7 by Peter Golenbock

Author:Peter Golenbock
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493013968
Publisher: Lyons Press

The men surrounding their table look at their feet and shift in their seats, but no one leaves.

• • •

So you reacted by acting surly? That’s no way to be.

I was trying to scare them away, to get rid of them the only way I knew how. How would you like it if I cornered you while you were eating lunch and started asking you a bunch of questions?

I’d probably have answered a couple of their questions.

I tried that, but then after I’d say, “Excuse me, I’d like to finish my lunch,” the guy would get all huffy and unload on me for being so rude. This way I just skipped the middle part. That’s why so many people who met me back then remember me as being a prick. I feel bad about it, but at the same time if I had to do it over again, I don’t know that I could have done any different. I wanted people to respect my privacy, and this was the only way I knew to do that.

Didn’t you want people to like you? Everyone wants people to like them.

I really didn’t give a shit. I just wanted them to leave me alone. Fortunately, baseball and my nightlife kept me sane.

You were baseball’s biggest star in 1956.

It was one of my two greatest seasons. Whenever I look back at my life and want to relive some of my happiest memories on the ball field, I think about that year a lot. Despite my leg injuries, I could still run to first base in just over three seconds, ran like the wind in the outfield, could hit a baseball farther than anyone else, and after the games were over—party time. I also had an MVP year.

Do you remember your statistics that year?

Of course I do, but you need to understand that statistics never meant jack shit to me like they did to some other players, like Pete Rose, who probably remembers every hit he ever got, or Joe D, who could talk in great detail about every hit he got off which pitcher during his fifty-six-game hitting streak. Maybe Joe didn’t need friends because he always had his statistics to keep him company. It was Joe’s fate to live in the past. He had his hallowed streak, and he had his memories of Marilyn, and he worked very hard to keep them both alive. Like me, Joe went from card show to card show signing autographs and taking home piles of cash from a generation of people who never saw him play but who saw him more as an investment than as a hero. I did that, too, but the difference was that that was Joe’s whole life. He needed to do it in order to remind himself how important he still was. I did it because it paid my bills.

Mick, let me list your ’56 statistics for you. You led the American League in just about everything. That year you batted .352, nine points higher than Ted Williams.

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