The Soul of Baseball (5 page)

“You in the market for a chainsaw chain sharpener?” Buck asked John.

“You never know,” John said with a small smile.

Buck nodded. “We all bleed red,” he said.

T
O GET TO
Nicodemus from Kansas City, you don’t really turn right at Nowhere. You turn right in Hays, which is not very different. Fewer than forty people lived in Nicodemus on the day Buck arrived. Nicodemus was more living museum than town by then. Nicodemus had been one of the first towns west of the Mississippi founded by freed slaves after the Civil War. The founders intended for it to become the largest black colony in America. The brochures explained that Nicodemus had once been a bustling city of eight hundred people and had two newspapers, three general stores, four churches, a school, a bank, and an ice cream parlor! The brochure punctuated “ice cream parlor” with that exclamation point. The school building survived the Kansas wind, so did one church, but the ice cream parlor and town died. The Nicodemus historians explained this had something to do with the railroad not coming through. The first thing Buck did when he arrived in Nicodemus was hug everybody. There was a pattern to Buck O’Neil’s embraces. He walked up to strangers and held his arms out, as if holding an invisible tea set. He said, “Give it up.” That was it. I never once saw anyone resist. Sometimes people would hold out a hand and try to shake hands. In this case, Buck stepped up his attack. “You can do better than that,” he would say. Veteran Buck O’Neil watchers noticed that Buck hugged the women longer than the men, and the pretty young women longer than the pretty older ones. But everybody got a hug when Buck O’Neil came to town.

“Welcome to Nicodemus,” a woman said after her hug. She was Joan, and she worked for the National Park Service. Nicodemus was her town. She looked to be about forty, and she wore the drab brown park service outfit. She had planned the day for Buck to the minute. Joan looked quite worried that something would go wrong. She gave the impression that she often looked worried.

“Are you married?” Buck asked first thing, pointing at a bare ring finger.

“No,” she said.

“What’s wrong with the white boys around here?” he asked.

Joan blushed and smiled. A couple of local men, Fred and Alex, walked over. They wore suits and sunglasses. “We’re the Blues Brothers,” Fred said, and together—with the alternating rhythm of a vaudeville act—they explained that they often put on their own Belushi-Aykroyd act at various local events and high school football games. Upon close inspection, Fred’s suit was blue and Alex’s black. They both wore giant sunglasses over their regular glasses, as if they were going to a 3D movie. Buck acted as if he was meeting Belushi and Aykroyd themselves.

“You guys are great,” Buck said.

“We’ll be driving you into the game,” Fred said.

“All right, then,” Buck said.

“It’ll be an honor,” Alex said.

“All right, then,” Buck said.

A warm wind blew and rattled the chain on the flagpole in front of the town hall. Spring felt close. Joan and the Blue/Black Brothers went over the schedule of events for the day, each interrupting the other. Buck would speak about baseball, then he would have some authentic Nicodemus barbecue—every town in Kansas, no matter how small, has its own barbecue—and then the Blue/Black Brothers would drive him to the baseball field, where kids would put on a re-creation of the first recorded baseball game played by blacks. Buck nodded, but he was not listening. He asked: “Who is the oldest person in town?”

“Well, that would have to be Ms. Switzer,” one of the Brothers said. “How old is she now?”

“She’s one hundred and one,” Joan said.

“Take me to her,” Buck said.

Joan’s worry returned. This was not on the schedule. She looked around helplessly, and Buck put his hand on her shoulder. “It will be all right,” he said. One of the Brothers took Buck to a row of small apartments down the street. Through a screen door, Buck could see Ms. Switzer sitting in a recliner. The room was surrounded by photographs and computer-generated banners—“Happy 98
^th
Birthday!” and “Happy 100
^th
Birthday, Grandma!” and “We love you, Happy 101
^st
.” She saw Buck and said, “I hear you’re famous.” She looked as if she had been expecting him.

“I’m just old,” he said. He held out his arms—“Give it up.” She made no move toward him. He leaned down and hugged her. She said, “Oh my!”

Buck asked her to remember what Nicodemus was like when she was young. She started to tell a story about her mother and how she had been a wonderful cook, but she stopped midway through. Something was bothering her. She asked Buck to sign her autograph book. He tried to get her to remember again. “Tell me about your children,” he said.

“They’re good to me,” she said. “You cannot forget to sign my book.”

“I’ll sign it, don’t worry,” he whispered, and he tried once more to return her to better days. “I’ll bet you’re a good cook,” he said.

