Everything They Had Page 10

  Williams loved to study young hitters. He was like a drill sergeant and he taught them, above all else, concentration.

  “Bush, where was that pitch?”

  “It was outside, Mr. Williams.”

  “Where outside?”

  “About two inches.”

  “What do you mean about? Don’t you know?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bush,” he would say in disgust, “you’re too dumb to be a hitter.”

  That spring, Williams had told reporters that a kid named Reggie Smith looked like a ballplayer, and that had been sweet.

  In some ways, the real education of Reggie Smith had begun in that, his 19th year. Boston had assigned him to room with Earl Wilson, the Red Sox’ only other black player, an immense power pitcher. Wilson’s legend preceded him; he was not to be trifled with. In the previous season, he had pitched a no-hitter, and he was said to have only marginal tolerance for rookies. On the first day of spring training, Smith, determined to be respectful and not to behave like a rookie, had carried his suitcases down the hall, practicing all the while how he would greet this legend. He would prove to Wilson that he was a serious young man, not some brash rookie, since he was in truth a brash rookie. He finally knocked on the door and a huge voice told him to come in.

  “Hello, Mr. Wilson, my name is …” he began.

  An enormous black form began to rise out of the bed. “Get the fuck out of here!” he shouted. “My name is Earl.”

  So Smith left the room, knocked again, entered and said, “Hello, Earl.” With that, he decided many years later, his education had commenced.

  Not until long after both he and Wilson left Boston did he truly understand how generous Wilson had been. For Wilson, virtually alone on a mostly white team, had taken him in hand and made sure that he did not waste such exceptional natural gifts, particularly in an organization that had not yet become an equal-opportunity employer. That was not always easy or painless, for Wilson was educating a relatively soft young man for a harder world.

  “You’re so young, Bush,” he had said to him in that first week, “that you don’t even have your man muscles yet.”

  That spring, Wilson was pitching batting practice to Smith, who had power but did not yet know how to pull the ball. Wilson threw an inside pitch and Smith hit it sharply through the box. Wilson just managed to duck out of the ball’s way.

  Dick Radatz, the mammoth relief pitcher, began to get on Wilson. “You going to let that little kid get away with that, Earl?” he shouted. The next pitch, very fast, hit Smith in the back.

  “Now hit that one back the middle,” Wilson said. So Smith started trying to hit everything through the middle and Wilson, in turn, finally threw right at his head. That made Smith even angrier, though his anger was directed at Radatz, who, he decided, had started all the trouble. Earl, after all, was his friend. So he started yelling at Radatz; then Wilson came in and grabbed him by the collar. A hand had never seemed so large.

  “Hey, Road,” Wilson said, using a nickname for a roommate, “you’re out of line. This is the big leagues, and you’ve got to learn to pull pitches like that.”

  A few minutes later, Smith was sitting in the dugout still fuming, when a huge foot belonging to Radatz suddenly appeared in front of him, blocking all else from view. It was surely the largest foot that Reggie Smith had ever seen. “You mad at me?” a voice that was in some way connected to the foot had asked. This man, Smith thought, is huge. Just huge.

  “No, I think I’m over it now,” he answered.

  “I’m very glad of that,” the voice said, and both it and the foot disappeared.

  Later that day at Korakuen Stadium, Smith recalled an incident from his boyhood in California, a very long way from Japan. He had been about 15 and was driving back from a semipro game with his father when they had spotted Willie Mays doing a promotion in a tire store. Reggie had walked up to Mays and told him that he, too, was a ballplayer. Mays, to his surprise, had not asked him whether he batted lefty or righty or which position he played. The only thing he had said was, “Do you know how to duck?” Now Smith finally understood what Mays had meant.

