Keeping It Light

Foreword.

I wanted to start my book with a quote from my lawyer. I was sitting in his office one day, beefing for the one hundredth time about the lack of progress in my career. I reminded him, as I always do, of my impressive accomplishments, which I keep in a handy folder. George the Attorney was a good listener, a reader of books. He was said to know a lot about history, literature and the sciences. After hearing me out, and downing a handful of Peanut M & Ms, he said, Just because things don’t make sense, doesn’t mean they're not true. And just because something does makes sense, doesn’t mean it's not a lie.

His advice: keep doing my best and everything would take care of itself. He'd said things like that many times over the years. I have worried, as I lay in bed at night, that I entrusted my future to someone who has no apparent worries about what the future might bring. Yet I respect that he has kept me substantially employed for a long time now, through all my ups and downs. If, from time to time, George tells me things that I can’t understand, well, I have to respect that, too. Lawyers have rules, and one of them says, your lawyer is always supposed to tell you the truth, even if what he tells you doesn’t make any sense.

My Statistical Line for The Season.

G AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB K SB CS AVG SLG OBP

102 407 155 33 2 22 72 75 69 49 7 0 .381 .634 .469

Introduction.

My name is Steve Sutherland, and I am a baseball player. This book is about baseball. It is a great game, and there are none better. It is a hallowed game, played by men who are legendary immortals, greater and better than the rest of us. It is a game of ancient ways and knowledge, of rituals and traditions passed down through the ages like a chain, from the dead to the old to the young to the not-yet-born. In this book I will tell about baseball, from exciting action on the field, to inside strategies and behind-the-scenes insights, also with plenty of tips and pointers for use by youngsters in their own careers.

This was originally supposed to be called, Big-Time Baseball, after a favorite book I used to read as a boy. It turned out I couldn't use the name because of various legal rules. My friend and former teammate Angel Luis Saltillo said that, in Mexico, anyone who writes a book can call it whatever he wants. Luis is not a lawyer, though, and this isn’t Mexico, and I’m not going to jail for the luxury of using the name Big-Time Baseball. Therefore I’m going to have to find another title.

Innings make up a baseball game. Games make up a season. Seasons, one of which is the baseball season, make up the years, which in turn become your life. I will try to honor that timeless plan, for better organization. The calendar always starts with New Year's Day and ends with New Year's Eve, the months and days following always in that order. In baseball, this is referred to as a set lineup, like the one used by the Big Red Machine of the nineteen-seventies. It is also shows that God Himself recognizes the principle that you should never mess with a formula that works.

They start playing games in the spring because of the nice weather. You can’t play baseball in the ice and snow. If you did, you could slip and tear your ligaments. I tore my ligaments once, and believe me, it’s a terrible experience. Or, you could try to throw and injure your shoulder. I had an injured shoulder once, too, and it was bad. Not as painful as torn ligaments, mind you, but worse in the long run. I believe that my whole family fell apart because of the time I hurt my shoulder.

Baseball is a game of injuries, and I remember all of them; in fact, they never go out of my head. Injuries, well times, seasons and off-seasons. Nothing ever seems to get forgotten. This has bothered me quite a bit over the years, but no matter what I do it never changes. It's not a good situation generally, but it did prove somewhat helpful when the time came for me to stop and write things down.

But enough about me. I’m writing about Our National Pastime. Created more than a hundred years ago during the Civil War by General Abner Doubleday, it was originally used to stop the spread of dysentery in the camps. From there it became the greatest sport in the whole country, probably one of the greatest in the world. It’s known in countries as far away as Mexico and Japan, but to the rest of us it will always be the American Game. As a treatment for dysentery, though, it’s now known that Our National Pastime is worthless. I have seen many of my teammates come down with that disease over the years, including the excellent prospect Billy Joe Patko, who missed most of last season with intestinal problems, which was what they now call the dysentery of the Civil War. That last is according to the sportswriter Glenn Rall.