“You have to sign my book,” she said again. This time it sounded like a desperate plea. She reached down for a large spiral notebook bursting with photographs and loose papers and Christmas cards. “I know just where I want you to sign,” she said, and she carefully flipped through to an open page. “Sign it to Ora Switzer.”

“What did you say your name was, Ms. Switzer?” Buck asked.

“Ora,” she said.

Buck kneeled close to her. He said, very softly: “My wife was named Ora. We were married for fifty-one years.” Tears welled in his eyes. He tried to look at her face, but she looked only at the book, and distress covered her face. He signed the book and handed it back to her. “Here you go,” he said. “It’s a beautiful book.”

“I’m a hundred and one and a half years old,” Ora Switzer said.

“Is that right?” Buck said. “I’m ninety-three.”

“I never would have guessed that. People don’t come to see me much anymore. I sit here a lot. My courting days are over.”

Buck caught her eyes. “Well,” he said, “you know, I’m single.”

And with that Ora Switzer’s face broke, and she laughed in Buck’s arms.

W
HEN
B
UCK
O’N
EIL
walked into the town hall, forty-eight people sitting in metal folding chairs stood and applauded. Buck ignored the microphone—he never used them. He leaned over the lectern and said there was no place in the world he would rather be than Nicodemus. Everybody applauded again. Buck spoke for a few minutes about his days as a baseball player. Buck said he wished each of them could have seen the Negro Leaguers play. “We were something,” he said. “We played a different kind of game. Fast and loose. Everybody could run fast. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I could run back then.” He asked for questions. A man in the back shouted, “Buck O’Neil! Buck O’Neil! Do you remember me?”

Buck looked hard at the man as if he recognized the face but could not place the name. Buck had perfected this look through the years. At every speaking engagement everywhere in America, somebody asked Buck, “Do you recognize me?”

“Let me give you a hint,” the man said. “In 1935, you and the Kansas City Monarchs came to play baseball down the road in Hill City. It was an all-white team. My name is Denny Switzer, and I was the only black player on that team. I was just a kid then. You beginning to remember now?”

“Yes, how are you doing?” Buck asked.

“Satchel Paige was pitching for the Monarchs in that game. And you said to Satchel, ‘Try this kid out. See what he can do.’ You remember that, Buck O’Neil? You remember saying that?”

Buck began to say something, but Denny Switzer was not finished with the story.

“So Satchel goes ahead and says, ‘All right, here comes a pea at your knee.’ And I hit a home run off of Satchel Paige. Hit it straight to center field. And when I got to first base, you said to me, ‘Son, take a bow, you just hit a home run off of Satchel Paige.’ You remember that, Buck O’Neil?”

Buck said: “Yeah, I remember that. You sure that was you?”

Denny Switzer: “That was me.”

Buck: “Let me ask you something. When you hit that home run, Satchel just stared at you as you ran around the bases, didn’t he? Just stared at you all the way around, am I right?”

Denny: “You’re right. That’s just what he did. Stared at me all the way.”

Buck: “Denny, it’s good to see you again. Real good to see you.”

Applause. Tears. Buck signed autographs and posed for photographs (“Take your time,” he said when he posed with women). He ate ribs served by the only black woman mayor in Kansas. The Nicodemus Blue/Black Brothers had Buck sit in the backseat of a beat-up car that coughed smoke. They drove to the baseball game with a loudspeaker taped to the top of the car, and B.B. King’s voice roared with the static. Buck threw out the first pitch of the game and then sat in a tent that flapped in the wind. He played peekaboo with a little boy. He ate ice cream with one of those small flat wooden spoons that look like tongue depressors. “All right, John,” Buck said, “it’s time to go home.”

T
HE RADIO PLAYED
a show called
Gun Talk
on the ride back from Nicodemus. The topic was the end of the assault weapons ban, which the host called “Independence Day.” He said: “We’ll talk about how these are not really ‘assault weapons’ and we’ll expose other media lies in a few minutes. First your calls.” The first call was from a somewhat hysterical man who worried that his hunting guns that had any range would soon be classified as “sniper rifles” by the liberal media and then taken away by the government. The host reassured him. “They’re already doing that,” he said. A passing billboard read “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.”

“I know I’ve told you how I met my wife, Ora,” Buck said suddenly. He had. That was Buck’s best day. He told the story again about that Easter Sunday in Memphis, Tennessee, when he hit for the cycle and walked up to his Ora and said, “My name is Buck O’Neil, what’s yours?”

“My name is Buck O’Neil, what’s yours?” he whispered again, as if he were practicing. Ora had died of cancer eight years earlier.

