Coping required me to first force my mind to go blank as slate. I had to completely reformat my hard drive. I mentally transported myself to another place. A Wal-Mart in Akron, Ohio. I rolled my shopping cart down the canned-goods