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Posted by Curtis on 10/20/2005 at 04:29 AM
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The Sport
You've gotta love 'em. They're the biggest bunch of crybabies, narcissists, and all-around scum you could find this side of a coke dealers' convention, but they think we're the worst vultures and fiends in creation. Miss one syllable of theirs, and they scream about being misquoted. Quote 'em accurately, and they yell about being taken out of context. If you catch one of 'em doing somebody a favor, you can be sure the favor's owed. If you catch him treating someone with what looks like respect, you can bet the debt is money. Big money.
Money's the only thing that gets their undivided attention. Which is why, when I spotted one who didn't seem to care about money, he got mine.
Truth be told, he would have gotten it anyway.
They have to register their contracts; it's league and union policy. The union is protecting its CBA, and the league is enforcing its salary arbitration system. The rule couldn't be tougher if they had an actual cap. And there has to be a contract. The date on the contract is what determines eligibility to play.
It's not unusual for a new guy to get the minimum. Hell, I wouldn't complain about it; the minimum is twelve times what I get for more or less honest work. A thirty-seven year old no-name should count himself lucky to get a shot at the majors, even with a going-nowhere expansion team like the Olympians. But when June starts to fade and the guy is 14-0 with twelve complete games, a no-hitter, and a 0.31 ERA, and he's still getting the minimum, you start thinking about alien invasions and sanity hearings.
And feature articles. Not Page One above the fold, but top, front and center of the Sports section, with your byline in bold, and serious prospects for TV spots and panel shows.
Not only was he getting the minimum salary permitted to a major leaguer under the CBA; he wasn't spending it. The money never hit his checking account at the team's bank.
As far as I knew, I was the only hack who'd noticed. I had to conceal the discovery. I wanted an interview with Conrad Bearing -- who didn't -- and the money angle was my crowbar, but I had to let him know what I knew without spilling it to my competitors.
We are a bunch of vultures. Vultures that will snatch up meat that's still breathing, if there's no carrion to be had.
With reporters all over him before and after every game, I had to slip him the hook in a way the others wouldn't snag. It was going to be a challenge. But if I couldn't find a way, I wouldn't get the scoop.
I wouldn't deserve it.
He didn't finish his fifteenth, but he won it. It would have been a shutout, but the reliever gopher-balled the Twins' number-one RBI man with one out in the ninth. Still, 4-1 wins just as well as 4-0, and the reliever got the earned run. Bearing's ERA was down to 0.30, and his statistics were screaming Cy Young and MVP. It would be the first time ever in the history of the sport, but if he finished the season the way he'd started it, no one in America could deny it to him.
The usual horde was besieging him. I was part of it. As he dressed, he answered the shouted questions, no matter how pointed or personal, the same way he always had: with silence and a shake of the head. He didn't look up but twice, both times with the same stony face he showed to opposing batters from the mound. His teammates, knowing they wouldn't get two seconds' worth of any of us while he was around, faded away without a word.
I'm used to pro ballplayers. I know why they all look older than their ages. But I'd never gotten over how old he looked. You could have convinced me that he was fifty. His hair was solid gray, his face was deeply lined, and I'd swear he had liver spots on his hands. He was fit and trim at six feet and one-eighty, but there was a suggestion of a stoop to him, even when he sat, that suggested that just maybe, the years on his face weren't just from sun and wind.
The other hacks were half-crazy. None of them had turned up the first thing about him. They knew his name, and his face, and his incredible pitching, but not one damned thing more. He saw no one but his teammates, and them only in the locker room, the dugout, and the clubhouse. He made no phone calls and received no mail. Nothing about him had turned up on the Web. Despite offers in six and seven figures for the beginning of a clue to who he was and how he'd risen from nothing to the top pitcher in the game -- in the history of the game -- no one had stepped forward with the smallest morsel of fact about him.
A man who arrives at training camp as a free agent, has never played pro ball before, then wins fifteen consecutive starts in sixty games has no business being anonymous. Maybe he wasn't doing it to spite us, but that was the effect it was having. At first, they just wanted to know who he was. Now they wanted to get him.
I had him. It was time to land him.
I held my tongue until the rest of the pack had stopped baying. I wasn't going to shout. Not likely he would hear me clearly over the rest, even if I did shout. But if I waited until the din died down a touch, and caught him looking my way, I could mouth what I had to say. Eyes like his would catch it.