“Her parents did not want her to marry a ballplayer, you know,” Buck said, “but I won them over. Her father asked me what my father did. I told him: ‘He’s in recreation.’ And he was too. He ran a pool hall. He did some bootlegging. You know…recreation.

“I told him I would take good care of his daughter. But really, you know, she took care of me. I was gone so much of the time because of baseball. That’s how it goes in this world. Life doesn’t turn out the way you think. You just hold on to each other. That’s the trick.”

He closed his eyes. Outside, the wind blew and the trees swayed and leaned. I told Buck it was remarkable that he remembered that man, Denny Switzer, who claimed to have hit a home run off of Satchel Paige almost seventy years before. Buck shrugged.

“A lot of men hit home runs off of Satchel,” he said. “And there are more every year.”

“Well, it’s amazing that you remembered him. You could see how much it meant to him.”

Buck was almost asleep. He said: “I didn’t remember him.”

Silence. A few minutes later, Buck whispered: “That guy didn’t hit a home run off of Satchel Paige. He’s too young. When I played with Satchel, that was the 1940s, that guy couldn’t have been more than five years old. He might not even have been born.”

I asked Buck why he pretended to remember the man. He said:

 

In our beautiful memory

We were all handsome.

We all could sing.

We all had the heart

Of the prettiest girl in town.

And we all hit .300.

 

And then Buck O’Neil dozed off, and I listened to him snore.

B
uck O’Neil loved to sit behind home plate and listen to baseball. “Baseball music,” he called it. He heard people stomp their feet and clap their hands. That was the beat. He listened to cranky old men beg the pitcher to throw the ball over the plate and vendors shout “Budweiser!” Late arrivals barked, “I believe this is my seat,” and children cried for cotton candy, and the public-address announcer blared, “Will the owner of a red Ford Mustang, license plate number…” The melody for Buck, though, was the crack of the bat. For fun sometimes, he would close his eyes, listen to the crack of the bat, and guess what happened.

“That sounded thin, it’s a pop-up,” he would whisper. It was usually a pop-up.

“Line drive,” he would say when the sound resounded fully and deeply.

“That’s a home run,” he would say. He was almost never wrong about home runs. Buck liked to say that home runs echo. He said when you’ve been listening to the sound of bats all your life, you can hear the echo.

“The crack of the bat sounds different for different players,” he said. Buck said there was a particularly loud and full crack of the bat he heard only three times in his life. The first time Buck heard it, he was a child in Florida. He and other friends stood behind the outfield fence in St. Petersburg, and they waited to catch home run balls they could then sell to tourists. He heard this sound, this particular crack of the bat—in his life he would compare it to dynamite blasting and a gunshot. But neither of those quite captured the sound. Buck remembered standing up straight and asking, “What was that?” None of the other kids knew what he was talking about. Then the sound exploded in his ears again. Buck climbed the ladder they had set up behind the outfield wall and looked out on the field toward home plate. He saw Babe Ruth hitting baseballs.

Twenty years later, Buck was a player for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues. His team was playing the Homestead Grays. The way Buck told it, he was in the clubhouse getting dressed for the game. He heard that same crack of the bat—to Buck the sound seemed to shake the walls. He rushed out into the dugout—he was wearing only his jock—and he climbed to the top step. He saw a thick, muscular black man swinging a bat roughly the size of a fully grown oak tree. The man hit the next pitch, and that unmistakable sound rang again in Buck O’Neil’s ears. That was Josh Gibson.

Buck, you didn’t really run on the field wearing just your jock.

Yes, I did. Of course I did. Someone yelled at me, “Hey, Buck, put your clothes on.”

Buck, come on.

It’s a story. It’s my story.

Fifty years later, Buck was still scouting—he was almost eighty and he still traveled around America in search of talented baseball players—and he was in Kansas City, on the field. He was talking to the players. He heard that sound once more. He turned to look, and there in the batting cage Bo Jackson hit the ball. Like dynamite exploding but not quite. That was almost twenty years ago. Buck had not heard the sound since.

 

I keep going to the ballpark

To listen.

People don’t listen.

I will hear that sound again

Maybe today

Maybe tomorrow

Someday. I know it.

I’m not that old.

 

Buck had always been a scout at heart. When he played in the Negro Leagues, he played well, he hit stinging line drives, and he defended with grace, but mostly he watched other players. His teammates called him “Cap,” even when he was young, because he just seemed like the team captain. He knew other players’ strengths and weaknesses better than they did. He shared such good advice that, after a while, players just gathered around him. When he could no longer play well, he started to manage in the Negro Leagues, and when the Negro Leagues began its bittersweet descent into antiquity, he became a professional scout. He traveled the American South in search of black baseball players.

