The Soul of Baseball (18 page)

“He’s safe,” Buck said as he pointed at the painting.

“You got the point right away,” Kadir said.

Buck sat in a metal folding chair, and people surrounded him and asked baseball questions. Then a familiar thing happened. The questions stopped. And people started telling Buck their own stories about baseball. This never failed. There was something about Buck that seemed to invite people to tell him their stories.

The television reporter who had come to interview Buck stopped in the middle of the interview, put down his camera, and told Buck how the first game he ever attended was rained out. “I cried like a baby,” he said. “But I still have the program.”

Another guy told Buck a story about the 1971 All-Star Game. In that game, Reggie Jackson hit the ball onto the roof of old Tiger Stadium. The ball had clanked off one of the light towers on top of the stadium. A Baseball Hall of Famer, Al Kaline, said he had never heard a sound quite like the one made when the ball hit Reggie’s bat.

“I was watching that game,” the guy said, “and I put a tape recorder next to the television so I could record the announcer’s call. Then Reggie hit the ball…” and the man clutched his heart and said that in the days and weeks afterward, he would play the tape again and again and again, until he knew every crackle and buzz of the tape. He listened over and over to the sound of Reggie Jackson hitting a baseball out of Tiger Stadium and beyond imagination.

“You know what play I love?” Buck said. “The triple. That’s my favorite play. Someone hits a home run, what happens? Everyone stands around and watches the ball go. Then the guy jogs around the bases. But, man, someone hits a triple…”

And then Buck spoke a haiku:

 

Everyone’s running.

The whole field bursts to life, man,

Best play in baseball.

 

Outside, a cool wind blew off Coronado Bay. It was still summer by the calendar, but fall chilled the air. On one side of Buck, Mark Cohen still talked about how nervous he felt when he was a boy and was trying to get autographs from the Chicago Cubs. On the other side of Buck, Kadir Nelson talked about how scared and amazed he was when he met the all-time home-run leader Hank Aaron. A young couple on their honeymoon walked into the gallery, three women who had just finished their book club lunch walked in, an older couple who had just been outside arguing about his driving walked in, and soon they all gathered around Buck O’Neil, and they either talked about baseball and being young or they listened.

“What did I tell you,” Buck said as the gallery burst into life around him. “People say baseball’s dead. Baseball doesn’t die. People die. Baseball lives on.”

M
onte Irvin and Buck O’Neil sat on a bench in front of the stadium in San Diego and watched the baseball fans walk by. The people were headed to the evening ballgame, the San Diego Padres against the Philadelphia Phillies. The baseball fans wore caps and authentic Padres jerseys. Many of the jerseys featured the name “Greene.”

“Who is Greene?” Monte Irvin had asked.

Buck shrugged. Khalil Greene was a blond-haired Padres shortstop who, even under his baseball cap, had the unmistakable look of a surfer. He fit San Diego. The fans, so many in their Khalil Greene jerseys, walked slowly. There’s no rush in California. Some of the fans drank out of beer cans. Some carried their baseball mitts.

“Nobody uses the word ‘mitt’ anymore, have you noticed that?” Buck asked.

“Well, they still say ‘catcher’s mitt,’” Monte Irvin said.

“Yes they do. But for everything else, they say ‘glove.’ They don’t say ‘mitt.’ We used to call all the gloves ‘mitts.’”

“We did? I don’t remember that. I think we called them ‘gloves’ sometimes.”

“I like the word ‘mitt,’” Buck said.

Nobody seemed to notice Monte and Buck, which suited them fine. This gave them a chance to talk about nothing. They had come to be part of the San Diego Padres’ Annual Salute to the Negro Leagues, and they both knew that in only a few minutes they would be rushed off to make appearances and do interviews and sign autographs, and there would be no chance to talk.

“I see we lost Double Duty,” Monte Irvin said.

“Yeah.”

“You going to the funeral?”

“Yeah. You?”

“No. I can’t make it. Duty lived a good life.”

“What you talking about? He lived one hundred and three years. He lived a great life.”

“Never stopped living.”

“No sir. You’re right, Monte. Never stopped living.”

Monte Irvin leaned on his cane. He was eighty-five, and only recently his body had started to betray him. Doctors kept telling him he would not get better unless they operated, and Irvin believed them. He had decided he would not get better.

“You ever stretch, Buck?”

“Stretch?” Buck said. “What do you mean?”

“Can you stretch your back?”

“Well, yes, I can still stretch. But once I start stretching, I can’t get back up.”

“I know what you mean. I can’t stretch at all. Sometimes that’s all I want in the world. Just a good stretch. It’s hard growing old.”

“Better than the alternative, Monte.”

“I suppose it is that.”

