The Soul of Baseball (8 page)

“He was named Josh too,” Buck said. “Tough thing having that name. He couldn’t play a lick either. He must have gotten his mother’s genes.”

“Why do you think there are so many fathers and sons in the game?”

“Maybe it’s because baseball is a sport you hand down to your kids,” Buck said. “Does a father teach his son how to be a running back? No, see, that’s instinct. Everybody runs with their own style. Does a father teach his son how to play basketball? Maybe, there are a few fathers and sons in basketball, right? But it’s not the same thing.

“In baseball, you play catch with your son. You teach him how to hold a bat, how to swing it, how to get under a pop-up, how to throw to the right base. You teach him how to run the bases. You teach him how to run back on a ball over his head. You teach him how to throw a curveball. You see what I’m saying?”

I nodded. But Buck wanted to be sure.

“In baseball, you pass along wisdom,” he said. “Like your father did for you in your backyard.”

C
HICAGO WON THE
game. Buck should have been happy with the result, since he had worked with the Cubs organization for more than thirty years. But we were in Houston, and Buck always wanted the home team to win. He never did like seeing the home fans sad.

On the way out, Buck ran into Ralph Garr, a fine player who stole 172 bases in the Major Leagues. Garr also had a famously shrill and piercing voice. Anyone who heard that voice remembered it. Buck asked Garr about a story he heard—it seemed that Garr was with the White Sox and they were facing Nolan Ryan, who had the Guinness Book record for fastest pitch ever thrown. This was 1978, and Garr led off the game by striking out. He may or may not have seen Nolan Ryan’s pitches. Either way, he staggered back to the dugout, looked at his teammates, and said in a voice that could be heard all through the stadium: “Boys, we got
no
shot tonight.”

“It’s true,” Garr told Buck, and his voice again pierced through the noise of the crowd.

Buck was stopped by dozens of people wanting autographs and handshakes and a little baseball talk. Someone asked him how he felt about the news that baseball players were using steroids to bulk up and hit longer home runs.

“People are always looking for an edge,” Buck said.

“But I can’t understand why someone would risk their health for a sport,” a man said.

“You’re right,” he said. “But think about it. Would you rather be a superstar for twenty years and die at forty-five or be ordinary and live until you’re eighty?”

“You’re not ordinary,” the man said.

“It isn’t how long you live,” Buck said. “It’s how well you live.”

J
. C. Hartman reached into his leather satchel and pulled out a manila folder overstuffed with photographs. He placed the folder next to his buttered toast. It was morning. Hartman said: “I remember everything, Buck. I remember every inning of every game I ever played. I remember every hit, I remember every ground ball. I look at these photographs, like this one here….”

A waitress clanked a plate of scrambled eggs on the table. Hartman riffled through his pictures. There were a couple hundred. All were photographs from Hartman’s days as a player. He had been a ferocious baseball player for Buck O’Neil’s Monarchs in the mid-1950s. Unfortunately, he could not hit. This would seem to be an overwhelming hurdle for a baseball player, but Hartman made up for his weak bat with a crazed gusto that either inspired his teammates or scared them half to death. Hartman never stopped moving or practicing or thinking or talking during games. When the games ended, he still did not stop. Buck had told him, “If you want to make it to the Major Leagues, you have to play harder than the other guys.” Hartman played harder. He signed to play in the Minor Leagues, and his zeal for baseball spurred his next manager—a plain-talking Texan named Grady Hatton—to set the North American land speed record for baseball clichés.

Hatton said: “This boy might make the big leagues on sheer determination and hustle. He gives one hundred percent all the time. I’d like to have nine guys on my team like Jay. He doesn’t know what it means to quit.”

In the hotel restaurant, with the smell of coffee and bacon swirling, Hartman flipped through the photographs. He wanted to show Buck something, but he could not find the right picture.

“These kids, Buck,” he went on, “these kids nowadays, they don’t know…. Hold on, where’s that photo?…They don’t know what we had to go through, Buck. They make more money than God, you know. They make all that money, and they don’t know…. Let me show you this picture, here. No, this isn’t the one…. We loved the game, Buck. You know what I’m saying? We loved it…. Is this it? No, this one’s not it. Hold on…. It didn’t matter how much money we were making, Buck. Hell, we didn’t make any money playing. But we loved it, you know? We loved it, Buck, and I don’t see that love now. It’s become a business. Here it is, here it is. Look at this picture.”

