Everything They Had (13 page)

Indeed, the real belief of the people who run Japanese baseball is that as long as there are
gaijin
players, Japanese baseball cannot really be considered first class. The current commissioner has asked all clubs to be rid of their Americans in five years.

“Last year,” said Whiting, “Tony Solaita, the former Yankee and Toronto Blue Jay, had a great year. Everything went right. Led the league in home runs and R.B.I.s. Led the league in game-winning hits. In the second half of the season, he got 14 of his 17 game-winning hits.” Whiting paused. “He finished a distant third in the M.V.P. voting. His manager told all the writers to vote for one of the other guys. So I told Solaita what happened and he was really pissed and he called the manager, who said, ‘I'm sorry; I didn't know you wanted it. Besides, you weren't here.' Solaita had a hard year. He was in the race for the home-run title, and the Japanese are still sensitive about
that
title, because it means power, and they're more touchy about power than about average. So in the last part of the season, the opposing pitchers started walking him all the time. He got desperate and asked his manager to argue with the umpires, and the manager did. Then he asked if Solaita wanted him to walk the other home-run hitter. Solaita said, ‘No, it's unprofessional.' But in the last appearance of the last game, he took himself out.”

Smith listened carefully as Whiting spoke. He had been warned.

A day later, Smith was frustrated even further. Sliding into third base, he hurt his knee badly. It would be at least a month before he could run hard again. If he were lucky, he would be able to pinch-hit in about two weeks. It would be even harder now to perform here the way he wanted.

A career for an athlete was an elusive thing, he thought. Only when it was virtually over, when the physical powers were diminishing, was it possible to have any genuine insight into what made a career—not a season but a complete career, the signature of a man. He saw himself now as a contemporary not so much of certain teammates from the Red Sox or Cardinals or Dodgers but, rather, of a handful of players who had entered the major leagues in one era, the mid-Sixties, and lasted through an entirely different one, the early Eighties. The first era had been harder, the game was tougher, the pay was smaller and a rookie was always a threat to a teammate's job. Smith himself had been paid $6500 in his rookie season. It was a world without guarantees. The players were forced to be much tougher, both mentally and physically (particularly, he believed, the black players, who had all spent time in vicious little Southern towns and who later, in the bigs, faced a more subtle kind of racism, an attitude that allowed a black player to be accepted as long as he was unquestioning of authority and was not different and did not complain. As long, in Reggie Smith's view, as he remained as white as he could be).

That era had gradually come to an end in the late Seventies with the advent of free agency. By the early Eighties, even mediocre players were signing huge contracts with so many built-in guarantees that the pressure on players to maximize their talents had eased. Only in exceptional cases, he believed, did pride goad a young player into higher levels of excellence. Hunger, he was convinced, had diminished.

He remembered, now, with almost astonishing clarity, the beginning of his own career—not just the hard times in Wytheville, Virginia, where he had encountered a racial prejudice unlike any he had known before, but far more clearly the time when he showed up at Red Sox spring-training camp in Scottsdale in 1964. He had been a rookie, and rookies were still almost subhuman in those days, referred to by the veterans as “Bush,” existing to be seen but not heard. If, in conversation, a rookie volunteered some experience of his—a minor-league moment, of course—the veterans would say, “Yeah, Bush, you hit .300 in Appalachia. We
all
hit .300 back there.”

Spring training with the Red Sox had been almost as much dream as reality. There had been Ted Williams prowling the field, his intensity and instinct for confrontation not dimmed by three years of retirement. It was amazing, Smith thought, that the man had been away from the game all those years and was still stalking pitchers. He noticed that wherever Williams went, the Boston players began almost unconsciously to edge away, particularly the pitchers. Williams liked to taunt pitchers; it was a challenge he carried over from his days as a hitter. Pitchers, he said, “couldn't goddamn help themselves. They're just dumb by breed.”

Williams loved to study young hitters. He was like a drill sergeant and he taught them, above all else, concentration.

“Bush, where was that pitch?”

