Chapter 17

Since we had saved a lot on our payroll by getting rid of two of our three highest-paid players, Thomas Ambrose had a lot of room to go shopping for some expensive muscle in the free-agent market. I had asked Mrs. Jepperson about Fast Charley Freeman, the long-vanished relief pitcher, but she just shrugged in response, promised to ask her husband about him, and Ambrose only said he was not sure where he had gone but that he was looking into it.

Anyhow, over the All-Star break and with the trading deadline approaching, our general manager worked out a deal for Toronto's Zeke Ramirez who had twenty-three home runs and sixty-four runs batted in at the half-way mark. Zeke, who was only thirty years old and in the last year of his contract, reminded me of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, a big guy with big muscles who batted around .300 year after year. I wondered if he was using steroids, but I did not ask.

The "new Killebrew" said the Times' headline which probably meant very little to readers under fifty, but then most newspaper readers were over fifty I guess. In fact he looked more like Ted Kluszewski than Harmon Killebrew, but since Killebrew was the old Senator's last big slugger, he was the one that the reporters compared to Zeke. No one seemed to care that Killebrew had hit most of his homers for Minnesota. I wondered if they had forgotten all about big Frank Howard who had a very long baseball career.

Ramirez reported about noon on the day that the second half of the season got going. We were at home so there were people around to help him find a place to lay his head and put his bags and his bats; he brought with him a dozen beautifully-made maple bats from a Canadian source. His home was in Oklahoma where he had a wife and several children. He had played football for one year at the university before deciding that baseball was his game. He was a bright and personable man with a neatly trimmed mustache who sat patiently through numerous interviews after we held a press conference at the MCI Center to introduce him to the reporters. He said he was happy to be in Washington and that he was looking forward to playing for me.

I doubted both statements since he had come from an American League team that was a title contender almost every year. Oddly enough, he had been waived out of the league. His salary was big, but it was not that big by modern standards, which had long ago gotten completely out of hand. I could have named at least ten non-pitchers were making more than he was.

I told him that I was planning to have him bat third in the lineup. He nodded, working on the handle of one of the dark red bats that he had brought to the picture-taking, and said he was used to being the cleanup man, but that third up was fine. I assured him that he would get very few passes since Bigger Johnson and Papa Junkins would bat behind him. When we got out to the ballpark that evening, he came into my office and sat on a metal folding chair, his new uniform shirt tight over his bulging shoulders, his forehead full of furrows, his hat moving steadily though his fingers.

"They tell you I've got a drug problem?" he asked, clasping his big hands between his knees to stop their motion. He looked at the floor.

I felt my heart skip several beats and shook my head. "Nope."

"I do. I tested positive several times up in Canada. I don't do it much, but I still do it now and then." He glanced up at me.

"You been suspended?" I asked.

"Uh uh, league's never caught me," he said. "They used a private doctor, not the team's. But I wanted you to know."

"Thanks," I said. "Somebody looking after your money for you?"

"Oh yes," he said with a tight smile. "My wife gives me ten dollars a day to spend. She sends it to me in an envelope, one ten at a time, along with notes from the kids."

He was making about $30,000 a game, something like a million a month.

"Does Mr. Ambrose know?" I asked.

He nodded. "I asked him to let me tell you. I don' like being traded to a last place team, y'understand." He shook his head, sad-eyed.

"Of course," I said.

"But they didn' trust me any more up there. Said the ax was sure to fall, and they'd get nothing for me. I guess the word was out."

I nodded.

"I'll give you one hundred percent, every day. It's jus' that, maybe, if things don' go right, an' I can't control this here problem, I might take off for a day or two."

"Okay," I said. "As long as you stay out of jail. And don't get your name in the papers."

He smiled. "When I use, I lock myself in my room."

"I understand," I said. "I was a drunk, but I drank the stuff almost every day. I did get my name in the papers. It cost me a five year suspension and my marriage."

"Ain't the same," he said mournfully. "Ain' the same a'tall." He stood and shook my hand.

"Thanks," I said, making a mental note about getting him treatment after the season.

In his first time at bat in a Nats uniform, Zeke Ramirez hit one over the scoreboard in right field and out into the dark somewhere, maybe into the Anacostia River. The twenty-five or thirty thousand there to see him cheered like we had won the pennant, and he had to step out of the dugout and tip his hat before they would stop yelling his name. From that day on, he heard 'Zeke, Zeke, Zeke' every time he came to the plate. Attendance improved at once.

Then I found a leadoff hitter, or actually had one built for me. Young Frank Smith, who backed up Papa Junkins at first and who played both third base and the outfield for me had been under scrutiny by Scott Lindale's TV/computer system and had also become one of Mac's prize pupils. "Use him," said my taciturn batting coach, standing in his usual spot, his shoulder against the edge of the dugout. "Leave him in for a week. Give him a chance to show you." He managed to chew through a box of toothpicks every game, littering the dugout floor.

Frank batted right handed, and when I first saw him, he was standing in the awkward-looking Charlie Lau position but taking a small step toward the pitcher as he swung and dropping his foot in the bucket on the curve balls. He was hitting about .180. Now he stood poised on his front toe with a closed, wide-spread stance, his bat high and still, and he had developed an eye that would have made Ted Williams proud. Magruder had taught him how to read the spin right from the release point. He got fooled once in a while, but he did not swing at bad pitches. Sliders away did not bother him. Splitters that dove at the plate were ignored. High hard ones barely got a look. If you did not throw Frank Smith a strike, Frank Smith did not swing.