Buck glanced up from his pancakes and looked at a photograph of J. C. Hartman when he played with the Houston Colt .45s. The Major League team was called the Colt .45s in the early 1960s, when cowboys were still the true Texas hero. Soon, though, Americans and Soviets were racing in space, a new kind of hero emerged, and the team changed its name to the Astros. Hartman’s face looked thinner in the photograph, but his eyes blazed then exactly the way they blazed now as he talked about baseball. He had made it to the Major Leagues, even though he could not hit. He made it by catching every ground ball, running hard on every play, and trying to win more than anybody else around.

“You know how badly I wanted to play ball, Buck,” he said. “You know how much it meant to me. Now, they just want stuff handed to them. They don’t want to work for it like we did, Buck. You remember what you told me first time you saw me, Buck? You remember? You said, ‘If you don’t love this game, you’ll never be great.’ I remember that like it was yesterday. You gotta love if you want to be great. I was talking to Billy Williams about that.”

“How’s Billy doing?” Buck asked.

“He’s good. He’s had some times like all of us, but he’s good. Real good. He always asks about you, Buck. He always remembers the time you went to get him in Alabama.”

It’s a famous story in baseball circles, the story of how Buck O’Neil saved the baseball career of Billy Williams. This was 1959. Buck was a scout for the Chicago Cubs then. He received a phone call from the team’s general manager, John Holland. Billy Williams was a top Cubs prospect and Holland had just heard that Williams quit his Minor League team in San Antonio. He went back home to Whistler, Alabama.

“What would you like me to do?” Buck asked.

“Go get him,” John Holland said.

Buck drove to Whistler. He knew the way—he knew all the back roads to all the small towns where baseball players lived. He made it to Williams’s house in time for dinner. Billy’s parents were thrilled to see him. Over dinner, Buck talked about the weather. He talked about the news. He complimented the food and asked for seconds. Everyone at the table kept waiting for Buck to talk some sense into Billy and tell him to go back and play ball. Buck never said a word about baseball. They ate, and after dessert Buck excused himself. He said he had driven a long way and wanted to go back to the hotel to rest. “If it’s all right,” he said, “I’d like to come back tomorrow.”

The next day he ate with the family again, and again he said nothing at all about baseball. In the kitchen, Billy’s mother asked Buck when he planned to talk some sense into Billy. Buck interrupted her and said loud enough for everyone to hear: “Billy’s a smart young man. He can make his own decisions.” Baseball did not come up after that.

Then Buck said: “Billy, I want you to come with me somewhere. Will you take a ride with me?” They got into Buck’s Plymouth Fury and rode to a park nearby. Children were playing baseball. When the car pulled up, the kids turned and saw Billy Williams. They rushed over and shouted:

“Billy, it’s great to see you.”

“When did you get back?”

“Are you hitting a bunch of home runs?”

“I can’t wait until I get old enough to play ball myself.”

Billy laughed and signed autographs and played catch with the kids and told them stories about playing baseball in the Minor Leagues. When the excitement died down and the children went back to their games, Billy said to Buck: “All right. I’ll go back.”

That night Buck called John Holland and told him the news. Holland said, “Put Billy on the first plane in the morning.” Buck said, “Plane? No, sir. I’m driving him back to Texas myself.” They drove back together, and for the rest of his life Williams talked about that ride with Buck and the things they talked about. Billy Williams played ball again. They called him “Sweet Swinging Billy from Whistler.” He hit more than four hundred home runs in the Major Leagues. He played every single game for eight straight seasons. When he was finished playing, Sweet Swinging Billy was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Buck O’Neil was there that day, and Billy Williams winked at him from the stage.

“You know, it’s funny, there’s one part of that story that always bothered me,” J. C. Hartman said. “How did you know all those kids were going to come up to Billy like that? I mean, I’ve heard you tell that story a thousand times, Buck, and you’re a smart man. How did you know for sure those kids would go up to Billy?”

Buck smiled. “Billy was a hero to those kids. I knew they would react that way. Of course”—Buck looked around for a second—“of course, a good scout always checks things out first. I might have gone out there the night before, you know, just to be sure.”

“Did you pay those kids, Buck?”

“A good scout always checks things out first.”

J. C. H
ARTMAN SAID:
“There’s another part of that story you probably don’t know, Buck. You know, I was Billy’s roommate when he quit baseball. We were the only two black players on the team then. I remember the night he left.”

Buck leaned forward and listened. Hartman said they played a game in Victoria, Texas. Williams hit a double in the ninth inning that knocked in the winning run. The game had gone late, and by the time Hartman and Williams finished getting dressed after the game, the one black restaurant in town was closed.

