Everything They Had (15 page)

Some of his friends had thought that he'd come to the end of the road, but after that night, things began to change for the better. He and Oh, whom he respected, had a long dinner that helped clear the air, and the umpires seemed to ease up and give him more of a strike zone (there were quite reliable reports that the sainted Oh had talked to them). He began to get better pitches and he began to hit. He shortened his swing to match the style of Japanese baseball—hands right in front of his face. Suddenly, he was not just hitting, he was carrying the team. That was important: earlier, when the Giants seemed to have the pennant locked up, they had not needed him. Now, when they were making a run, he was dominating the game, going in the process from bad
gaijin
to good
gaijin
. By the end of the season, he had 28 homers and 72 R.B.I.s in only 261 at bats. (Tatsunori Hara, the team's star, who benefited from having Smith hit behind him, had 31 homers and 103 R.B.I.s in almost twice as many at bats.)

Soon after Smith got hot, the Japanese press was writing positively about him. The Giants clinched the pennant on a day in which he hit three home runs. A series of articles in a Japanese sports paper featured his tips on hitting and referred to him as Professor Smith. There were even some commercial endorsements, which was unheard of for an American player. He finished second in the most-valuable-player voting, behind Hara. The owner of the team, Shoriki, referred to Smith's salary as a bargain. Smith himself began to talk of what he would do when he came back in 1984 and about the advice he would give a new
gaijin
player (“Forget everything you thought you knew about baseball and strike zones and strategy …”). Appreciated by the Japanese, he in turn became more appreciative of them, of how much they had created out of so little. Everyone seemed to relax a bit more. Acceptance bred acceptance. For the first time, there was on their part a recognition of how passionately he had wanted to excel.

In the end, some of the Giants' front-office people spoke of the fact that the team could not have won the pennant without him. Newspapers said that Smith was not like the other
gaijins
, who had come over only for the money. Instead, he had played hard and well under difficult conditions. Even a
gaijin
, it seemed, could learn something new about an old game.

I grew up with my soul divided. For I am both a man of New York and of New England. Things as critical as this, the selection of a favored baseball team, are not, as some suspect, a matter of choice; one does not choose a team as one does not select his own genes. They are confirmed upon you, more than we know an act of heredity. By an odd blend of fates and geography, I am somewhat schizophrenic in my baseball loyalties; I think of baseball, and I think American League, and then New York and Boston. The National League has always been a distant shadowy place. I was born in New York in the very borough where the Yankees play; my father, a small-town boy with a small-town obsession about baseball, took me to the Stadium in 1939 when I was 5, having in the previous two years talked almost exclusively about the great DiMaggio. So I began not just with loyalty to a locale, but to a mythic figure, a man worthy of his myth and who did not disappoint. He was to the little boy sitting there that day, pleasure of pleasures excused early from school, every bit as dazzling and graceful as my father had claimed he would be. The Stadium seemed not so much a sports coliseum as a cathedral; never had grass seemed so green, never had any group of men caught my attention; this, unlike the world of elementary school I had just left behind, was real. I departed that day a confirmed Yankee fan. Soon the war came, my father went back in the service, and we moved to Winsted, in northwest Connecticut, which serves as the selected site of my otherwise dislocated childhood. Winsted then was the classic New England mill town of about 8,000, a serious baseball town, its own loyalties somewhat divided between Boston and New York. But it is about 20 miles nearer New York and the magnetic pull of the Yankees was somewhat more powerful then, in large part I suspect because the reception for the Yankee games, WINS-1010 on your dial, Ballantine Blasts and White Owl Wallops with Mel Allen, was stronger than that of the Red Sox.

