The Dead Pull Hitter
Read The Dead Pull Hitter Online
Authors: Alison Gordon
A Kate Henry Mystery
Alison Gordon
For Isaac Anderson and King Gordon for their love of words and Paul Bennett for his words of love.
The reading light over my seat didn’t work. It had been burned out the last time I was on the plane, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. I moved to the aisle seat, the one with the non-reclining chair back, strapped myself in, and opened my book.
I was already in a bad mood. We had been sitting on the ground at LaGuardia Airport for half an hour. The equipment truck had a flat tire, and we couldn’t leave until it got there. The passengers in the rows behind me were socking back drinks and getting more unruly by the minute. I wanted a cigarette badly.
Claire, the purser, leaned across me and lowered the tray table on the window seat. She set down a couple of baby bottles of vodka, a can of tonic, and a glass of ice.
“You look as though you could use this.”
“You are an angel. How much longer?”
“The truck just got here,” she said. “The way the guys are going, I hope they load fast. It’s getting pretty drunk out.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
The guys she referred to were the Toronto Titans baseball team, currently in first place in the American League East. They had just swept the Yankees in New York and our charter flight was headed to Toronto for the last home stand of the season. They were more cocky and arrogant than usual. And that’s going some.
“Yo, Hank! What kind of shit did you write tonight?”
Stinger Swain, the third baseman, yelled at me from his seat five rows back, a mean little smirk on his sallow face. He had just folded his poker hand and was looking for other sport. I tried to ignore him.
“Yo, Lady Writer! I’m talking to you,” he said, tossing his empty beer can at me. “Did you write about your hero Preacher’s catch in the eighth inning? If my white ass looked as good as his black one in uniform, would you write about me all the time, too?”
And kids lined up for this guy’s autograph? I turned in my seat.
“I wrote about you today, Stinger.”
“The lady’s finally learning to appreciate the finer points of the game.”
“I wrote about the way you looked sliding into third: like a pregnant seal trying to climb an ice floe.”
That earned me a few appreciative hoots. Alejandro Jones, the second baseman, barked and slapped his palms together like flippers.
“Shut up, Taco-breath,” Swain said, then turned to Goober Grabowski, his seatmate. “Deal the cards.”
We finally took off, to the accompaniment of sarcastic cheers and vulgar noises. As the no-smoking sign clicked off, Moose Greer, the team public relations director, dropped his seat back in the row in front of me and peered at me through the gap.
“Glad to be going home?”
“It’s been a long road trip.”
And a long season. I had spent just about enough time on the Flying Fart, which was what the clever fellows behind me call this elderly bird, for reasons I won’t go into. Trust me, the name is appropriate.
Because of the one a.m. jet curfew at Pearson International, and, I suspect, the high pockets of Titan owner Ted Ferguson, we fly a propeller-driven plane after night games. It’s the airborne equivalent of the spring-shot buses that at one time or another transported most of this same gang through the minor leagues—reliable, but not luxurious. The seats are covered in faded orange and green, clashing horribly with the sky-blue-and-red pop art patterns on the bulkheads. But we ride in relative comfort, with a friendly crew and plenty of food and booze.
It’s a funny little world on the airplane, a society in which each member knows his, or her, own place. Literally. The seating never varies.
Red O’Brien, the manager, sits alone in the right front row of seats. The travelling secretary has the left side. Coaches take the next two rows and the trainer, his assistant, the equipment manager, and Moose Greer are just behind.
The writers and broadcasters sit in the next couple of rows and the players have the rest of the plane: the Bible readers and sleepers towards the front; the card players and drinkers next; and the rookies in the very back. I am the only woman on board who doesn’t serve drinks.
I’m Katherine Henry. My friends call me Kate. I am a baseball writer by trade, and for the past five years I’ve spent the best months of Toronto’s calendar everywhere but at home, following the Titans all over the American League map.
I’m forty, older than most of the Titans, including the manager. I’m tallish, prettyish, and a lot more interesting than most of the people I write about, but I love baseball. On the really good days I can’t believe I’m paid to do my job.
I’m also good at it, to the active disappointment of some of my male colleagues, who have been waiting for me to fall flat since the day I walked into my first spring training. By now I have earned some grudging respect.
So has the team. They have never finished higher than fourth in the tough Eastern Division in the ten years they’ve been a team, but this season they began winning in spring training and forgot to stop. They slipped into first place in the beginning of June and have been there ever since.
There are a number of reasons for this. Stinger Swain is one. He’s having a career season, with a batting average well over .300 and thirty-seven home runs going into the last week of the season. But he isn’t the only one. Red likes to say that if they award a new car for the Most Valuable Player this year they should make it a bus. Managers always like to say that. They find it in the media phrase book they get at manager school. It’s right in there with “He pitched well enough to win,” “We’re just taking it one game at a time,” and “You can’t win any ballgames if you don’t score any runs.”
But Stinger is this year’s star, unfortunately for the writers. Swain is a singularly unpleasant person, a vulgar, racist, sexist bully who embodies everything wrong with a society that finds its heroes on playing fields. He delights in making the writers uncomfortable. In my case, he insists upon doing all interviews in the nude. And his hands are never idle.