Now a word about my point of view. Although a professional baseball player by trade, I have never gotten higher than the minor league team in Lexington, Kentucky, which is my home town, and the team’s owner is my friend. There used to be people who said I only had a job with the Lexington Leopards because of Max Smeer. Those who said that can see now that was wrong, not that there are any hard feelings. The subject of this book, then, is what I learned all my life. Now I have a book deal with the Ace Sports Publishing Company and have accepted an undisclosed amount of money in advance to tell this story.

A word to parents about the dirty language which appears herein. In baseball, men swear when they talk. It's just a thing they do, like eat food or ride on a bus. I used to go to the Methodist Church and to Sunday school quite a bit, mostly at the urging of my mom. She never cared for dirty talk, so out of respect for my mother I have left most of the swearing out. There are, however, places where I have to leave the words in, or else people will think what I’m writing is hokey or made up. My girlfriend, Melba, says, shit quite a bit; some of these I will remove but others will be left in depending on whether she really meant it.

Melba and I, by the way, eat a lot of Beefburgers on the couch; Beefburgers, the one burger guaranteed to satisfy every time, are made fresh daily from one hundred percent certified Grade-A beef without artificial fillers or preservatives. We make ‘em the way you like ‘em, to dine in or carry out. That’s Beefburgers, America’s best-loved char-grilled hamburger since nineteen fifty-seven.

This concludes the introduction to my book.

CHAPTER ONE - Rio Roberto

Spring training was in Arizona, and consisted mainly, as most training camps do, of dull practicing and calisthenics. Nobody wants to read about men doing jumping jacks, so we'll pass that by. Only two things happened that were out of the usual. First, my old coach from Calypso J.C., Gabe Lemay, was in the Rio Roberto area playing golf, He took me out to the resort and bought me drinks. Gabe had with him a six-foot tall blonde named Sandra. This was noteworthy because the last time I had drinks with Gabe Lemay he'd said he was through with women and had resumed playing golf to fill the extra time. He'd suffered a series of personal disasters that cost him a lot of money and psychic harm. Therefore to meet Sandra with him at the clubhouse bar was a surprise. She was taller than Gabe but they both had equally good tans. He described her to me as his fiancée.

Gabe and I reminisced about the old times when I played for him in the Florida Junior College Circuit (South Division). We talked about Key West, and the Casa del Sol Hotel, where we used to drink together, and the Fire House, where I used to be the bartender, and about our team winning the division championship two years in a row. Fine memories. He told me about how the wealthy financier and baseball fan Anderson Eddy had donated money to build a local sports museum, and it might have an exhibit about our team, and when it was finished it would be great if I could come and see it. I said that yes it would be great.

When Gabe went off to the bathroom Sandra and I chatted. She was a psychiatric assistant, which was a course of study at Calypso Junior College, and had met Gabe at a fund raiser for pediatric insomnia. I told her about my baseball career and how much I liked Key West when I was living there. Gabe's fiancée seemed to find everything I said interesting. She was a touchy, fingery type of woman. She walked her fingers slowly up my arm and told me I looked like a TV star, she couldn’t remember who (Author's note: I'm sure it was TV newsman Tom Brokaw. Practically from the time I was born people have been telling me I looked like Tom Brokaw.). Then she leaned over very close to me and, because this is not that kind of book, I will not repeat the words she whispered in my ear. Basically she invited me to have sex with her in her room while Gabe was out playing golf. I was mystified; not only was she engaged to my old college coach, but also I only knew the woman about ten minutes. I sat there staring at my cocktail until Gabe finally came back from the john.

When Sandra went to powder her nose, I felt it was my duty as a friend to point out to Gabe that he had sworn to God on a motel room Bible that he would never marry another woman.

He said, Babe, have you ever been in love?

I said, I'm still in love with Melba.

Then he said, I don’t mean just ‘love.’ I’m talking about ultimate love here. She knows me for who I am. She knows about my history with women. She even knows about Shirley Jones. This is not just love this time. It's 'love love.'

I said I didn’t understand, and he said, Then get off my back.

We had a few more drinks and listened to Sandra sing karaoke. She did several numbers; by the time she sang You Light Up My Life for the second time, we were the only ones left in the bar. When I left, Gabe kissed me and said I love you, Babe, like he always used to say years ago down in Key West. But I don’t know whether he was talking love here, or love love. No matter what happens he'll always be the man who taught me how to execute the hit-and-run.

