Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [98]
I doubt any insurance company would protect Alcor for the potential liability. So if the company has the remains and its president is reading this, he should call. I know where we can get a Viking burial ship at a good price and constructing a proper funeral pyre is a snap. Finding two virgins in Key West . . . that will be the difficult part.
20
OF FATHERS AND THEIR CHILDREN
I had just turned nine years old when my father first handed me that ancient baseball glove. It did not resemble any glove I had ever seen before. For one thing, the manufacturer had not attached the five fingers to each other as with modern gloves; a fielder could not count on snaring a ball in the top of the webbing. No ice-cream cone catches. And it felt dinky on my hand, more a mitten than the baskets fielders wear today.
My own glove had emerged from its package colored a dull yellow brown and gave off the same smell as my book bag on the first day of school. Time had buffed and stained the leather of this older glove into a burnished oxblood. It did not give off any one scent, but a blend of rich, gamy odors. In my boy’s imaginings, that glove carried the smell of sweat and liniment and cigar smoke and the dirt from one hundred different infields. The aroma of something that had traveled many miles in the company of men.
My grandfather William F. Lee Sr. wore that glove when he played second base for the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League in 1918. Many players in that era regarded the PCL as a third major league. Its star performers routinely refused to sign with teams like the New York Yankees or St. Louis Cardinals, since joining those clubs would have required these players to accept pay cuts. William Lee stood on a rung just below star, an excellent contact hitter, dangerous in the clutch, and one of the best fielders in the entire circuit.
Dad slipped the glove on his own hand and explained how his father would slice the leather from the center of it, exposing his palm. My grandfather believed it was easier to control a catch when you could feel the ball against your skin. This practice also gave him a decided edge over rival second basemen. During Grandfather’s playing days, the home team fielders left their gloves at their positions so the visiting players could wear them when they took their turn to play defense.
Other second basemen hated using Grandfather’s glove. They lacked the thick pad of callus that had formed on his palm and acted as a cushion against hard-hit balls. Many of them yelped in pain whenever they fielded a searing grounder or line drive while wearing my grandfather’s doctored mitt, and some even shied away from plays rather than risk damaging their hands.
My grandfather’s webless glove would not let you stab at balls the way infielders do today; a hot smash could rip away your finger. He had to move his body behind every grounder and quickly transfer the ball to his throwing hand. This left no time to double-clutch. He either made the play right or he didn’t make it at all. And from what I’ve heard, Grandfather rarely botched a grounder.
He studied the rudiments of defense and practiced his art for hours every day, taking ground balls of various speeds from every conceivable angle until his legs melted. Grandfather schooled my dad in baseball fundamentals and taught him the proper way to play every infield position. During the 1940s, my father started at shortstop for Jackson Paint, a semipro team that played its home games in Griffith Park, just to the side of the Los Angeles River.
Scotty Drysdale managed that club and his son Don, the future Hall of Fame pitcher, served as bat boy. Don was fourteen when we first met, a long-muscled string bean and already a schoolboy pitching legend renowned for throwing