Baseball fans kept walking by these two men who had done so much in the game. A few months earlier, Monte Irvin—a baseball Hall of Famer, a man who had once played ball like Willie Mays—said he sometimes felt bad about things. He said: “Sometimes I think,
Nobody saw me when I could really play
. I guess that’s human nature.” Now, Monte sat on a park bench and breathed in the ocean air and talked easily in his invisibility. He seemed quite happy that people wanted to see Khalil Greene.

Monte Irvin was probably the only player to be a star in both the Negro Leagues and the Major Leagues. Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were just kids when they played for their brief times in the Negro Leagues. Satchel Paige was an old man when he played in the Major Leagues, and even though he was occasionally brilliant, he mostly served as a publicity stunt.

Monte Irvin was thirty-two years old when he got to play his first full season in the big leagues. He had already lived a baseball life. He played remarkable baseball in the Negro Leagues. He won a baseball championship in Cuba. He was a hero in Mexico and something bigger than life in Puerto Rico. He had also gone to fight in World War II. After turning thirty, he signed with the New York Giants and went to play in the Minor Leagues. He could feel time running out, though, and in 1950 he told the Giants he was ready to play in the Major Leagues. The Giants management told him they would decide when he was ready, and they shipped him back to the Minor League team Jersey City. In eighteen games in Jersey City, Monte Irvin hit .510 with ten home runs. The Giants decided he was ready then.

He was ready, but he was not the same. The war and the years had taken something out of him. In 1951, he showed just a little bit of the player he had been as a young man. He led the National League in runs batted in. He hit eleven triples and stole twelve bases on tired legs. He also hit twenty-four home runs, and he finished fifth in the league in hitting. Irvin helped the Giants catch the Dodgers in the last days of the pennant race, the greatest comeback in baseball history. In the World Series he hit .458 against the mighty Yankees. He stole home. He was, in short, one of the best players in the Major Leagues. Even in that remarkable year, though, Irvin could not help but feel that something had been taken from him.

“I was a different player by then,” he told Buck as they sat in the San Diego dugout while the Philadelphia Phillies players took batting practice. “I was still good. But I was not the same player.”

“I know,” Buck said.

“When I was young, I played a big center field,” he said. “Like Willie Mays.”

“I remember,” Buck said.

Irvin had been an amazing athlete at East Orange High in New Jersey. He was a four-sport star. He was an unstoppable basketball scorer and he set the state record in throwing the javelin. In baseball he felt limitless. Nobody could hit a fly ball Monte Irvin could not run down. Nobody could throw a pitch past him. He felt invincible until the war. He spent three years in the army. When he came home from Europe, his body did not feel quite the same. He could still play brilliant baseball—he could still hit home runs, still steal bases, still catch most of the fly balls hit out there—but it was not effortless, not like it had been before.

“I’m not complaining,” Irvin said. “I mean, I lived a good life. Better than most guys in the Negro Leagues. I got to play in the Major Leagues. I got to play in the World Series. I’m not complaining. It’s just that people used to tell me how good I was, and I would tell them, ‘You should have seen me when I could really play.’”

“I saw you, Monte,” Buck said.

“And?”

“You could really play.”

“That’s all I was saying,” Monte said, and he smiled too.

K
ENNY
L
OFTON, THE
Philadelphia center fielder, walked over to hug Buck. He said, “We’ve got the new Josh Gibson. I’m not kidding with you, Buck. I’m going to bring him over. I want you to meet the new Josh Gibson.”

“Bring him on over,” Buck said.

Lofton ran off and came back a few seconds later with a huge hulk of a man named Ryan Howard. His baseball card listed him at six foot four and 252 pounds, but in the bright sunshine he looked about twice that big. Howard had a sheepish look on his young face, as if he felt bad for taking up so much space on this earth. Lofton said Howard’s face transformed when he was hitting. The sheepishness turned cold, and though Ryan Howard had only been in the Major Leagues for a few weeks, pitchers feared him. Lofton could not help but be giddy about him.

“I’ve told Ryan that he’s like a left-handed Josh Gibson,” Kenny said. “You should see him swing the bat, Buck.”

“You got some power, young man?” Buck asked.

“A little bit, sir,” Ryan Howard said.

Buck shook his head. “Don’t be ashamed of your power,” he said. And then, without knowing it, Buck offered up another haiku.

 

If you got power,

Don’t hide it for nobody.

Swing the bat hard, son.

 

Kenny Lofton said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him. But it sounds better when you say it, Buck.”

In the next year, Ryan Howard would hit a 500-foot home run in Philadelphia. He would win the Home Run Derby at the All-Star Game. He would smash the Philadelphia Phillies record for most home runs in a season. He swung the bat hard.