But there are more pleasant players. The best story of the year is Mark Griffin, an engaging left-handed rookie reliever with twenty saves. He’s just twenty-one, a real pheenom, and a Canadian, born and raised in my neighbourhood. They call him “Archie,” because he’s got red hair, freckles, and went to Riverdale Collegiate. His best buddy on the team is another left-hander, Flakey Patterson. When he and Griffin became friends, some of the players started calling Flakey Jughead. Swain and Grabowski called him Veronica.
Griffin is relatively sane, but Patterson is a Central Casting left-handed pitcher—loony as a tune. During the three years he has been with the Titans, he’s tried meditation, EST, self-hypnotism, macrobiotics, Tai Chi, and Norman Vincent Peale, and he alternates periods of extreme self-denial with bouts of excess. During the All-Star break, in protest over not being chosen for the team, he dyed his hair bright orange and wore it clipped close on the sides and long on top: as close to punk as is possible in the conservative world of sport.
He is the third starter in the rotation. The first, the Titans’ erstwhile ace, is right-hander Steve Thorson, Stevie the K, a twelve-year veteran and winner of a couple of Cy Young awards when he pitched for the Dodgers. His handsome blue-eyed face and body that won’t quit are used to sell everything from breakfast cereal to men’s cologne. He’s mobbed for autographs wherever he goes. Grown men and women pack giant K’s in their ballpark bags to wave when he strikes a batter out. He’s the biggest star the Titans have ever had. And he’s an insufferable prick.
The television guys love him, because he’s always glad to see them. It might have something to do with the money they slip him for interviews, but I think it’s also a matter of control. They only want thirty-second clips and feed him soft questions. He can do without the print guys. It’s not that he refuses to talk to us, he just talks such self-serving crap that I hate to write it down.
He’s not popular with the team, either. He always finds a way to blame his failure on others. The centre fielder or second baseman should have caught the ball that fell in for a game-winning hit. The catcher called for the wrong pitch. The manager shouldn’t have taken him out of the game when he did, or, sometimes, should have when he didn’t.
But he’s a winner, which counts for a lot. Or he was until this season. Either age or opposing hitters caught up with him, and the former twenty-game winner had only thirteen going into the last week of the season.
It’s ironic that the season they might win it all has been his worst, but I’m secretly delighted. His role as a winner was taken over by Tony Costello, nicknamed Bony because he’s not, a left-hander with his own set of idiosyncrasies. He’s a lunchbucket kind of guy from New Jersey, simple and matter-of-fact, but a total neurotic, so wrapped up in his phobias he has trouble functioning. He’s afraid of flying, heights, the dark, germs, snakes, insects, and, most of all, failure. This last despite the fact that he’s having a dream season. With twenty-one wins, he’s a contender for the Cy Young Award, carrying the team on his pudgy shoulders. That scares him, too.
I looked back to where he was sitting, just behind Swain. He clutched a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, staring straight ahead. There were eight little Scotch bottles lined up on his tray. A typical trip for Bony. He’s a candidate for the detox centre after a trip to the coast.
This road trip had been rough: Chicago, Detroit, and New York, all towns in which a person could get into a lot of trouble if she were so inclined. This late in the season I was so inclined I was almost bent. I was looking forward to a long night in my own bed.
I undid my seat belt and headed back towards the john, excusing myself past the players in the aisles. A few pretended not to hear me or refused to move, then made lewd remarks as I squeezed past. Steve Thorson yelled something about the back of the plane being off limits to the press. What a bunch of jokers, eh? Some fun.
The smiling face of Tiny Washington was a beacon. Surely the sweetest man on the team, he never gave me a hard time.
“The lovely Kate Henry,” he murmured as I got to his seat, his voice a rich bass. “It’s always a pleasure to see you. You’re always welcome in my part of the world.”
“Cut the crap, Tiny,” I said. He winked.
“Stop by for visit on your way back. We’ll have us a little conversation.”
Washington was one of the most sophisticated players on the team, but he hid it well. If people wanted to think he was nothing but a slow, friendly, shuck-and-jive kind of guy from the ghetto in Washington, D.C., that was fine with him. It made his life a lot easier. But I was lucky enough to find out early on what was behind the façade. It had made my life a lot easier.
That first spring, Tiny came up to me by the batting cage after a few days, introduced himself, offered to answer any questions I might have, then left me alone. I took him at his word and used him as a sounding board for my early perceptions.
It wasn’t characteristic of him. He usually let reporters come to him. At the end of the season he explained why, late one night in the hotel bar in Cleveland.
“I watched the other writers and the way they were treating you. I listened to the other players. I could see how scared you were, but more important, I could see that you had pride. I thought maybe someone should give you a chance.”
Then he had sensed how moved I was, finished his drink, and moved on.
“Hey, I give all the rookies a hand, if they know how to take it,” he said. “You knew how.”
That season, Tiny was the only legitimate star the team had. He was a veteran, admired by players all over the league. He set an example for the young Titans, especially the blacks, and smoothed my way with a word here and there to players on other teams. It helped a lot, and I was grateful.
Now he was at the end of his career, and smart enough to know it. He might have a few years left as a designated hitter, but there was a young player ready to take his place at first base. Hal Cooper, a.k.a. Kid, was a big farm boy from Nebraska who had been biding his time in Triple A for the last couple of years. He was called up when the rosters increased in September and Tiny had gone out of his way to help him. I hoped the Kid knew how to take the hand, too.