But we were a divided family; my mother's family had grown up in Boston, and my Uncle Harry, her oldest brother, had become successful in the wholesale paint business. He occasionally visited us in Winsted and was intrigued by the idea of a young nephew whose knowledge of batting averages was so encyclopedic, and who could repeat so faithfully the wisdom of that era's sportcasters. He also had, it turned out, season tickets to the Red Sox games. That seemed almost beyond comprehension to me; it was not that we were so poor, but we were, in those immediate post-Depression years, most assuredly frugal. We lived on a World War II officer's allowance, and something like going to a baseball game was at best a pleasure permitted once a season. Uncle Harry was said within family circles to be something of a dandy; that is, he not only made a lot of money but he was quite willing to spend it. That he could go to all 77 home games, and sit in the very same seats, seemed both miraculous and quite possibly frivolous. We simply did not know people who did grand things like this. It seemed to mark him not so much as a relative, but as someone from another family who had mistakenly wandered into our lives. His seats, he said, were right behind the first base dugout, and he loved them because he could see the ballplayers' faces up close. They were such clean-looking young men, he said. Could this really be true? Did he have seats this good? If it were, then it struck me that Uncle Harry, if not actually on speaking terms with these distant and vaunted celebrities, was at least on
seeing
terms with them. He seemed to know a great deal about them—Pesky, Doerr, York, the mighty Williams. Pesky's name, he confided, was not really Pesky. It was Paveskovich. Mel Allen, to my knowledge, had never mentioned this. Could I doubt Uncle Harry and his inside knowledge anymore? But it was true; in time the war was over and we were allowed to travel again and we visited Boston and Uncle Harry made good his pledge. He
did
have wonderful seats and I could see in the players' faces up close the disappointment after they had grounded out, and turned back toward the dugout. They seemed quite wonderful, so large and powerful, and on that day, against Detroit, with Hal Newhouser (Ron Guidry before Guidry) pitching, I found myself rooting for them.

So it was that my childhood concluded with two conflicting loyalties. The first was one to the Yankees, and most of all DiMaggio. When I think of DiMaggio, I see him, not so much at bat, though the stance was classic, but of him going back on a fly ball, or of running the bases, particularly going around second on his way to third; I have never seen a tall man run with more grace. He was the first of my heroes; my true (and pure) loyalty to the Yankees ends with his retirement. Never in the age of Mantle was I able to summon the commitment and obligation innocence that I had brought to the age of DiMaggio. I was growing older. By the time DiMaggio retired in 1951, I was 17, and it was time to go on to other things.

But even as a young man, the vision and the loyalty were clouded. For there was the other vision, that of the Red Sox, and most of all, of Williams. As DiMaggio seemed so natural in the field, so Williams seemed equally natural at the plate, first seemingly loose, and gangly, and then suddenly bound tightly and perfectly together, the swing at once so smooth and yet so powerful, all of it so completely focused—as if he was destined to do this one thing, hit a baseball and nothing else. Of his talents, there was no lack of admiration among Yankee fans: When I was a boy, there was a constant schoolboy debate not just about the respective merits of DiMaggio or Williams, but of what would happen if each had played in the other's park, DiMaggio with the Green Monster, Williams with the short Stadium right-field porch. It was the ultimate tribute to Williams that had the trade been made, it would have been accepted without complaint by most Yankee fans.

In the summer of 1946, my father had come back from the war, and he had taken my brother and me to the Stadium to see a Yankee–Red Sox game. That was a glorious year for the Red Sox, all their players had come back from the war, and the Red Sox players more than those of the Yankees were making a comfortable readjustment to baseball. Their pitchers were healthy, and by mid-season they held an immense lead over the Yankees. On that day, Aug. 10, 1946 (you could look it up, as Casey Stengel said), Williams hit two home runs, the first of them a truly massive three-run shot off Tiny Bonham that went into the upper deck. The memory of that drive, the hardest-hit ball I have ever seen, remains with me today; I still see the force of it, the unwavering majestic trajectory, the ball climbing as it hit the seats, the silence of the fans, stunned not just that the Red Sox had scored three runs, but that a ball had been hit that hard. Williams seemed that day to a young boy a glorious figure, a hero who did what heroes are supposed to do.