I was designated for the minor-league camp for the ninth year in a row. It was to be my third season with the Lexington Leopards, a very unusual thing. In baseball, most of the time you are either going up or you are going down. Or out. But I was a former high school star at Hunt Morgan High School, and, as Max Smeer, the owner of the Leopards always said, I was one heck of a guy. I did TV commercials and played in charity golf events. Plus I could hit. Everybody knew it. I couldn’t throw or run very well any more, but I could hit the pill: fastball, curveball, split-finger pitch. If you can hit you can play this game. I proved it again at Rio Roberto, hitting a home run so far over the left field fence it knocked over an endangered cactus plant. A picture of the ball, stuck on the thorns, was in the morning sports section. I was interviewed about it by a TV guy, the first interview I had all year. They also had a guy from the Sonoran Desert Defense Committee who said I ought to be in jail.

The other thing that that happened in Rio Roberto was that Pete Appollo and Leon Treadway and Dane Piper and Billy Joe Patko and I went down to Mexico to celebrate the end of training camp. I’m not sure what all we did down there, because of being drunk. Apparently Piper, our relief ace, squashed some gum in a Mexican guy's hair because of an argument over the guy’s wife. Dane is a fun-loving individual. The police came to the bar and arrested Treadway even though it was Dane who gummed the guy. Leon took off running, and disappeared down the street. He stole forty-two bases last year, so there was no way they could catch him. Instead they arrested Piper and we had to post all the Mexican money we had to bail him out of jail. The only other thing I recall was Billy Joe Patko getting into a caterpillar-eating contest with some of the locals. This, by the way, is an important thing in the book but I can’t tell you why right now because it will spoil the plot.

CHAPTER TWO - Flying Open

I live in a rented house. In the house with me lives Daiquiri, which is a Pekingese dog. For those who aren’t up on their dog breeds, that is a very small type of animal, runs around a lot, and it is pronounced pickin-ease. The dog is not mine. It belongs to Melba DeRaine, who is my live-in girlfriend for years (Author's note: The phrase live-in girlfriend will come up a lot in this book, mostly due to the presence of Melba. From now on, therefore, to save time and pencil lead, I will substitute the letters LIGF, and everybody will know what they stand for.). Melba is a dental hygienist by profession. One day last April I said Good-bye to Melba and headed out the door to go to the baseball park for the first game of the season.

She said, I know you’re going to have the greatest year of your life. Something tells me everything in your life is going to change in a positive way.

And I said, Well, it’s about time.

Then Melba said, Say bye-bye to Daddy, Daiquiri. Say bye-bye. Come on. Bye-bye. But the dog said nothing. It never paid attention. Pekingese are stupid.

It was just a short drive from the rented house to the baseball park on the north side of town. Nevertheless I enjoyed the drive, which allowed me to see some of the scenic sights of my hometown.

Lexington, Kentucky’s second largest city, population two hundred eighty-two thousand and ninety-eight, is the commercial center of Bluegrass Country. The region is distinguished by a rich historical heritage that centers on thoroughbred horses, tobacco and basketball. Lexington lies amid rolling bluegrass pastures trimmed by miles of painted wooden fences and peppered with cupolas and quaint tobacco barns. While picturesque, the pastoral scene commands a higher purpose: the horse. Nearly fifty thousand horses are bred each year in and around Lexington. Keeneland Race Course holds Thoroughbred meets in April and October.

Lexington loves it's college basketball. The local obsession reaches a crescendo from late October through March, when the University of Kentucky Wildcats hit the hardwood. The many-time national champions play at the twenty-three thousand seat Rupp Arena, named after the legendary college hoops coach Adolph Rupp. For ticket information phone the University ticket office, at (859) 723-8181.