“It was outside, Mr. Williams.”

“Where outside?”

“About two inches.”

“What do you mean
about
? Don't you know?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bush,” he would say in disgust, “you're too dumb to be a hitter.”

That spring, Williams had told reporters that a kid named Reggie Smith looked like a ballplayer, and that had been sweet.

In some ways, the real education of Reggie Smith had begun in that, his 19th year. Boston had assigned him to room with Earl Wilson, the Red Sox' only other black player, an immense power pitcher. Wilson's legend preceded him; he was not to be trifled with. In the previous season, he had pitched a no-hitter, and he was said to have only marginal tolerance for rookies. On the first day of spring training, Smith, determined to be respectful and not to behave like a rookie, had carried his suitcases down the hall, practicing all the while how he would greet this legend. He would prove to Wilson that he was a serious young man, not some brash rookie, since he was in truth a brash rookie. He finally knocked on the door and a huge voice told him to come in.

“Hello, Mr. Wilson, my name is …” he began.

An enormous black form began to rise out of the bed. “Get the fuck out of here!” he shouted. “My name is Earl.”

So Smith left the room, knocked again, entered and said, “Hello, Earl.” With that, he decided many years later, his education had commenced.

Not until long after both he and Wilson left Boston did he truly understand how generous Wilson had been. For Wilson, virtually alone on a mostly white team, had taken him in hand and made sure that he did not waste such exceptional natural gifts, particularly in an organization that had not yet become an equal-opportunity employer. That was not always easy or painless, for Wilson was educating a relatively soft young man for a harder world.

“You're so young, Bush,” he had said to him in that first week, “that you don't even have your man muscles yet.”

That spring, Wilson was pitching batting practice to Smith, who had power but did not yet know how to pull the ball. Wilson threw an inside pitch and Smith hit it sharply through the box. Wilson just managed to duck out of the ball's way.

Dick Radatz, the mammoth relief pitcher, began to get on Wilson. “You going to let that little kid get away with that, Earl?” he shouted. The next pitch, very fast, hit Smith in the back.

“Now hit that one back the middle,” Wilson said. So Smith started trying to hit everything through the middle and Wilson, in turn, finally threw right at his head. That made Smith even angrier, though his anger was directed at Radatz, who, he decided, had started all the trouble. Earl, after all, was his friend. So he started yelling at Radatz; then Wilson came in and grabbed him by the collar. A hand had never seemed so large.

“Hey, Road,” Wilson said, using a nickname for a roommate, “you're out of line. This is the big leagues, and you've got to learn to pull pitches like that.”

A few minutes later, Smith was sitting in the dugout still fuming, when a huge foot belonging to Radatz suddenly appeared in front of him, blocking all else from view. It was surely the largest foot that Reggie Smith had ever seen. “You mad at me?” a voice that was in some way connected to the foot had asked. This man, Smith thought, is huge. Just huge.

“No, I think I'm over it now,” he answered.

“I'm very glad of that,” the voice said, and both it and the foot disappeared.

Later that day at Korakuen Stadium, Smith recalled an incident from his boyhood in California, a very long way from Japan. He had been about 15 and was driving back from a semipro game with his father when they had spotted Willie Mays doing a promotion in a tire store. Reggie had walked up to Mays and told him that he, too, was a ballplayer. Mays, to his surprise, had not asked him whether he batted lefty or righty or which position he played. The only thing he had said was, “Do you know how to duck?” Now Smith finally understood what Mays had meant.

Earl Wilson understood, too, by the time he spotted the immense raw talent in Smith. “He's in the Clemente/Mays class,” Wilson would say, and he loved, that first spring, to show him off. Once, when Boston played the Giants in an exhibition game, he went over to the San Francisco bench and took Mays aside. “Willie,” he said, “you think you've got an arm. Now watch this kid.” Wilson worried about Smith, about his instinct for defiance in a profession not much given to contention (“Reggie reminded me a lot of me,” he later said), and he had worked to protect him. Smith remembered now how Earl had told him once, when the younger player was depressed, that he was not allowed to get down nor to let his temper diminish his talent. “Reggie,” he had said, “you've
got
to make it. You are the best young prospect ever to come along in the Boston organization. You've got the best chance and so you've got to make it. Not just for yourself but for all of us.”