They did.
His eyes caught mine. He looked about as if he were still attending to the others, but never more than a few degrees off our personal line of contact. I stayed stock still, hung back as unobtrusively as I could until the locker room cleared. The five seconds before the door swung shut behind the last of my colleagues were the longest of my life.
He turned to face me squarely, clapped his hands against his thighs, leaned forward and murmured, "What was that about my salary?"
Even his voice sounded old. I looked him in the eye. "You've barely spent the first dollar of it."
"And you know this...how?"
I smiled and said nothing.
He grimaced. "What are you angling for?"
"A scoop, of course."
He looked away. His hands clenched, relaxed, and clenched again.
"All right," he said. "You get an interview. Twenty minutes, right here and now. But strictly about baseball. Nothing personal. And only on the condition that you stop looking into my private affairs, permanently."
He sat back, plainly expecting me to start into a conventional sports interview. When I shook my head, his face fell.
"Then what do you want?" he said.
"The same thing everyone wants: to know who you are and where you came from. To know where you got that fastball, that curve and that control. To know where you're headed next, since a pitcher that good isn't going to stay with an expansion team for the minimum two years running." I pulled my cassette recorder out of my jacket and pushed the RECORD button. "Give me that if you want me to lay off your finances and your miser's ways."
He glared at me as if I'd hit a grand slam off him the inning before. I just smiled. But my smile faded when he chuckled.
"I don't know which of us is more ridiculous," he said. "You for overplaying such a weak hand, or me for taking you seriously. You lose. Take your best shot and we'll see what you can learn on your own hook. I won't try to stop you."
He rose, hefted his duffel, and left me there gaping at his back.
Yes, sports hacks socialize. Professionally, we'd cut each other's throats given half a chance, but we can be pals after curfew. After all, who wants to drink alone?
The Tenth Inning was its usual noisy post-game self. No major-leaguers, but a few triple-As and the customary swarm of collectors and jock itches. Most of them were there in the hope that a utility infielder might wander in, susceptible to a plea for an autograph or the offer of a bed partner. The hacks were there...well, why were we ever there? It was the boozery nearest the stadium, and we all had expense accounts, so why go anywhere else?
Besides, there was always a chance he might wander in, even if he never had before.
"What gets me," Mitch Rainier said, "is the endorsements."
"What endorsements?" Cal Martinez said. "He won't even do a no-lines spot for a soft drink."
"Right." Mitch flashed his one-sided grin. "Fifteen-and-oh with the All-Star break still three weeks away, he could probably pull down twenty million in spots this year alone, but none of the flacks have gotten within a county of him. The doormen at his hotels are all given instructions to pitch them into the street."
He's not interested in money, I thought. But why else does anyone play this game?
"He won't keep them at bay forever," Martinez said. "They'll hook him. They hook everybody sooner or later. Who was the last big guy said he wouldn't do a spot for anything?"
"Guidry," I said.
Martinez nodded. "And they got him, didn't they? They used a Cause. Once they found out he had a thing for dogs, he was meat on the table."
"So," I said, "if they find out he has a soft spot for dogs, or old buildings, or alcohol-soaked hacks, they've got him, eh?"
"Right. Of course," Martinez said, grinning, "that first step is a doozy." He hefted his glass and squinted down into it. "Who buys the next round?"
I was about to own up when Floyd Whiggins slouched through the front door. He scanned the bar, saw us and headed for us, and I nodded in his direction.
"He does."
Bearing was Torre's immediate choice to start the All-Star Game. It's not like he had to think hard about it.
The Olympians wouldn't have anyone else on the squad, but their star was enough for the whole league. Everyone in America wanted to see him pitch. Hell, there were hacks advocating rescinding the rule against more than three innings per pitcher just to see what he could do against the National League's finest.
Thing is, he didn't want to play at all.
Day after Torre announced his picks, Bearing made his first phone call that year. Hell, maybe the first of his life. He called Torre and asked to be removed from the squad, completely.
I hear the call lasted for nearly an hour. Torre finally persuaded him to play. It was close, but that's why Joe's a great manager. The manager's job is to get your lazy ass onto the field and goose it into performing no matter how sick or tired or hungover you might happen to be, and Joe is the best manager in the game. Ask any of the primadonnas he's had to coddle.