Now, I have to make an admission. The part I just wrote, about Lexington being picturesque and crescendo and so forth, that is not really me writing there. I copied it from a Triple-A Travel Guide. You can’t go wrong with Triple-A. I was told specifically not to put other people’s writing in my book, and I apologize. But when I sat down to try to describe the city of Lexington it seemed like it didn’t come out sounding as good as it should. For example, Lexington does have a lot of horses, but I don’t know very much about them. I always lose money when I bet at the Keeneland Race Course, where the girls are more interesting to see than the ponies. I don’t know anything about tobacco barns; I don’t even smoke. And while I liked to watch UK basketball on TV, I can’t get a decent seat at any home games unless Max Smeer isn’t using his season tickets, which he almost always does.

I could have added a few other things that I know from living here. Lexington is a bad place to live if you have allergy problems, I guess because of all the flower pollen. Ginger Appollo and some other people I know have bad allergies. I could have mentioned that about once a year the local police do sting operations in some of the city parks to keep people from having sexual meetings in the woods. Or I could have said that the Kentucky Wildcats football team usually stinks. But I think this book ought to be a positive thing. Besides, Lexington is a good place in which to be for the most part. That is because it is where I am and where I am from and where my friends and my home and my job is.

A lot of things have happened to me in my baseball career that some would say were tough breaks. The game is full of breaks, good ones and bad. It’s up to the individual to handle them like a pro and to show a lot of class in doing so. Whoever had a tougher break than the great Lou Gehrig, who played in two thousand one hundred and thirty consecutive games until he was felled by the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis? He walked out on the field and told the fans he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth. When Melba and I watched a movie about him she said he should have said he was the unluckiest man on earth, but I think everyone knew what he meant, and the main thing is that he showed he was a quality individual. He hit a three-forty batting average for his lifetime, and I don’t know how on Earth you do that. I had Melba take her calculator out the other day and figure out my lifetime average and it came out to three-oh-nine, and that was even counting my best and biggest year. So it was an amazing feat done by that Hall-of-Famer.

But I also had obstacles to overcome. When I was a high-school senior I was horsing around playing football at Reeve Spann’s uncle’s farm in Bourbon County, and threw my shoulder out, and my arm never did come back. Then I suffered from post-traumatic depression, and ate nothing but Husman’s Baked Cheese Curls for three or four months and gained thirty-five pounds. Then one time I was standing in the sea watching the stingrays at Bahia Honda State Park in Florida and some kid ran over me with an out-of-control wave runner and tore all the ligaments in my right knee, and caused me to hit my head so hard they thought I might never recover. It was then that I got retrograde amnesia.

I spent nine years bouncing around in the farm systems of three teams, listening to people tell me I wasn’t a good player for some reason or another while other people agreed with them to some extent or another. My mother, who had suffered more bad breaks in her life than even I had, got suddenly sick and passed away, just when it seemed like she was doing very well for herself. This hit me hard. I think some people figured then that I was washed up. But I knew some things that other people did not know. I was a baseball player, and I knew that if I believed in myself, and with the love of a good woman, everything would work out for me in the end, just like with Lou Gehrig.

So I headed down to Smeer Park to warm up for the opening day game against the Tri-County Diggers. My car is a Chevrolet Cavalier which is white and is a hatchback. It has some rust and the radio is smashed in but it has always run good. I put a disc in my boom box: the Smooth Sounds of Mister Lou Rawls. I hoped this disc would help me to find my groove and give a rhythm to my swing in the batter’s box. Also I just happened to like Lou Rawls.

There is something about the first day of the baseball season that is very joyous. When I was a boy, John, my dad (I called him John, everybody called him John), used to tell me how he and his brother used to cut out and go to Cincinnati to watch the game on Opening Day. I have a picture of the two of them together, John and Uncle Jim, when John was student at the University of Kentucky and Jim was working in Lexington. John was a dark-haired and good-looking man; his brother, was a big, lumberjack-looking guy. The two made regular trips to Crosley Field, and one time John got a foul ball behind the dugout. It hit a boy in the head and John caught it on the rebound. He was so excited he forgot who hit the ball. But the good part was that the kid who got hit sat up eventually and was all right and didn’t remember a thing. John gave me the ball when I started in the Little League, and it has stayed in the Sutherland family ever since.

