Chapter 8

But I did get a start. Our third game in New York was on a wet, cold, blustery day with a nasty wind from the northeast. It felt like it might snow any minute. We skipped batting practice so they could keep the tarp on the field as long as possible as showers came and went.

It was a day game on a Sunday and normally that would have meant a good crowd at Shea, but coming to a baseball game dressed for football just does not excite many people. So the Mets' stadium was full of orange and blue seats and a few groups of fans, as in fanatics, huddled together for warmth, most of them wearing parkas, hats and gloves. Two bare-chested young men perched in the left field stands, slowly turning blue as they awaited their moments of glory on TV. No one sat near them. The beer sellers were not making many over-priced bucks but hot chocolate was going fast.

About an hour before game time when I was huddled under the roof of the bullpen wishing I owned some woolen gloves, Marvin Marshall, the old pitching coach, nudged my foot with his toe. I snapped back from wherever my mind was, probably somewhere in Florida.

"You wanna start?" he asked after spitting a gob of tobacco juice into the dirt. He wore the bill of his cap so low it was hard to see his eyes.

I lifted an eyebrow at him and pointed to my own chest.

"Buzzy don' wanna let the kid hurt hisself in this rotten weather."

"But he doesn't care about me?" I was trying to be funny. "Damn!"

'Guess there ain't no way you can hurt your arm no more'n it is," he said, giving me a tobacco-stained smile.

"Why not," I said, standing and looking for my glove, "they pay me." I was not about to admit that I was eager.

So I did some serious stretching and jogged up and down a bit and then threw a few times in the bullpen with the taciturn Enos, backing up as far as I could so I was tossing at about 75 or 80 feet. When the lineups were announced, there was my name, right at the end of the list, batting ninth just as God and Abner Doubleday had intended. (Don't get me going on Doubleday who might have been a good artillery man but probably did not know beans about baseball.)

Anyhow, I had not started a big league game for more than five years and none anywhere else under my own name. It felt very good, made my heart really thump. If you don't get excited and a little scared just before a game starts, you are not doing it right and you ought to quit.

We went out one-two-three in the top of the first, without even a loud foul against their big right-hander, and I ambled out to the mound, stepping over the foul line carefully of course, and picked up the new rosin bag. What I needed was one of those gas-fueled hand warmers. The umpires let us blow on our fists on days like this, but that did not help much unless you were determined to throw a spitter.

Bigger and I had gone over their line up and decided not to let their strong-armed catcher beat us. We almost always picked out one guy we were going to really work on, one guy we would rather walk that let hit. Since the stinging breeze was blowing toward center field most of the time, flapping the pennants noisily and carrying ice pellets with it now and then, I decided to use more knuckle balls than usual. Bigger groaned and gritted his teeth.

"I ain' had but one passed ball this season," he said. "Wanted me that gold glove, you know."

"When it stops moving, my man, just pounce on it," I said, breathing out a cloud of vapor. I think Bob Uecker said something like that about the knuckler.

He growled.

The third man up pickled one of my sliders which served me right since the thing hung up there like a birthday balloon. I did not even bother to watch it leave the ball park. Most of the time, you can tell by the sound. The umpire threw me a new ball, and I turned my back on the batter as he circled the bases at a slow and stately pace, enjoying every minute of it while his dugout buried me with their jibes about my age, skinny legs and bald head. I rubbed the ball until its skin was loose. The cold crowd clapped and yelled, but gloved hands do not make much noise.

In our second inning, we got the run back, and I made the third out. There is an old baseball joke that goes, who bats after the pitcher? The answer is, usually the other team. Ha ha.

I used the knuckle ball a lot the next inning, and the third batter asked the ump to look at the ball after one pitch danced away from him. The umpire, a black guy named Curtis who had been around for a while, put his mask under his arm, turned the ball over several times in his big hands and then walked out to visit me along with Bigger.

"Got a nick here," he said, showing me the ball.

I held up the first two fingers of my right hand. "I dig in when I throw that thing," I said. "Only way I know."

"Uh huh," he said. "Be careful." He threw that ball aside and handed me a new one.

"Yes, sir," I said, and we went back to work, being careful. It tried to stick my nails into the ball's seam but did not get much action that way.

The game ambled on one-to-one until the fifth inning when a combination of bad luck, bad throws and a Bigger Johnson home run put us ahead by three. Pretty good for a team with a combined batting average of about .230. All of a sudden, I was looking like the winning pitcher if I could get through my half of the fifth; that is what is needed for an official-scorer win, assuming we held the lead; hardly a safe thing to assume with our bull pen.