Out of My League by George Plimpton

Author:George Plimpton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation / Baseball / Essays & Writings, Biography & Autobiography / Sports, Sports & Recreation / Baseball / General, Sports & Recreation / General, Sports & Recreation / Baseball / History, Sports & Recreation / Coaching / Baseball
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

When Scott pointed toward the first-base dugout and then made a circular motion with his arm upraised—like a squad leader signaling his men to assemble—the American League players started toward us. Being the home team they would be in the field first.

It was, in the vernacular, a pretty fair country ball club.

At first base was Mickey Vernon, twice winner of the American League batting championship and a very stylish and graceful fielder besides. He throws left-handed, which is, of course, a defensive advantage in a first baseman. He fits the general prescription for a first baseman—namely, that he should be long, lean, and left-handed. At second was Chicago’s Nelson Fox—his round kewpie-doll face distorted by the big wad of “Favorite” tobacco he stuffs in his left cheek. He chewed licorice before he reached the big leagues, but his manager got him to change to chaws because the licorice made him sick. He swallowed his chaw on one hideous occasion he refuses either to disclose or discuss. He is a diminutive (150 pounds, 5 feet 8 inches) performer, yet brilliant enough both with the bat and in the field to win the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award the following year. His partner at second base was shortstop Billy Martin, the fiery ex-Yankee. He has a deceptively pleasant face, with melancholy brown eyes in it, and a long nose which got him into the early fights when his schoolmates ribbed him about it. It is a mobile face which has often worked hard and furiously an inch or so away from an umpire’s. The Great Agitator, the press sometimes calls him, but he’s more popularly known as the Kid, with—unlike me—the k capitalized, and he’s a great favorite in the stadium. He was one of the few players who took a personal interest in my struggle that afternoon—sensing, I think, the loneliness and the awkwardness of being new and raw in a situation that in my case I could hardly hope to cope with skillfully. A spirited cockiness was his own defense. Riding into New York that first time, coming up on the long train ride from the St. Petersburg training camp, a reporter found him reading a magazine as the train moved into the Penn Station tunnel. Pretty excited about seeing New York for the first time? “Nah,” said Martin, not yet then twenty. “I saw it in the movies.” Nothing cowed him. He once told Ty Cobb, the legendary high-spike base runner and a noteworthy predecessor in what ballplayers call the “hard-nose” type of play, that he would’ve come into second base with his spikes up on the Kid only once. “After that,” said Martin, “you would have had no teeth.” It may have been a mask, this spirit, to hide the insecurity endured in a childhood of misery and poverty in the California town where he was raised, but it had made him, despite limitations as a ballplayer, a competitor whose drive picked up a whole team. Cobb liked him and grinned when he talked about him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.