Baseballs can be dangerous; our opening game confirmed this. When I went out on the field for the warm-ups everybody was standing around Herm Wadsworth, the pitching coach, who was lying flat on his back stretched out like a man trying to get a suntan. It was bright and warm enough to get a suntan, but Wadsworth was wearing his baseball suit and a neck brace. I went over to ask what was going on.

He’s knocked out, said Jimmy Fee, our little shortstop. Maestro was hitting fungoes and Salgado threw a long throw from right field and Buck missed it and it hit the old guy right in the neck. It made a loud pop and down he went. Seems like he’s been lying there for about all day. They need to haul him out of here and get this thing moving.

Is he going to be all right?

Jimmy mopped his brow with his hat. The slick-fielding glove man was known for his sun sensitivity; rusty-haired and bat-eared, when exposed to the sun too long he became swollen and red all over.

Can you keep a secret? said Fee. I just now realized that I don't even care. I’m going in the clubhouse to see what’s on TV.

Pete Appollo was more sympathetic. Pete was a stocky right-hander with thick, black hair who was expected to be in the starting rotation. I knew him from when we were in the Minnesota organization together, and we were roommates on the team this year and the previous year.

My Jesus Mercy, what a shot, he said. It sounded like somebody golfing an apple with a three-wood. When Pete spoke he used a peculiar, low-pitched mutter which made it hard for some to understand him. As his roommate, though, I usually knew what he was trying to say. The old guy was teaching me how to throw a knuckleball. I’ve got to develop a new pitch or else they'll send me out of here.

Here’s a story about Pete Appollo. Pete pitched for New Jersey in the in the Little League World Series, where he lost to Taiwan, thirteen to one. Then he pitched for Temple in the College World Series, where he lost to Texas, seventeen to one. He got to the major leagues in the same year, but then he hurt his arm striking out Dave Winfield in the next-to-last game of the season. And so he didn’t get to go to the grown-up World Series with Minnesota. Instead he got his shoulder operated on and had to sit out for a year and a half. During that time he became clinically depressed, and ate bag after bag of Ruffles potato chips, gaining forty-five pounds in the deal. We talked a lot about that and became friends. Anyway, when he came back, his fastball was slower than the ones he had thrown to the Chinese eleven-year olds. Since then he had been pitching slowballs in the minor leagues.

Herm never did get up. They put him on a stretcher and and drove him away on a cart. Buck Bramble, our first baseman, came over and said, They said he’s going to have a contusion. They probably shouldn't let old guys like that out on the field.

The warm-ups resumed. Appollo stepped in as a substitute fungo hitter. Players ran, stretched, fielded and whipped the ball around. Maestro McGraw was telling a young man, You’re opening up too soon, you’re flying open. It was baseball season all over again. Rocky Sanzone, who was our backup catcher, got into an debate with Buck over whether Herm Wadsworth would have had a contusion or a concussion. It’s a fact that baseball players know very little about medical matters. In this game, as the sportswriter Glenn Rall says, there are only four basic human conditions: active roster, fifteen-day disabled list, sixty-day disabled list, and retired slash dead. Since Herm was already in category number four, there was only so much damage that getting hit in the neck could really do to him. That’s not what anybody said. But I think maybe a lot of people were thinking it without saying.

CHAPTER THREE - Likes TV and Going to Restaurants

Baseball players are superstitious people, probably more than anybody in the world. This is because you can’t succeed in the game if you're a magnet for bad luck. This may be true in other walks of life as well, but nobody believes in it more than a clubhouse full of ballplayers.

Everybody has their own thing. One man might have a lucky hat. Others, a lucky bat or pair of socks. Some people, especially pitchers, get attached to their underwear and will not allow them to be washed with the rest of their clothes. In my view this is carrying things too far.