The game was special. First baseball game ever to out-draw a Super Bowl, and Conrad Bearing was the reason. Two days before, he'd won his twentieth straight game. Another complete game shutout.
He sauntered out to the mound as if he had nothing much to do that day, just crank up the windmill, throw a few balls, then go back to Spokane, win, lose, or draw. But I'd caught a glint in his eye and a hard line along his jaw as he warmed up. He wasn't happy to be there, but as long as he was, he was going to show us his best.
I didn't know that we hadn't yet seen his best.
The National League owns all the slugging records these days. They grow 'em big over there. But they also grow 'em quick. Every man in their starting lineup had an average of .320 or better. Some of those guys could hit Nolan Ryan's best fastball all the way to Paris.
Bearing peered in at Alec Altman -- .365, 22 homers, 76 RBI -- and whipped a fastball past him that practically fried the Jugg gun. It was right down the cock, a perfect hitter's pitch, but it clocked in at 115 miles per hour. Altman's mouth sagged open and he called for time. The ump, whose mouth sagged just as loosely, gave it to him. It didn't help.
Bearing threw two more whizzers, same place, same scorching speed. Altman swung at the last one, God knows why. Up went the thumb.
He threw three curves to Edgar Kretgen. Real yellow hammers. All three looked to be high and away. All three nicked the low-inside corner of the zone. Another thumb.
Juan Gottfried came to the plate holding his bat like a truncheon. A lot of the pre-game chatter had been about whether he could handle Bearing. He'd blasted the best pitchers in the NL all year long: thirty-six homers in eighty-one games. It seemed they could only keep the ball in the park by plunking him, and a lot of them did. His glower said he knew he had something to prove. He practically dared Bearing to throw at him.
Bearing didn't take the bait. He cocked and threw, and I gasped.
The ball seemed to float through the air like a dirigible. It was the fattest-looking pitch I'd ever seen. I was certain Gottfried would put it into orbit.
Just as it closed on the plate, the ball sank three feet. Gottfried missed it by two.
Bearing threw two more, and Gottfried could come no closer.
Nine pitches, three strikeouts.
He did it again in the second inning, and once more in the third. When he stepped off the mound at the end of his stint, the thunder could have cracked the world.
He looked up at the stands, and his face, for three innings a stone mask, melted into a sunny, boyish smile. He doffed his cap and waved, and the applause seemed to redouble.
When the hacks went looking for him after the game, he was nowhere to be found. Torre told us he'd left the stadium as soon as he was off the mound, and caught an early flight back to Spokane.
The Olympians weren't going anywhere. Expansion teams never do, Their team batting average never broke .220, and they didn't have a certified power hitter anywhere in their lineup. Their fielding was no better. Except for their star, their pitching frankly stank. Only Conrad Bearing could get them near to respectability, and he only played one game in four.
But every game, they played before a capacity crowd. Only the size of their piddly-ass beer-baron's stadium limited their gate. They could have packed the Grand Canyon.
It wasn't dreams of the postseason. It wasn't that there'd been an untapped market for baseball in the Pacific Northwest. It wasn't clever marketing or promotional days. It was Conrad Bearing. Whether he was slated to be on the mound or not, the people of Spokane wanted to be near him.
The hacks and the flacks continued to pursue him. There wasn't a reporter in the game who wouldn't have sold his children into slavery for five minutes of his time. There wasn't a corporation in America that wouldn't have given him a controlling interest for five words of praise for their products...and a replay of that All-Star smile.
He kept taking the mound every fourth day. He kept winning. He was even more unhittable after the All-Star break than before it. Game after game, he mowed down the American League's best as if they were toddler league scrubs. But the smile never returned.
I could learn no more about him. None of us could. Not that any of my colleagues would have shared even the smallest tidbit. Hell, just learning whether he liked his socks to be wool or nylon would have been a million-dollar scoop. It didn't matter. He revealed nothing, and no one could unearth anything. All we knew of him was his name and his prowess on the mound.
For the sportswriters, it was an agony of agonies. For the city of Spokane and baseball fans the world around, it was more than enough.
The season is long. Players tire, even the ones who keep up their conditioning regimens and scrupulously avoid the bars and the Baseball Annies. It's simple physics. We all knew that Bearing had to lose a game eventually.
Except that he didn't.