  Earl Wilson understood, too, by the time he spotted the immense raw talent in Smith. “He’s in the Clemente/Mays class,” Wilson would say, and he loved, that first spring, to show him off. Once, when Boston played the Giants in an exhibition game, he went over to the San Francisco bench and took Mays aside. “Willie,” he said, “you think you’ve got an arm. Now watch this kid.” Wilson worried about Smith, about his instinct for defiance in a profession not much given to contention (“Reggie reminded me a lot of me,” he later said), and he had worked to protect him. Smith remembered now how Earl had told him once, when the younger player was depressed, that he was not allowed to get down nor to let his temper diminish his talent. “Reggie,” he had said, “you’ve got to make it. You are the best young prospect ever to come along in the Boston organization. You’ve got the best chance and so you’ve got to make it. Not just for yourself but for all of us.”

  It happened very quickly. By 1967, he was in his rookie season and having a wonderful year. At first, he’d taken pleasure from the status, from simply being in the big leagues, and he had done the usual rookie things: bought the requisite T-bird, endowed it with REGGIE plates and enjoyed it when he was recognized on the streets of Boston. He had learned to time it, to watch the excitement in the face of the surprised citizens, and had learned to be very cool under the glare of that attention.

  His natural gifts had shown through from the start, and he loved it when opposing teams gathered in front of their dugouts to watch him throw from the outfield during pregame practice. Roberto Clemente, who had been one of his heroes, said that Smith had the best arm in baseball. Carl Yastrzemski had taken him under his wing that first year, and that had been both generous and unusual, since Yaz usually stood apart from the others. But in 1967, the ball club came together. It was a young team, and it did something no team had done in 20 years—it went from last place in one season to first place in the next one. Baseball was sheer pleasure for Smith, and it generated a sense of excitement he had not known before. He simply could not wait to get to the ball park every day. In the morning, there was always an impatience, a feeling that they should skip the pregame drills and just play the game.

  That summer, he watched his friend Yastrzemski with an admiration that was complete. Yaz had always been an exceptional teacher, not so much by what he said as by what he did (the lessons were there if you wanted them, but you had to ask; he did not volunteer anything). From Yaz had come not only his own shrewd insights about hitting but the distilled lessons of Ted Williams as well, for Yaz had listened carefully to Williams and shared with him that intensity of concentration, as if in life, baseball alone mattered.

  If that was normally true, then it was even more true in the summer of 1967. During the pennant run, Yaz started taking extra batting practice after home games, something he had picked up from Williams. Soon he asked Smith and a few others to join him, and there was a special pleasure in those hours, a rare sense of camaraderie among big-leaguers. There they were, staying behind after everyone else had gone home, men playing like boys, exulting in the dual pleasures of their manhood and their boyhood.

  Eventually, Boston went sour for Smith. There were divisions on the team; he was in the Yaz group, and the people who did not like Yaz took out their frustration on him, not on the superstar. There were racial tensions with fans and sportswriters, for the Boston sports press in the late Sixties was not entirely ready for a brash young black player who seemed to lack what some sportswriters felt was the requisite gratitude of a black player to a white newspaperman. Then, in the early Seventies, there were the beginnings of his injuries, and with them he became more of a target for the Red Sox fans.

  At the end of the 1973 season, he was traded to the Cardinals. He was glad to go, glad to get out of Boston, where he had stayed too long, he thought,
and where there was still a curious reluctance to accept a black star. He was also glad to be going to the National League, where he was sure his game would be more natural.

  He loved the National League immediately. It was a far better place to utilize his skills. He felt liberated there, able to play the game all out as he had not been able to in Boston. (With a similar number of games played in each league, Smith made the all-star team five times from the National League and only twice from the American.) Speed was of the essence here; he was aware of that the moment he walked into the Cardinals’ locker room. No one symbolized it more than Lou Brock. He might seem like a perfect gentleman on the outside, but there was an intensity with which he exploited his speed and pressured the opposition with his running that was almost frightening. No one was going to stand in the way of what he wanted. Brock’s preparation for a game reminded Smith of nothing so much as a razor being sharpened and then sharpened again. Brock had exceptional speed, but what gave him his edge—it was all about edge, no matter how small—was his intelligence and passion. Smith worked with Brock, helping time opposing pitchers and catchers on their moves, and he decided they were all part of the same generation. They were the lineal descendants of Jackie Robinson, all in their own ways fighting the stereotype that blacks had talent but not intelligence. They were hard men, Smith decided later, because they were always proving themselves.