Many players have pre-game rituals. This is where my superstition comes in. Years ago, in my first year of college ball at Calypso J.C., we had a home game scheduled against our arch-rivals, the Bogeys of Largo State Community Tech. I knew I'd be batting cleanup. Therefore I wanted to eat a light lunch. I had a piece of jerk snapper at a Jamaican restaurant on Front Street. About an hour before the game that afternoon, I was out on the field taking infield practice when I started to get a jittery feeling in my intestines. At first I thought it was pre-game nerves. Then, suddenly, I tasted a little jerk snapper in the back of my mouth. Then, even more suddenly, I felt like I was about to crap a great big loose bunch in my uniform pants, right there in the middle of the infield. I ran off like I was being chased by a bear, making it to the locker room with seconds to spare.

As I was sitting on the commode I broke out in a cold sweat. I kept getting the flavor of the jerk seasoning in my mouth and it wouldn’t go away. Every time I tasted it, it made me sick again. There I sat, afraid to get up. Finally Gabe LeMay knocked on the door. He asked if I was OK and I said no. As much as I wanted to play, the fear of having an accident on the baseball field made me ask to be out of the lineup.

While I sat there, I noticed a Bass Masters magazine on the floor under the next stall. Therefore I spent the next twenty minutes or so reading about fishing.

When I finally got to feeling better I went out on the field, and was surprised to find that the game hadn't started yet. It turned out that there was a traffic accident and the Largo team bus had been stuck behind it. They were forty-five minutes late getting to the park. By then I was over the effects of the the bad fish. I went to Gabe and told him that I was ready to play ball. He put his hand on my shoulder and told me very confidentially that I had to know if I crapped my pants on the baseball diamond that it would follow me around for the rest of my career, if not the rest of my life. It was things like that that made Gabe a good manager. He was always giving little tips and advice to his players.

I did not soil my pants that day. Instead, I batted cleanup, went four-for-five, and hit for the cycle. That means I had a single, a double, a triple, and a home run, something that doesn’t happen very much in baseball. It was quite a thrill, since I never did that before, and I haven’t done it since. My name was in the local paper the next day, another first, and in bold print, too: SUTHERLAND SHRUGS OFF SNAPPER, BATTERS BOGEYS. That was when I started my record-setting two years in the Florida Junior College Circuit (South Division).

Ever since then I spend a few minutes before every game sitting on the pot and reading. It doesn’t matter whether I actually plan to go. Usually I don’t. But I will go in the restroom and take something to read. It was an accidental discovery which became a ritual I could never change. Besides, the john is a good place to collect your concentration before the game, a quiet place that's respected by everybody (Author's note: I should say, almost everybody. A dumb son of a bitch named Terry French, a pitcher, once dumped a ten-gallon bucket of ice water on me for a joke. I chased him in a rage, but slipped down and bruised my knee. I carried a grudge for weeks, looking for the chance to pay him back. Then I picked up the paper one day and read that French's wife had shot and killed him. What he did to piss her off, I never knew. Where he ended up, though, I’d wager that ice water is in short supply.).

So I started this season’s opening game by reading in clubhouse bathroom. On this occasion I took in a fresh new copy of the team’s yearbook.

The roster was young, as a Class Double-A minor league team is expected to be. At twenty-nine, I was the oldest man on the squad, except for Johnny Paloose, a thirty-year old pitcher who was coming back from arm surgery. I didn’t feel that old personally. But it was my third year with the team (pretty unusual), and most of the guys I played with before were gone. As I scanned down the list of my teammates for the upcoming year, a few names were familiar. But most I saw for the first time in Rio Roberto. Here they are, or, what my Theater Appreciation professor in college would have said, here are the dramatis personae:

Pitchers.

Mickey Host, age 24. BL/TL. Hobbies were hunting and golf. Short for a pitcher, squat and blocky. Joined the team at the end of last year. Didn’t know him.

Brandon Brandfield, 21. BR/TR. Hunting and fishing. Didn’t know him.

Johnny Paloose, 30. BR/TR. Travel and antiquing. Knew him a little because I had played against him in the Florida State League a few years ago. Seemed like he perspired a lot. But then that was a very humid league.

Hugo Cordero, 22. BL/TR. Enjoyed Latin music. I hit a home run off him when he played for Lucasville last year. He cursed at me in Spanish. Didn’t know what it meant at the time.