He won his thirtieth straight game on August 8: his second no-hitter. He threw not a single gopher ball. His ERA sank to 0.28. From the All-Star Game onward, he was never taken off the mound before the end of the game.
He just kept on, looking as strong or stronger each day than the previous one. And the crowds kept flocking to see him.
Fans have always preferred free-hitting games. There's more color to them. More seems to be going on. Paradoxically, because they demand less attention, they hold your attention better. The history of the game seems to bear it out. Back in the late Sixties, when hitting was on the skids and titans like McLain and Gibson ruled the field from the mound, attendance and viewership hit their postwar lows. So why did this unhittable pitcher command such adulation and love? Wasn't he doing exactly what the fans should have resented: taking the action out of the game?
I couldn't fathom it, any more than I could fathom him.
He kept accepting the minimum, and none of it ever reached his checking account.
Bearing was scheduled to start against the Angels on the last day of the season. His record stood at 40-0. He hadn't allowed an earned run since late July. As usual, the stands of Olympus Field were packed.
As he took the mound, Cal Martinez nudged me and murmured, "Think he'll go out undefeated?"
"What else would you expect?" I said. "Has anyone laid a bat on him this whole year long?"
"First time in the history of the sport," he said.
"First time for everything, pal." I settled back and propped my steno pad on my knee as the ump yelled "Play ball!" and the first Angel batter stepped to the plate.
Bearing didn't hew to the practice he'd followed the whole year long. He didn't concentrate immediately and wholly upon the batter. Instead he put his hands on his hips, scanned the stands from end to end and back again, and nodded as if he'd come to a decision. Catcher Roy Wriston started to rise from his squat, but Bearing waved him back down, peered in for the sign, wound up and threw.
The ball smacked into Wriston's glove with a clap so sharp I'd have sworn it could be heard in Canarsie. The catcher reeled backwards as the digits on the Jugg display whirled, slowed, and finally settled on their verdict.
128 miles per hour.
Right down the cock, yet completely unhittable. The crowd shouted in amazement.
Bearing nodded, wound up, and did it again.
And again.
And again.
Is there really a first time for everything? How would I know? Or anyone else, for that matter? As the game progressed, it dawned on me that never in the history of the sport had a pitcher eliminated his opponents without ever allowing the ball to touch their bats. It was inconceivable, a degree of dominance no player had ever achieved in any sport. But as Conrad Bearing strode out to the mound at the beginning of each Angel half-inning, it became ever clearer that I was witnessing exactly that.
After six innings he'd thrown exactly fifty-four pitches. After seven, exactly sixty-three. After eight, exactly seventy-two. All strikes. All about as hittable as a rifle bullet.
The crowd went by stages from amazement to hoarsely screaming delirium.
When he took the mound at the top of the ninth, I was no longer able to sit. I could hardly breathe. Martinez was apoplectic beside me. He'd been screaming along with all the others. The wonder of the game had flensed him of his sports hack's veneer and left him to stand without disguise, as the fan he really was. As all of us who cover this sport have to be.
I couldn't imagine what the hacks in the TV booths were saying, to their viewers, to one another, or to themselves. I couldn't imagine what I would have said in their place.
We were witnessing a miracle, a new definition for "the perfect game." It was draining us of words, the stuff of our trade.
In that time and place, Conrad Bearing had stripped us of our defenses. We jaded and cynical ones, too worldly wise to admit to our childlike devotion to a childish game, had been reduced to the same openmouthed state of awe a small boy feels in the presence of his hero, or a man feels at the discovery of his one true love.
We knew he had perfection in him. We'd seen eight innings of it. We were desperate to see him end as he'd begun. He did not disappoint us.
Three whizzers down the cock to Berglund. Three curves that seemed to swerve around the bat of Sant'Angelo. Two sinkers to Petrovich that looked like they'd dropped all the way to China.
He saved his best for last.
When he wound up, you could see him marshaling his forces for the pitch, a service that would ring all the bells in America. When he let fly, I half-expected his arm to catch fire.
Petrovich swung...about half a second after the ball reached Wriston's glove.
144 miles per hour.
"Yerrrrr....out!"
The crowd went mad.
His teammates converged on him at a sprint. Before they could reach him, he held up a hand in the universally understood sign to halt. They did. The stands fell immediately silent.