So they went back to the Ambassador Hotel, where the team was staying. They saw teammates eating in the hotel restaurant. Hartman said it was the most familiar scene in the world—ballplayers laughing, drinking, telling stories, a waitress flirting—but on this night it left them cold. Williams and Hartman were black and were not allowed to eat in the hotel restaurant. This was a minor nuisance on most nights because they could eat somewhere else, but now it was late and they were hungry, and they felt humiliated. Hartman found the manager and said, “We need to eat. We’re hungry.” The manager called the hotel owner. A deal was struck. The manager took Williams and Hartman to the kitchen and set up a table for them.

“You can eat here,” he said, and he walked off.

Williams and Hartman sat in the kitchen. They heard their teammates talking about the game and Billy’s big hit. Nobody offered them food. A waitress rushed by and did not seem to hear their calls. This was seven years after Ralph Ellison’s book
Invisible Man
had been published. They felt invisible.

Billy Williams said: “I can’t take this anymore.”

Hartman remembered saying: “It won’t be like this forever, Billy.”

Williams: “I’m not waiting for forever. I’m going home.”

Hartman: “Don’t do that, Billy. Don’t let them beat you.”

Williams: “I’m going home. I’ve got a girl there.”

Hartman: “It’s going to change, Billy.” These were the words Buck O’Neil had instilled in him. Every day, when Hartman played for Buck in the Negro Leagues, he was aware of what it meant to be a black man in America. “It’s going to change,” Buck used to say.

Billy Williams said: “It’s never going to change.”

And he left. Hartman did not see Billy in the room that night. J. C. Hartman carried in his mind for forty years a picture of Billy Williams’s face that night; his face twisted with rage and frustration. “I couldn’t blame Billy,” Hartman said. “It was hard. But I knew he’d come back sooner or later. He loved playing. He was just like you and me, Buck. He loved to play.”

After breakfast, I asked Buck if he’d ever heard that part of the story before, the part about Billy Williams quitting baseball because he could not get a meal at the Ambassador Hotel in Victoria, Texas. Buck nodded. He said he’d heard it from Billy on the drive back from Whistler. I asked Buck why he never included that when he told the story. He said:

 

Sometimes pain

Is better left behind.

America’s a better place now.

Not perfect. But better.

We survived, man.

 

B
uck O’Neil Day began with a 5
A.M.
wake-up call in Houston. The car arrived at the hotel at 6
A.M.
The flight to Minneapolis was scheduled for seven-thirty. Buck beeped going through the metal detector at the airport, and he had to be patted down by a somewhat embarrassed airline security guard. Buck took off his shoes twice. “I’m sorry, sir,” the guard said the second time, though Buck had not complained. “These are the rules.”

“It’s all right,” Buck said. “I understand rules.”

A woman asked Buck if he needed a wheelchair, which spurred Buck to bark “No!” a little louder than he intended. There was a winding walk to the gate and McDonald’s pancakes for breakfast. The plane was delayed. Buck walked a bit and saw a jewelry store. “I know why they have jewelry stores here,” he said. “I’ll bet that helps some traveling men get back into their house.” He walked back to the gate, and when they called for people who needed a little extra time to get down the jet bridge, Buck was first in line. As Buck’s friends said, he never acted old except to get on the plane first.

Buck found his seat and fell asleep the instant he sat down. He woke up next to two middle-aged men who said they had never been on a plane before. Buck was fascinated. Flying had been a part of his life for so long—days like this had become so routine—he simply could not fathom that there were people left in America who had never flown before. The guys explained they had nothing against flying per se. They weren’t scared or anything like that. They just had never seen a reason to try it before.

“So what is it that finally got you up in the air?” Buck asked.

“We’re going to do some Minnesota fishing,” they said.

The plane landed in Minnesota. Two young women—neither of them twenty-five—emerged from behind a train of luggage carts. They could have been sisters. One said they would take Buck to his hotel. They giggled as he talked, and they got lost on the way to the hotel. After a few phone calls and several detours, they found the hotel, which was called The Le Meridien, and it was so fancy it needed the words “The” and “Le” in the name. The rooms looked like something out of a fairly high-budget science-fiction film. High-definition televisions faced the toilets. Lights streamed out of the most surprising places. The chairs in the rooms featured odd numbers of legs—some had three, others five, and some none at all. It took Buck twenty minutes to figure out how to turn on the lights in the bathroom.