Derrick Tyler, 24. BL/TL. Music and cooking. I once read about him in Sports Illustrated. Got a million dollar bonus as a high school pitcher out of Brooklyn. Throws hard, drives a golden Porsche.

Bobby Pincer, 26. BR/TL. Word games, cars and playing with his son. Knew him from last year.

Aaron Oswald, 23. BL/TR. Reading and photography. Didn’t know him. Read two whole books in spring training, which is a lot for a ball player. Looked intense most of the time.

Dane Piper, 24. BR/TR. A Lexington native, like me, and from Hunt Morgan High School as well. Dane’s daddy played basketball for Coach Adolph Rupp and I played high school ball with his big brother, Duane.

Pete Appollo, 27. BR/TR. Eating and watching TV. I already told you a little about him. Pete was my best friend on the team and roommate. Also his wife and Melba liked to go to the tanning bed together.

Catchers.

Albert Mondelli, 23. BR/TR. Hobby was having a good time. His nickname was Moose. Could eat and drink as much as two men. Tremendous power.

Rocky Sanzone, 23. BR/TR. Watching game shows. Finished the previous year in Lexington. In spring training, he popped up to the first baseman every time I saw him bat.

Infielders.

Clarence Bramble, 21. BL/TL. Hunting, fishing, and learning the guitar. People called him Buck. Didn’t know him too well.

Angel Luis Saltillo, 24. Music and swimming. Played winter ball with me in Mexico and also played in Lexington last year. Sang in the shower, and looked a little bit like the artist formerly known as Prince.

Truitt Fee, 24. BB/TR. Country music and monster trucks. Went by the name Jimmy. I don’t know why. Also on the team with me last year.

Chad Schleussner, 19. BB/TR. Cars and doing card tricks. Didn’t know him.

Rashid Carmel, 21. BR/TR. His hobbies were fitness and pencil-drawing. Didn’t know him.

Jeff Wheat, 23. BR/TR. Fishing and golf. Came to the team midway through last season. A first round draft pick with a big signing bonus. Got booed a lot.

Outfielders.

Cesar Salgado, 18. BL/TR. Enjoyed spending time with his family. Didn’t know him very well. He spoke no English, but he seemed friendly. If he had food, he always offered you some.

Dwight Bleckner, 26. BL/TR. Motorcycles and rock music. Played against him for a few years, so I knew him a little. Had long hair and nineteen seventies-style sideburns.

Billy Joe Patko, 20. BL/TL. Walleye fishing. Voted the best prospect in the Milwaukee organization. Spent a month with the team last year and batted .384. Expected to be in the majors soon, maybe before the year was out.

Steve Sutherland, 29. BL/TL, which they got wrong, for the second year in a row. Likes TV and going to restaurants.

Leon Treadway, 26. BL/TR. Reading and bowling. Roomed with him for a year at Santee. Smart baserunner, philosophical talker.

And that was it. Those were my teammates. I didn’t know much about a lot of them. I was glad that I had read the yearbook so that they seemed less like strangers to me. The coaches I knew better. Herm Wadsworth and Maestro McGraw were here last year. Cliff Hindman, the manager, was in his first year with the team. I got to know him better as the season went on.

You writing a book in there? It was the voice of Luis Saltillo.

What is it?

We’re going out on the field, he said. I thought maybe you'd want to loosen up. They’re getting ready to do ‘Jose Can You See.’

CHAPTER FOUR - Being Ready

A lot of the people at this point are probably wondering why I don’t just go ahead and describe the action and say how I did in the season’s first game against the Tri-County Diggers. Well, there’s no point beating around the bush. I didn’t get to play in the game. Because of my experience and versatility at playing different positions, I was too valuable as a utility man to use up playing a regular starting position, like third base, or left field. At least that’s what Max Smeer, our team’s owner, told me.