He stood there on the mound, scanned the stands end to end once again, and smiled: the supremely sunny smile from his All-Star appearance.
"Thank you," he said, and walked off the mound toward the dugout.
By the time Martinez and I got to the locker room, he was gone.
Time warps the memory. Things once bright and clear grow dim and indistinct. We illuminate the high points and efface the drudgery and drear. The lucky ones among us retain their "signposts:" the events that mark their transitions and achievements, and gave color to their undertakings.
I will never forget that last game. It would be the last game Conrad Bearing would ever pitch. He did not return for the following season. The Olympians' public relations office gave no explanation.
I thought I understood it. By baseball standards, he was an old man. He'd had a season to eclipse every other season any pitcher had ever played. Likely it would never be surpassed. Why return? Why show the fans he'd thrilled so completely anything less than that pinnacle of performance? It was obvious he didn't care about the money. He was letting us remember him at his peak.
It was several years before I discovered how wrong I was.
His departure from the game was as sharp as his arrival. Not only didn't he turn up on anyone's roster; he didn't turn up anywhere. No sportscasting billet; no endorsements; no appearances at charity events. No one had an inkling of where he'd gone or what he was doing. Conrad Bearing had absented himself completely from the public eye.
When I stumbled into him in a department store in Seattle, it took me a moment to recognize him for who he was.
I wasn't at my sharpest. I was sorting through flannel shirts and thinking about the mass of yard chores I'd been putting off all spring. He was passing behind me when an old woman lurched into him and knocked him into me. He was steadying her on her feet when I turned and registered his face.
"My God!" I said.
His eyes caught mine, he smiled meaninglessly, and tried to pass on. I grabbed him by the arm -- that incredible baseball machine -- and held him there.
"Where have you been?" I murmured.
He essayed another meaningless smile. "Excuse me? I think you might have mistaken me for someone else." He tried to pull away. I didn't let him.
"Oh, I don't think so, Conrad." I pitched the name so that only he would hear it. "I still want that interview, you know. And don't try to give me the slip or I'll call out your name, here and now."
"It's George," he hissed. "George Matulovich. Now let go!"
I shook my head. "Maybe that's what it is now. Your car or mine?"
He tried to stare me down, but I wasn't about to relent. I kept my grip on him and waited. Presently he conceded defeat.
"All right. Yours."
That must have been hard.
"What do you do now?"
"Not much. Until last year, I was a mailman."
"So why did you retire?"
"I got bored with delivering mail."
"No, from baseball!"
"I always wanted to be a mailman, and I didn't want to lose my last chance."
"Come on!"
He shrugged. "Don't you have a theory?"
I scanned his living room. It was as ordinary a place as I've ever been. Moderately used mid-grade sofa, recliner, and tables. Two bookcases filled with popular novels in paperback, plus two portrait photos of a handsome older woman. A small television propped on a homebuilt redwood stand. It was a modest house, in a modest rural neighborhood well removed from the clamor of city life. A retired mailman's house.
"At first," I said, "I figured it was that you wanted to go out at your peak. That would have been natural, so I believed it for a while. But then I realized that it would have been the only natural thing about you. So no, I don't. Would you tell me, please?"
He stared at me in silence for a long interval.
"George," I said, the name strangely ill-fitting in my mouth, "I'm as far out of the game as you are, now. I don't have a byline any more." I spread my hands. "No steno pad. No tape recorder. I don't want to sell you to anyone. I just want to know."
He rose from his recliner and paced the little room, hands in his jeans pockets.
"Who would believe me anyway?" I said.
"It's not who would believe you," he said. "It's whether I can get you to believe me."
I started to protest, thought better of it. If there'd ever been a figure to challenge credulity, on the field or off, it was he.
He stopped before one of the bookcases and caressed the photo it bore.
"Your wife?"
He nodded without looking at me. "She passed away six years ago."
I counted backwards. "Right after...your season?"
Another nod.
"Then you retired to be with her?"
"You could say that." He closed his eyes. There were tears at the corners. Presently he opened them and returned to his seat. I inched forward on mine.
"Doris was...very sick when I joined the Olympians. Pancreatic cancer, one of the worst forms. She had very little chance to live, and all of it depended on a treatment we couldn't afford. I had to raise a lot of cash very fast, and baseball was the only legal way to do it."
What?