People wandered up to Monte Irvin for autographs and photographs and he sat on the railing by the dugout. He obliged graciously. But every time they walked away, he returned to the railing and tried not to catch anyone’s eye.

“Didn’t they try to sign you before Jackie Robinson?” a man asked Irvin.

“The Giants did talk about signing me in 1945,” Irvin said quietly enough the man had to lean forward to hear. “It was right around the same time as Jackie. But I wasn’t ready then. I had just gotten back from the war. I could have been first, I think. I could have handled it. But it wasn’t meant to be. It was Jackie’s time.”

Buck and Monte headed upstairs to do a television show together. Buck walked across the field. He stopped to sign a few autographs. He shook hands with some people in the stands. He caught a foul ball on one bounce and tossed it up to a young fan. Monte Irvin leaned hard on his cane and tried to walk across. He made it five steps and stopped. A truck picked him up and drove him through the outfield.

“Hard thing, growing old,” he said again as the truck passed Buck O’Neil.

“I remember those rickety old buses,” Monte Irvin said when the television hosts asked what he remembered best about the Negro Leagues. Monte talked about the bus rides, and how they would shake up his insides. He said that the players would wash their clothes in the morning and dry them by holding the clothes out the window on the ride to the next town.

Buck grimaced. He never did like hearing stories that made the Negro Leagues sound second-class. The longer we were together, the more troubled he seemed by those stories. He supposed people already thought the Negro Leagues was second-rate baseball, and these stories about wobbly buses and hobo ways strengthened those feelings. One of the radio hosts asked Buck to tell the story about how, when he was very young, his team would have so many people in one car that some had to ride on the bumper. Buck shook his head.

“No, no, that was not the Negro Leagues,” Buck said. “I did that, but that was in our younger days, when we were barnstorming, when we were playing on our own semipro teams. The Negro Leagues, we had buses. They were some of the best buses money could buy.”

Monte Irvin looked over at Buck.

“You must have had better buses than us, Buck,” Monte said.

“We probably did,” Buck said.

“Anyway,” Monte said, “Buck has a better memory than I do.”

Monte Irvin talked about timing. He said that had he been born a little later, he would have spent his whole career in the Major Leagues, and people might think of him as one of the greatest players who ever lived. They might think of him the way they think of Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle. Then again, he said, had he been born a few years earlier, he might not have been known at all. He would have spent all his life in the Negro Leagues, playing baseball on rock diamonds in small towns. The only way anyone would know him would be through whispers and myth.

“Either way, though, I would have gotten to play ball, and that’s all I ever wanted to do,” he said. “I don’t feel sorry for myself. I got to play.”

Nearby, Buck looked out on the field. He did not seem to be listening.

“You know what I always wondered,” Monte said. “Why did they think we couldn’t play? The ball was the same size. The bats weighed the same. The fields were no smaller. The fences were no lower. It was still sixty feet six inches to home plate. Still ninety feet to first base. Why did they think we were inferior? Why did they think we could not play this game?”

Buck never turned away from the field. He whispered:

 

It makes no sense,

Hate.

It’s just fear.

All it is.

Fear something different.

Something’s

Gonna get taken from you,

Stolen from you,

Find yourself lost.

 

Monte Irvin then remembered a story. When he came out of high school, the Major League scouts knew about him. Even in those days, the good scouts felt a curiosity about black baseball players. Buck liked to say a scout is drawn to talent the way a comedian is drawn to the stage. He is drawn to small towns and overgrown fields and back roads. The times were different. And scouts were no more or less racist than anyone else. But the good ones couldn’t stay away.

Scouts watched Monte Irvin play baseball. He knew they were there, or at least he sensed it. No baseball scout ever talked to him, of course. But he noticed a few white men in the stands, watching him closely, writing down things—reports they never intended to file—and then, when the game ended, they slipped away quietly. Monte Irvin knew they were there. He just never thought much about it.

Many years later, he played for the New York Giants. Years after that, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He worked for Major League Baseball. He became a member of the Hall of Fame veterans committee, and worked along with Buck O’Neil to get Negro Leagues players into the Hall of Fame. Monte Irvin became one of baseball’s most respected men.

And in those later years, he ran into Horace Stoneham, who had been the owner when Irvin played for the Giants. Stoneham was, by most accounts, a gentle man who had, by circumstance, become despised by Giants fans on both sides of America. He had moved the Giants from New York to San Francisco, leaving behind angry fans who cursed his name. In San Francisco, he had traded an aging and tired Willie Mays at the end of his career, infuriating West Coast fans. Stoneham was in his mid-eighties when he saw Monte Irvin. He would die soon.

“You know we sent a scout out to see you in high school,” he told Irvin.