The manager of the Lexington Leopards, Cliff Hindman, did not tell me that. Cliff didn’t really tell me much of anything for the first three months of the season. He hardly even talked to me. I’m not the kind of guy to rip somebody in the press, but Cliff was so unfriendly to me for no reason that he made me feel like a hobo at the debutantes’ ball. He never said my name right, called me Sutcliffe and Sundberg and everything else. He was always fixing his hair with styling goop and talking about tail, I’m going to get some tail, score some tail. He played a few years in the major leagues for Texas and Cleveland as an outfielder. To him this made him bigger than the rest of us. All I wanted to do was to play baseball. But Cliff played games with my brain all the time. By the third week of April I had three times at bat - three times at bat, pinch hitting. I walked once and struck out twice. Nobody in baseball can stay sharp with no more tries than that.

I went to Cliff’s office before a game and asked him to give me a chance to play. He was sitting at his desk, playing some sort of card game with Cran Bashley, the Leopards’ silver-haired radio announcer, The Voice of the Leopards. Known for his familiar catch-phrase, Great Day in the Mornin', Bashley was the only person on the team who ignored me more than Cliff; in fact, he had never spoken a word to me, not in three years on the team. When I entered the room and stated my complaint, neither man looked up from his cards.

Cliff said, You’re getting a pay check, aren’t you? What the hell do you want? I double up, there, Cran.

Then I said, I’m a baseball player. I deserve a chance to play.

Hold the slough, said Bashley, in his announcer’s voice.

Cliff reached his hand down the front of his pants and scratched his testicles thoroughly, just to show how little regard he had for our conversation. He said, I was going to put you out in right field the other day, but I changed my mind. Now I’ve got to double twice.

Changed your mind? I said. Why did you do that?

I’ll take one and one, said Bashley. Aw, crap. I should have sloughed.

Then Cliff said something that really surprised me, something that I hadn’t heard for a long time. In fact it surprised me so much that I couldn’t even think of anything to say back in return. I just turned around and went and sat in front of my locker. Dane Piper had the locker next to me and he asked me if I was going to get to play and I told him no. Cliff said he didn’t want to put me in the game because in his opinion I was not ready.

Be ready. All my life that was a personal quest of mine. My dad (I called him John, everybody called him John) had told me that, in baseball, you couldn’t do anything unless you were ready, limber and ready. When I was a child I could hit the ball better than anybody on my team, but sometimes John didn’t like the way I batted. He always filled with pride and delight whenever I drove the ball over the left-fielder’s head for and circled the bases. But not even Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron can hit a home run every time. It seemed like my natural stroke was to hold my hands down at my waist and then whip the bat around when the ball came by. I hit line drives all over the field in this way, but to John it looked like I wasn’t prepared for the pitch.

You’re not ready, he used to say. You’ll never hit a fast pitch because you’re not ready. This idn’t slow-pitch softball.

And then I’d say something like, I got three hits.

And then he’d say that two of them were to right field. My sister can dink the ball over the first baseman’s head.

One time he was driving a bunch of us home from the game and he said to me, You stand in there with the bat down by your ass and you’re not ready. Look at Bobby Tolan. He keeps his hands up high above his head so he can jump on the pitch when it comes. You’re just a slow-pitch softball hitter like those fat guys down at Hock’s Cafe. My sister can hit a puffball.

Bobby Tolan at that time was an outfielder for Cincinnati. He was a very fine player, but I had seen in the morning sports page that he was batting only .219 at that time. So I said, I’m batting .500, but Tolan is only batting .219. Maybe he should try hitting with the bat on his ass for a while instead.

Then he bawled me out and said if I had to talk with a foul mouth I should just keep it shut. When we got home he seemed really mad.

All you ever think about is yourself, said John. Why can’t you for just one time in your life think about the way what you do affects other people? You want to be mediocre and half-assed in the way you live your life, that’s O.K. with me, just so long as it doesn’t ruin things for somebody else. That’s where your selfishness comes in.

Then he went on to say that if I ever showed him up like that again he would make me wish I hadn’t.

That was a long time ago but I still remember the lesson. Therefore I always tried to be ready whenever I set foot on the baseball field. I always jangle around to stay limber and I always keep my head in the game. That’s why it shocked me so badly to hear Cliff Hindman say he wouldn’t play me because he didn’t think I would be ready.

I told Dane Piper what Cliff had said. He sat down in the chair beside me and thought it over for a while. Dane