"Are you telling me," I said slowly, "that you did it for the money?"
He frowned. "Well, of course! Why else would anyone play pro baseball?"
"Uh, never mind. But...you took the minimum! You never haggled, never tried to renegotiate, never threatened to, uh, strike. If it was all about money, why didn't you press your advantage?"
He looked at me as if I'd started babbling in tongues. "I made what we needed. We didn't need more. Why should I have demanded more?"
"But..." I fell silent. There are some things you don't probe. It took me two divorces and a catastrophic career collapse to learn it, but learn it I had.
It took me a moment to realize that I hadn't asked about what I'd always wanted to know. He'd startled the question right out of me with his revelation about money.
"George...the why makes sense, but I have to know about the how." He grimaced. I could see him casting about for a credible lie. I held up a hand. "No evasions, now. No one else will hear."
He hunched forward, dropped his eyes to the floor, and sat silent for a long interval. Finally, he rose and headed for the back door.
"Come with me."
He had a spacious back yard, well maintained. It sported a large barn and was surrounded on three sides by a split-rail fence. Along one run of the fence were propped a quartet of sheet-steel plates. The first three were irregularly perforated with ragged circular holes about a baseball's size. The fourth was unmarked.
"I used to stand over there," he said, pointing to the opposite run of the fence, "and throw baseballs at plates just like those until I could exactly control which hole it would go through. I did it for hours at a time, day after day, until it was almost a bore. Then I started experimenting with curves, screwballs, and sinkers. I got so I could make the ball do whatever I pleased, and still make it go through whichever hole I chose. It was mostly a way of passing the time, but I never completely outgrew it."
I squinted at the plates. "What made these holes?"
He shrugged. "A baseball."
"What? Are you telling me --"
"Want to see me do it right now?" He had a baseball in his hand.
"Uh, no.
The far fence was about a hundred fifty feet away.
"How old were you when you...developed your skills?"
"About ten." He smiled. "I've always loved baseball. The sport, not the professionalized entertainment spectacle and scandal factory."
"And you kept on at that for twenty-seven years, until your wife's illness made you decide to cash in?"
He pursed his lips and turned away.
A retired mailman.
"George, how old are you?"
He hesitated. "I'll be sixty next month."
"You were...fifty-three the year you played for the Olympians?"
"Fifty-four, actually."
I was six years his junior.
"What's the matter, son?" He grinned. "Do you think I needed more seasoning?"
I barked a laugh, halfway between absurdity and pain.
I'd have given everything I've ever had and everything I've ever been to play even one game in the majors. I'd never gotten beyond single-A, and I knew early on that I never would. He'd disdained it for fifty years, and turned his back on it once it had served his need.
He sensed my anguish and laid a hand on my shoulder.
"You're thinking I wasted something priceless, something you'd have given your soul to have," he said gently. "But think about that last game, the one where I let it all out. Suppose you were a freak like me. Suppose you could have done that, not once, but every game you played, once every four days, even into your sixties. What would that have done to you? What would it have done to the sport you love?"
I could not reply. He nodded and squeezed my shoulder.
"A sport like baseball is only worth playing if there's a rough equality among the players. Oh, some will always be better than others, no denying it. But for one player to be an order of magnitude better than all the rest, able to have his way with them whenever he pleases, would belittle the sport itself. Whenever he was on the diamond, it would be no fun at all, even for him."
"Are you saying it was no fun for you? All that ability and you didn't even enjoy it?"
His grin was rueful. "Very little, son. Until the very last game I had to hold myself in check, as much as morally possible. Except for the All-Star Game, of course."
"So you never gave the team your best, then?"
His eyebrows rose. "What I gave the Olympians won them forty-one of the sixty-five games they did win. What point would there have been in humiliating the rest of the league even further?"
"But that last game..." I misted up at the memory. He smiled.
"Yes, that day I let it all out. I had to know just how good I could have been. I told myself the sport wouldn't suffer too much from that one indulgence. Was I wrong?"
"No."
He hefted the baseball, loped to the opposite end of his yard, and tossed it at me. I caught it automatically, started to throw it back, and stopped.
"You do love the game, don't you?" I called.
He nodded. "Almost as much as I loved Doris. About as much as you. You just going to stand there, or are you going to throw that thing?"
We played catch for the rest of the afternoon.