“Bob!” Buck shouted to Bob Kendrick. Bob was the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum marketing director. He had helped set up Buck O’Neil Day. Bob had grown up in a small town in Georgia, and he had dreamed of playing in the NBA. When that dream died, he moved into marketing. Bob had big ideas. Like so many others, he fell under the spell of Buck O’Neil. He was hypnotized by Buck’s stories about players in the Negro Leagues. To Bob, those forgotten players stood for something great—they had overcome the worst of America. They played baseball. He started to do some volunteer work for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which at the time wasn’t a museum at all. It was a tiny room in an office building in Kansas City. Nobody was allowed to see it, which was appropriate because there wasn’t anything to see other than a few yellowed newspaper clippings and a pennant or two. In those days, Buck and some of the other players would pay the monthly rent just to keep the museum alive. After a while, some people approached Bob and said they wanted to expand the museum and turn it into a destination place that people all over America would want to see. It was absurd, but Bob signed on. A couple of years later—spurred by Buck’s constant campaigning, Bob’s marketing sense, and taxpayer money—a 10,000-square-foot Negro Leagues Baseball Museum opened on the corner of Eighteenth and Vine.

“Bob!” Buck shouted again; it was hard to hear him over the odd New Age music playing in the hotel lobby bar. Bob ate an eighteen-dollar hamburger and fries piled to look like modern art. Mirrored glass surrounded all of us.

“What’s that, Buck?” Bob asked.

“What exactly are we doing here?”

“It’s your day, Buck. It’s Buck O’Neil Day at the ballpark.”

“Oh,” Buck said. “My day. Yeah.”

W
HEN WAS THE
first time you saw snow?” Buck asked. I told him that, growing up in Cleveland, I was surrounded by snow. In memory, snow first fell in late November, around Thanksgiving, and we would not see the green of the grass again until St. Patrick’s Day. “All that snow seemed normal to you, didn’t it?” Buck asked. “Whatever the weather was when you were a child, that’s what seems normal to you.”

Buck grew up in Sarasota, Florida, and in his memories, a hot sun burned every day. His most brilliant childhood memory, the memory he shared with kids again and again, happened on one blistering summer day when he worked in the celery fields. Buck was a box boy. His job was to take crates out to the celery cutters. It was hard work. The heat overwhelmed him that day, and he shouted out, “Damn, there’s gotta be something better than this!” It’s the word “damn” that stuck with him. Buck always told the kids, “That might have been the first time I ever used that word. But it was hot that day.”

Buck’s father was the foreman in the field. He heard his son shout. That evening Buck’s father said: “There is something better, son, but you won’t find it here. You have to go out and get it.” There was no place for an African-American to go to high school in Sarasota. Buck went to Edward Waters College, a black school in Jacksonville, to get his high school diploma. He played baseball and football there. That led him to snow for the first time. Edward Waters College traveled north to play a football game against Morris Brown College in Atlanta. Buck remembered being on the bus, crossing into Georgia, and he closed his eyes and slipped off into a fuzzy sleep. When he opened his eyes, he saw snowflakes drifting in the wind. It took a moment to understand he wasn’t dreaming.

“Stop the bus!” he shouted. They all piled out, the whole football team.

“Look at me now,” Buck said. He was eating an overpriced burger in a chic bar in a trendy hotel overpopulated with articles, and he thought of being young and naïve and sticking out his tongue to taste snowflakes in Georgia.

A T
WINS OFFICIAL TOOK
Buck to the Metrodome in a green Mustang convertible. Buck said: “I was made for this car.” The Metrodome was a hideous domed stadium where the Minnesota Twins played baseball. Ballplayers hated the Metrodome. Fans hated the Metrodome. Everybody hated the Metrodome. Baseball was meant to be played outdoors. The light in the Dome always seemed dull. Baseball games seemed to be played behind gray sunglasses. For outfielders, pop-ups dissolved into the roof, and infielders caught their metal spikes in the turf and twisted their ankles. Dan Quisenberry, a great pitcher, summed up everybody’s thoughts when he first saw the Metrodome. He said: “I don’t know if there’s a good use for nuclear weapons, but this might be one.”

The Metrodome never inspired affection even on those cold and rainy days in Minneapolis. But on a Minnesota spring day like this—blue and yellow and green, a gentle breeze blowing off the ten thousand lakes—it seemed especially wrong to play baseball here, like children playing in a cramped, smoky basement during summer vacation. Buck caught sight of the Dome and shook his head. “Shame,” he said.

Buck walked into the Dome on his day, and a dozen people rushed up for hugs. They gave him the specially made Buck O’Neil baseball card that would be handed out to the fans. They told him how good he looked and how much he meant to them and how honored they felt. “You’re lovable,” a woman told him.

“I can’t help it,” Buck said.