It happened very quickly. By 1967, he was in his rookie season and having a wonderful year. At first, he'd taken pleasure from the status, from simply being in the big leagues, and he had done the usual rookie things: bought the requisite T-bird, endowed it with
REGGIE
plates and enjoyed it when he was recognized on the streets of Boston. He had learned to time it, to watch the excitement in the face of the surprised citizens, and had learned to be very cool under the glare of that attention.

His natural gifts had shown through from the start, and he loved it when opposing teams gathered in front of their dugouts to watch him throw from the outfield during pregame practice. Roberto Clemente, who had been one of his heroes, said that Smith had the best arm in baseball. Carl Yastrzemski had taken him under his wing that first year, and that had been both generous and unusual, since Yaz usually stood apart from the others. But in 1967, the ball club came together. It was a young team, and it did something no team had done in 20 years—it went from last place in one season to first place in the next one. Baseball was sheer pleasure for Smith, and it generated a sense of excitement he had not known before. He simply could not wait to get to the ball park every day. In the morning, there was always an impatience, a feeling that they should skip the pregame drills and just play the game.

That summer, he watched his friend Yastrzemski with an admiration that was complete. Yaz had always been an exceptional teacher, not so much by what he said as by what he did (the lessons were there if you wanted them, but you had to ask; he did not volunteer anything). From Yaz had come not only his own shrewd insights about hitting but the distilled lessons of Ted Williams as well, for Yaz had listened carefully to Williams and shared with him that intensity of concentration, as if in life, baseball alone mattered.

If that was normally true, then it was even more true in the summer of 1967. During the pennant run, Yaz started taking extra batting practice after home games, something he had picked up from Williams. Soon he asked Smith and a few others to join him, and there was a special pleasure in those hours, a rare sense of camaraderie among big-leaguers. There they were, staying behind after everyone else had gone home, men playing like boys, exulting in the dual pleasures of their manhood and their boyhood.

Eventually, Boston went sour for Smith. There were divisions on the team; he was in the Yaz group, and the people who did not like Yaz took out their frustration on him, not on the superstar. There were racial tensions with fans and sportswriters, for the Boston sports press in the late Sixties was not entirely ready for a brash young black player who seemed to lack what some sportswriters felt was the requisite gratitude of a black player to a white newspaperman. Then, in the early Seventies, there were the beginnings of his injuries, and with them he became more of a target for the Red Sox fans.

At the end of the 1973 season, he was traded to the Cardinals. He was glad to go, glad to get out of Boston, where he had stayed too long, he thought, and where there was still a curious reluctance to accept a black star. He was also glad to be going to the National League, where he was sure his game would be more natural.

He loved the National League immediately. It was a far better place to utilize his skills. He felt liberated there, able to play the game all out as he had not been able to in Boston. (With a similar number of games played in each league, Smith made the all-star team five times from the National League and only twice from the American.) Speed was of the essence here; he was aware of that the moment he walked into the Cardinals' locker room. No one symbolized it more than Lou Brock. He might seem like a perfect gentleman on the outside, but there was an intensity with which he exploited his speed and pressured the opposition with his running that was almost frightening. No one was going to stand in the way of what he wanted. Brock's preparation for a game reminded Smith of nothing so much as a razor being sharpened and then sharpened again. Brock had exceptional speed, but what gave him his edge—it was all about edge, no matter how small—was his intelligence and passion. Smith worked with Brock, helping time opposing pitchers and catchers on their moves, and he decided they were all part of the same generation. They were the lineal descendants of Jackie Robinson, all in their own ways fighting the stereotype that blacks had talent but not intelligence. They were hard men, Smith decided later, because they were always proving themselves.