I went on to college in Boston a few years later. There I was, like most visitors to the city, puzzled by the harshness with which the Boston press treated him. He was clearly the greatest hitter of his generation in baseball, he had just returned from his second tour of duty as a combat pilot, he was, it seemed, defying baseball's actuarial tables, and it was a pleasure to go out early to Fenway and watch him taking batting practice, a game within a game. I did not know as much about the media then as I do now, but I knew that the Boston papers were by and large bad (in fact, they were probably worse than that in the early Fifties), that he was personally victimized by the most primitive kind of circulation wars, and that he, proud, idiosyncratic and unbending, was red meat for newspapers which were desperately trying to survive in a world which no longer needed them. What they did to him seems in retrospect to border on cruelty. It is probably true that he played into their hands, and was his own worst enemy, though his behavior, so much criticized then, seems by the modern Richter scale of athletic behavior mild enough. I did not share that view of the Boston writers that the problem with the Red Sox was Williams. (I suspect that this was why John Updike's piece, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” has itself taken on such singular importance. It is as if after hundreds of lower courts had ruled unfairly against Williams for all those years, Up-dike, a writer of skill and knowledge, taking time off from the chronicling of suburban infidelity, became in effect the Supreme Court ruling in favor of him, overturning the lesser judgments of lesser courts.) It was not the fault of Williams at all. Quite the reverse: It struck me that the late Forties was a time of marvelous matchups between two almost perfectly equal teams, that the advantage that the Yankees held was one of pitching and depth—the ability to trade for a particular player. For example, in 1946 the Yankees traded additional bench strength for Eddie Lopat. That gave the Yankees a pitching staff of Reynolds, Raschi and Lopat, the core of the strongest pitching staff in the league for the next six years.

The memory of Williams and that special grace lingers. I now think often of him; we live in a nation which seeks heroes and cites as its heroes the kings of celluloid like John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone, each of whom managed to stay out of his generation's war. I am wary of heroes in general, but as I grow older, I have become more and more intrigued by Williams, the man apart. Perhaps it is that wonderfully leathery face, for Ted Williams even looked like what he was and what he did with that William Holden cragginess. Perhaps it is the deeds, that prolonged exquisite career, the willingness to go for it on the last day of the .400 season. But finally it is as well the ability to stand apart, crusty, independent, outspoken, true to himself, living to his own specifications, and rules, the frontier man of the modern age. I have a sense of a life lived without regret and I hope that that is true. Grown now, I can still close my eyes and I can see DiMaggio going back on a ball, or kicking the dirt at second base after Gionfriddo had caught the ball in the 1947 World Series; I can as clearly still see these 40 years later Williams swinging, the ball heading for the third tier.

As I grew older, my loyalties softened, and my priorities changed. I went to school in Boston, and I soon was overseas as a foreign correspondent. Other issues clouded the purity of my baseball loyalties. I would root for certain teams based on their special character or my feeling about their cities (I root as a matter of course against all Texas and California teams, and I was deeply disappointed when Houston knocked off the Lakers this year, thus depriving the Celtics of the chance to do it). The real world began to interfere with the fantasy world of baseball; my pull to the Yankees weakened and that to the Red Sox began to grow, for I liked the Red Sox teams of the late Sixties, Yastrzemski-Smith-Conigliaro-Petrocelli. In 1964, just back from two years in Vietnam, I went to Opening Day at the Stadium with my editor and a few other writers, and I remember two things, Ann Mudge, the girlfriend of Philip Roth, refusing to stand for the National Anthem as an antiwar protest, the first I had ever seen, and the sweet swing of a young rookie named Tony Conigliaro. In 1967 I went to an early-season game at Yankee Stadium. On that day a Red Sox rookie pitcher named Billy Rohr was pitching. About the sixth innning, it was obvious that he had a no-hitter going. The fascination grew, the crowd inevitably rooting not so much for a team, but for the event. The seventh and eighth innings passed. Still a no-hitter. In the ninth inning, with one out, Tom Tresh hit a shot to left field. Yastrzemski was playing shallow, if memory serves, and went back, and dove just at the right moment, his body tumbling into a complete somersault as he made the catch. It ranks with the Gionfriddo catch as the greatest I have ever seen, made more remarkable by the fact that it saved a no-hitter. The next batter, Elston Howard, lined a hit into right-center. I thought, as I had of Conigliaro, that Rohr had a great career ahead of him. He was to win two more games in his major league career.