  The Cardinals were an organization in transition, and Smith enjoyed playing there but eventually got into a contract hassle with Augie Busch and, to his delight, was traded to the Dodgers. He was pleased to be going back to California, which was his home, and delighted to be playing for the Dodgers. They were, he thought, just one player—and a certain amount of toughness—away from being a great team. He was fascinated by the Dodgers as an organization; it did all the little things well: It scouted the minor leagues carefully; it taught fundamentals; and it looked for the type of player who would fit in with the new clean-cut, California Dodger tradition, which was, of course, different from the older, flintier Brooklyn one, for the tradition must fit the locale. Dodger Blue—the idea that they were not only cleaner but somehow spiritually superior to other baseball players—sold well. The seats were always filled and the teams were good, albeit not quite good enough. They lacked the inherent meanness of some of their opponents. Tommy Lasorda was a good front for it all, a man of the organization who not only articulated the team’s myth but propagated it himself. Walking Eagle, some of the older players called him, meaning that he was so full of shit he could not fly. It was a handsome new media team for the brave new media world.

  Smith was always amused by the idea of Dodger Blue and Dodger harmony; in its own way, it was one of the most divided teams he had ever known, as much wrought with truly petty jealousies as any team could be. Still, he admired the organization, the sheer professionalism of it on every level. He knew that Al Campanis had understood free agency before any other general manager in baseball and had signed all of his relatively young players to what seemed like generous long-term contracts. Generous they were the day they were signed; but within a few years, $300,000 a year was what utility players were being paid. As the contracts were about to run out in the past year or two, Smith had tried to warn his friends on the team that the Dodgers would not re-sign them, that they would turn to the younger players they had been stockpiling in the minors. But none of them really believed him. They were Dodgers, men of the organization; Walking Eagle was their buddy and they had been good to the organization, and they were now sure that it, in turn, would reward them. Smith was right, of course, and the Dodgers did not even try to sign Steve Garvey when he became a free agent. Soon Ron Cey and Davey Lopes were also gone, as was Reggie Smith.

  It was a tough, well-run organization, Smith understood, a place absolutely without illusion or loyalty.

  A month after he twisted his knee, it was still giving him a lot of pain. He was pinch-hitting now, which meant that instead of seeing bad pitches four or five times a game, he was seeing them only once. And that meant he was pressing even more.

  The Japanese press was beginning to needle him. There were references to him as “the million-dollar pinch hitter.” It was too bad, one sportswriter noted, that his body was so old, because he was certainly trying hard. “But, fortunately, our young Japanese players are so good that we do not need Smith-san.”

  “It’s getting harder and harder for me,” he was saying as he got ready to go to the ball park in Osaka. “I can’t show what I can do. I keep wondering why they brought me here. Why did they want me so badly? If they want their Japanese counterparts to be bigger stars, then OK, but I could have stayed in America. I pop up now and they spend half the paper writing about it, discussing it, analyzing my swing.” He paused. “You know, one of the reasons they told me they signed me was that they wanted to measure their best against genuine American stars. But then they back away from it. Sometimes I think the most paralyzing thing in this game—probably in this country—is the fear of failure. They would rather not try at all than try and fail. But to be an athlete, I mean a real athlete, you have to have the courage to try, which means the courage to fail.” He shook his head.

  Hector Cruz, one of the three Cruz brothers and Smith’s one gaijin teammate, met him in the lobby. They got into a cab and headed for the ball park. “Reggie,” said Cruz, “you are the best I’ve ever seen at getting around in Japan. You never get lost. You just get in a cab and they look at you and take you to the ball park. Maybe it’s the haircut.”

