Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [93]
I had forgotten that in Cuba stealing counts as a capital offense.
The Pinar first baseman stabbed the carom off his pitcher’s glove and stepped on first for the second out. Without pausing, he threw a strike to his catcher that beat me by a good two feet. I started to hook-slide around the catcher’s tag, but he planted his foot in my path. Sliding into his shin guard was like crashing into a concrete stump. My body halted. I lay laughing in front of home plate, too tired to feel any pain, while the umpire waved me out. Double play. Another game lost.
I kept looking out the window during the bus ride back to our hotel in Vinales. As the driver approached a familiar house, I asked him to pull over. She stood near her front door, the old woman who had given me the guava two years earlier. I did not have to introduce myself. “You came back,” she said in an amazed voice, “just to see us!” Her grandson was five now, still shy, still not talking, just that same pair of large, questioning brown eyes hiding behind his grandmother’s bulk.
I presented her with a rainbow-striped cotton shift and handed him a pair of ankle-high boots. “His first shoes,” his grandmother told me. She shook my hand and chattered in Spanish. Her words came so quickly, I had no idea what she said, but that did not matter. I saw it all there in her eyes. After showing off her place—nothing had changed since our last visit—she kissed me on the cheek and once again insisted on sharing a handful of fruit from her meager supply, papayas this time. I ate them on the bus, and their sweetness lingered in my mouth for hours. But the smile she gave me when I handed her that dress and her grandson those shoes and the grins on the faces of those elderly Gigi Stars who discovered their youth waiting for them in a box of baseball gloves will remain with me until my memory surrenders to time.
19
HANGIN’ WITH THE BIG DOG
I started hearing Ted Williams stories from the moment the Boston Red Sox signed me as a pitcher out of USC in 1968. Ted had retired eight years before, but he never relinquished his title as Mr. Red Sox, the greatest hitter ever to wear that franchise’s uniform.
People who had played with Williams—Johnny Pesky and Bobby Doerr among them—would recall for us minor-leaguers how Ted’s strike-zone judgment had been so precise, he could go weeks without swinging at a bad pitch, or how his eyes remained so sharp, he could still read a record label spinning at 78 rpm. A writer told me that when Ted hit .406 in 1941, he made such solid contact in every at bat he did not hit a single pop fly all season. Ted himself once claimed that his swing passed through the strike zone so quickly at times he could smell burning leather when he grazed a pitch.
I had no idea how much embellishment colored these tales, but we enjoyed hearing them. Yet when a coach described how Ted once hit a ball so hard, it cleaved in two, well, that carried the legend-making too far. “You guys,” I told him, “make Williams sound as if he’s God.”
“Oh, that’s silly,” the coach replied. “God could never hit like Ted.”
It was not until 1971 that I finally had the opportunity to watch Ted swing a bat against live pitching. I had just established myself as a member of the Red Sox starting rotation. He was managing the Washington Senators and had come to a sold-out Fenway Park to join other Boston heroes such as Frank Malzone and Walt Dropo in a home run–hitting contest. For every ball the participants smacked over the fence that day, the Red Sox donated $500 to the Jimmy Fund, a New England–based charity that raises money for juvenile cancer research. Williams had supported the organization throughout his career.
From the moment Ted