Buck was in Montgomery, Alabama, to see a game of semiprofessional players. This was 1968. The players were men in their early and mid-twenties. Buck understood within minutes that he was wasting his time. Baseball scouts (not all of them, but many of them) begin to rely on a sixth sense. They go to so many games and they see so many players who are not quite good enough—pitchers whose fastballs are just a bit slow, batters who can’t quite catch up with even those fastballs—that after a while they believe that real ballplayers will just stand out for them, like those black-and-white photographs with a bright red rose in the middle. Buck saw no roses on that field that day, and he started to leave before the game even began. Baseball scouts (not all of them, but many of them) have a natural impatience. Buck explains it this way: “If the player ain’t here, then he’s gotta be somewhere else.”

But Buck stayed. He had a hunch that something good would happen. It wasn’t a feeling he could explain, but Buck, like many scouts, put faith in his hunches. Late in the game, a young player ran on the field. Buck could not take his eyes off him. The kid could not have been older than eighteen. He was small and light and in Buck’s memory he did not do anything special in the game. But to Buck O’Neil, there was something about the way he moved.

Even the best scout’s hunches lead nowhere most of the time. But the best scouts cannot let go of their hunches. Nobody around him knew the kid’s name. He was a backup, they said, some kid from the neighborhood. Buck asked around and finally found out the kid’s name was Oscar Gamble. What a name! Oscar Gamble. Buck believed there was something in names. He found Oscar and said, “I’m Buck O’Neil, a scout from the Chicago Cubs. I want to see you play.” Oscar was shy then and befuddled; he gave Buck sketchy directions to a baseball field hidden in the woods outside of town. He offered an imprecise time for a game the next day.

Buck got into his Plymouth Fury the next day and drove into the woods to find Oscar Gamble. He found the dirt road Oscar had described, and he drove for what seemed like many miles along that road. He did not see other cars or street signs or tire tracks or any indication that anyone had driven on the road for many years. This was the late 1960s, and no great time for a black man to be driving along a dirt road in the Deep South. When Buck did see a car coming the other way, he had to pull off to the side—the road was too narrow for two cars. The other driver looked at Buck and shook his head.

After a while, Buck felt certain he was going in circles—he had seen this tree and that bush—and he started to turn back. Then he heard something. The crack of a bat. It was not loud, not the explosion of Babe Ruth or Josh Gibson, but it was unmistakable. There was a baseball game being played.

Buck drove around a bend and came upon a little field. Almost forty years later, he still remembered the lush beauty of that field. The outfield grass glowed so green it looked as if children had colored the blades of grass with crayons. The outfield wall was lined with blue ash trees, sixty or seventy feet tall. Buck smelled fried chicken and beer. Families sat around the field in lawn chairs.

From his car, he watched little Oscar Gamble walk to the plate. Again he felt sure he saw something, that indescribable little something that baseball scouts—after enough years of dirt roads, cheap hotels, and baseball games on dusty fields—are sure they alone can see. He watched Oscar Gamble wait for just his pitch and swing the bat with the force of a man twice his size. He watched the ball soar to the wall. The ball was caught there, but Buck O’Neil knew then that he was right. He told the Chicago Cubs to draft Oscar Gamble.

“Who?” they asked.

They drafted him in the sixteenth round and Buck O’Neil signed Oscar Gamble. Oscar hit exactly two hundred home runs in the Major Leagues. He played for seventeen seasons, many of those for the New York Yankees, and he became wildly popular in large part because he wore the largest Afro in baseball. He was not the best player Buck O’Neil signed. But Buck was always proud that he found Oscar Gamble.

Scouting changed in the years after Buck found Oscar. Scouts broke down players’ swings on video. They used computer programs to study players’ statistics. They traded information on the Internet. More than anything, the scouts started to use radar guns. At almost any game where a promising young pitcher was throwing, you could see the scouts sitting behind home plate pointing their radar guns toward the field like state troopers on the last day of the month. Buck understood that times change, and when you’re trying to predict the future—“Scouts are like fortune-tellers,” he said sometimes—you use every tool you have. Still, he did not like radar guns. He understood radar guns could tell a scout how fast a pitcher threw, but they could not tell how much life was on the fastball. And that was the important thing. He said:

 

Young scouts point their guns,

Write down the numbers.

Are they watching?

Really watching.

I wonder if they’re looking for life.

Because that’s the secret, man.

Miles per hour,

That don’t mean nothing.

Does the fastball have life?

Does it move? Does it dive? Does it rise?

Bothers me. Too many scouts

Not watching for life.

Life passing them by.