  Cruz was having an even harder time than Smith. Part of it was language. Smith spoke English and, thus, the interpreter could readily connect him to the team. But Hector spoke Spanglish, and on the way from his native Spanish to their Japanese a great deal got lost. Then there was the cultural difference exhibited in style, attitude and body language. The Japanese were formal, disciplined; indeed, tight. Their body language was unbelievably formal. Even the baseball players seemed as if they should be wearing blue suits. Cruz, by contrast, was loose. Everything about him was loose—his body movement, his attitude. Japan was not easy for Hector, nor, for that matter, for his brother Tommy, who had played the year before for the Nippon Ham Fighters. The time a batting coach tried to correct Tommy’s swing, he simply looked at him, dropped his bat on the plate and left the ball park. On another occasion, there was some difference of opinion on whether or not the team was going to pay Tommy Cruz’s utility bill, as his contract promised. He showed up for a game one night quite angry because the bill had not been taken care of. He would not, he insisted, play in the 6:00 P.M. game unless it was done. No one took him very seriously. At 5:45, he returned to the clubhouse, dressed and left the ball park. They caught up with him outside the park and persuaded him to come back. But Japan had not been easy on the Cruz family, nor had the Cruz family been easy on Japan. Hector had been injured early in the season, but now he was ready to play. The team was winning, however, so there was no need to replace a Japanese player with a gaijin.

  Smith and Cruz arrived at the ball park already dressed; the facilities were too primitive to shower there. There were still more than three hours to kill before the game. The Japanese sportswriters filled the Giants’ dugout, so Smith and Cruz sprinted to the outfield. The sportswriters were eager to talk with an American colleague about visiting baseball teams of the past, particularly the old Yankees.

  “We were very excited when Mr. Yogi was going to come here,” one of the sportswriters was saying, “because we heard a great deal about Mr. Yogi and how funny he was. But then he came here and we did not think he was very funny. We wanted him to say funny things, but mostly he told us to get out of his way. We do not think Mr. Yogi liked Japanese people.”

  Another sportswriter mentioned Mickey Mantle. “Mantle-san,” he said, “liked the Ginza very much, we think. He and Mr. Billy Martin went to the Ginza and they stayed in Ginza all night, and the next day, Mantle-san struck out three times. A real Ginza sw
ing.”

  At the ball park, Smith and Cruz seemed distinctly apart from their teammates. They stayed, after all, at different hotels and they did different pregame drills. The Japanese were deadly serious about their practices; they ran hard and exercised hard, and a good practice was considered important, a sign that a player was ready to have a good game. The gaijins didn’t work that way; by nature, they coasted through practice, assuming that what they were capable of doing was a given. It was part of the sticking point between the gaijins and the Japanese. The far larger roles of the manager and the coaches in the Japanese game irritated Smith. There were 13 coaches on the Giants and 14 on the Hanshin Tigers. To his mind, that was far too much meddling.

  That evening during batting practice, for instance, an American player named Steve Stroughter was getting instruction from a Tiger coach. “Look at that!” Smith said. “Just look at that. That batting coach is full of shit. Doesn’t know a damn thing about what he’s saying, but he’s going to tinker anyway. The kid has been swinging that way all his life, but he’s going to play with him anyway. Just a coach anxious to screw someone up.” He checked the coach’s number. “Hey, Ichi,” he called to the team interpreter, Ichiro Tanuma, “who’s number 84?”

  “Katsura Yokomizo,” said Tanuma.

  “He ever play Japanese baseball?” Smith asked. The distaste was palpable.

  “He played outfield for Hiroshima,” Tanuma answered.

  “Sure he did,” Smith said. “A great star there.”

  It was not a good game for Smith. In the fourth inning, with the bases loaded and one out, he was sent up to pinch-hit. He grabbed a bat, but first he told Sadaharu Oh, now a Giant coach, that it was too early in the game to use him. “It is never too early to hit a home run,” Oh said.

  The first pitch caught Smith by surprise. He had been expecting the Hanshin pitcher to waste two or three and, instead, it was the best pitch he had seen in two weeks, right over the plate. He hit a soft pop-up to shortstop. He was not pleased with himself. The game, which did not have a lot of hits, took more than four hours and ended with Yomiuri’s winning 5–4. To the Americans, the Japanese game seemed interminable; by contrast, the Japanese do not like telecasts of American games, which they find far too short.