They took him to a back room, where he spoke to local high school baseball coaches about life. He went to the lunchroom where cameramen recorded him offering a few words of inspiration for the evening news (“Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays—these are our genes, man!”). He stepped onto the field to do a radio interview (“Baseball is still the greatest game in the world!”). He went back to the lunchroom and spoke for more cameras (“I always loved playing in Minnesota because here they would treat you like a man”). He went to an empty locker room where an eager young newspaper reporter felt thrilled to meet him.

R
EPORTER:
Do you ever have a bad day?

B
UCK:
What is that?

R
EPORTER:
Really. Do you ever have a bad day?

B
UCK:
No. There are no bad days.

R
EPORTER:
But you would have so much reason to be bitter….

B
UCK:
I stayed at some of the best hotels in the world. They just happened to be black hotels. I ate at some of the best restaurants in the world. They just happened to be black restaurants. In fact, those were better than most of the white restaurants because some of the best cooks in the world at that time were black.

R
EPORTER:
But I guess someone would say to you: How could you not hate?

B
UCK:
Where does hate get you?

Buck went back to the lunchroom just before the game began so he could eat a few finger sandwiches and celery sticks. The Minnesota Twins general manager, Terry Ryan, walked in with a box of Minnesota Twins golf balls for Buck.

“Hit them like you used to hit baseballs, Buck,” Ryan said.

“I wish I could,” Buck said.

By now, Buck had been going more or less nonstop for thirteen hours. He did not look tired. He gathered a plate of food and started to eat. A man sat down next to him.

“Buck O’Neil,” the man said.

Buck did not look up. He said: “That voice. Tony Oliva, my hero.”

F
OR AN OLD
baseball fan, the name Tony Oliva conjures up the mood and air of the mid-1960s the way hearing Mick Jagger sing “Hey! You! Get off of my cloud” might, or seeing Julie Andrews twirling in the Alps. There’s something magical in the name: Oliva. It wasn’t that Oliva was the best ballplayer of his time—though there were few better. The name sizzled with possibilities. Tony Oliva burst on the baseball scene in 1964 like no one had before. He won batting championships each of his first two seasons, the first baseball player to do that. Even that does not quite explain things. There was also something exotic about Oliva. He slipped out of Fidel Castro’s Cuba by using his brother’s passport. His name was not “Tony”—it was Pedro—but he kept his brother’s name for political reasons. Once he escaped Cuba, he could not return home to his family. He told reporters in his painstaking and much-practiced English that he called his mother every night.

“I tell my mother I will come home if I am needed,” he told the
Sporting News
. “But she tells me to stay here where I have an opportunity to play baseball.”

Pitchers did not know how to deal with him. Oliva had a savage swing—the bat often slipped from his hands and spun violently into the outfield or the stands. Nobody threw a bat farther than Tony Oliva. Though he swung viciously, he did not miss the ball much. He hit scalding line drives all over the park. Anybody who watched a young Oliva understood just how hard a baseball could be hit. Oliva in his young days could run and throw too. He was flawless, the perfect player, and he played with the desperation of a condemned man. No one can play the game that hard for very long. Oliva’s body broke down. He got the mumps, then chicken pox. He needed seven knee operations. He was a broken ballplayer by the time he was thirty-three. He played on, a decaying designated hitter in his later years, and he still cracked a few hits now and then. But he was not the same. He was not Oliva. There is something melancholy about those athletes who are so good so young.

“You still look young to me,” Buck O’Neil said. Oliva’s hair had receded and the top of his head shined. His sideburns had grayed and a few dark wrinkles creased under his eyes. But Buck was right. His face still looked young.

“You were as good a hitter as I ever saw, Tony,” Buck said.

“I got a few hits,” Oliva said.

“Let me ask you something. When you were young, when you were hitting everything, how big did that baseball look coming up there? I mean, it must have looked like a grapefruit.”

“It looked as big as the moon, Buck,” Tony Oliva said. “As big as the moon.”

B
UCK AND
T
ONY
talked about the split-fingered fastball. They did not believe in it. That’s not to say they did not believe it was a good pitch. They did not believe it existed. It was the Loch Ness Monster. It was the Easter Bunny. The split-fingered fastball became popular in the 1970s, mostly because of a relief pitcher named Bruce Sutter. He would throw his splitter by shoving the baseball between his index and middle fingers and then throwing it as hard as he could. The effect made the pitch look like a fastball until the very last instant. And then it would dive down suddenly, violently, like a man walking into a manhole. Hitters would swing right over it. For a long while, nobody could hit Bruce Sutter’s pitches. Others started to throw the splitter then. And it became popular.

“The splitter,” Oliva said with a smirk on his face. “I guess that’s what they call it now.”