Jordan Pat - A false spring : a memoir

A False Spring

A Memoir

Pat Jordan

for Carol,

who knows

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rain would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring.

E RNEST H EMINGWAY S A Moveable Feast

I see myself daily as I was then, framed in a photograph on the desk in my attic room. The picture was taken on June 27, 1959, at County Stadium in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a few minutes before the Milwaukee Braves were to take the field against the Chicago Cubs, to whom they would lose that day 71.

I am standing midway between the firstbase line and the home teams dugout. To my back I see the stadiums half-filled bleachers. I am wearing a Braves uniform. Although the photograph is black and white, I see all the colors. My cap has a navy crown, a white M and a red bill. My flannel uniform is the color of cream. It is trimmedshirt and pantswith a half-inch-wide, tri-colored stripe of black and red and black satin. The word Braves is scripted in red and outlined in black at a slight upward angle across the front of the shirt. The script is underlined by a black and gold tomahawk. Below the tomahawk, in the left-hand corner of the shirt is 24 in large block numerals, also red and outlined in black. Unseen in the photograph but clearly in my minds eye is the small gold patch stitched onto the shirt sleeve below my left shoulder. It is the face of an Indian of indeterminate tribe, the face contorted by a war cry no less menacing for being inaudible.

To my right is Whitlow Wyatt, the Braves 52-year-old pitching coach. Wyatt is smiling at me. My gaze, however, is directed to my left toward Warren Spahn, the Braves great left-handed pitcher. Both Spahn and I are perspiring. We have just finished running wind sprints in the outfield and are apparently on the way to the clubhouse to change our shirts when we stop to pose for this photograph. For whom? For some faceless fan leaning over the dugout roof, imploring Please! whose good fortune it was to catch us in an obliging mood? So we stop, strike a pose, so casual, and wait for the cameras click. To pass this moment, as he has innumerable others like it, Spahn, hands on hips, turns to me with some bit of small talk, a phrase, meaningless, meant only to fill the instant. And I listen. Nonchalantly, hands on hips also, I listen to Spahn. To Spahnie. To Spahnie who is talking to me, so much younger, and yet with my amused smile looking so at easetoday amazed at how truly at ease I do appear, at how naturally I did fit, in that uniform, between those men, with Spahn, Spahnie and I, the best of friends, I, too, having done this small thing so often, having struck this obliging pose for so many fans, waiting only for the cameras click before tossing off a remark at which Spahnie and I would laugh on the way into the clubhouse to change our shirts.

I was 18 years old that day and the photograph had been arranged by the publicity department of the Milwaukee Braves, with whom I had just signed my first professional baseball contract. Of all the major league uniforms I wore that summerand I wore manynone was so gaudy and none so impressive as the uniform of the Braves. That was one reason I signed with them rather than with one of the other 15 major league teams who had also offered me a contract. There were other reasons. The Braves had agreed to pay for my college education, to pay me a salary of $500 per month during each baseball season, and to deposit in my savings account every June 27 for the next four years a certified check for $8750. All told, my bonus amounted to more than $45,000 distributed over a four-year period. It was one of the largest bonusesif not the largestany young player received from the Braves in 1959. For my part, I promised to leave Milwaukee the following morning on a flight to McCook, Nebraska, where I would begin my professional career as a pitcher with the McCook Braves of the Class D Nebraska State League.

I pitched in the minor leagues for three years, at towns like McCook, Davenport, Waycross, Eau Claire and Palatka, before I was given my unconditional release by those same Milwaukee Braves. I never did pitch a game in Milwaukee County Stadium, nor did I ever again speak to Warren Spahn. I did, however, keep the cash.

As I write this, confronted on my desk by that reminder of unfulfilled promise, 13 years have elapsed since I posed with Warren Spahn, and 10 years since my last professional game. I was married the year I left baseball (the phrase I always use) and now have five children. I also returned to college and graduated in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English. I taught English at a parochial all-girls high school for five years (the only male in a world of nuns and teeny boppers) and finally turned to writing. I have had little to do with baseball since my release by the Braves. Except for an abortive comeback attempt at 22 (at 22?), I have not pitched a game.

That comeback was a disaster. It had been urged on me by my brother, George, a lawyer, 13 years older than I, and who had had so much to do with my career, with my having had a career, that he could never reconcile himself to my having lost it. Years after I left baseball, he still kept on the wall of his law office that photograph of me at County Stadium. It was a constant embarrassment to me. Yet he never tired of explaining to his clients who that young player next to Spahn was, or what his promise had once been. I think he did this from a sense of loyalty to me, a brotherly duty not to abandon, and also because he remembered me only as I had been before that publicity shot. He never saw me pitch in the minor leagues, especially that last year, and so never saw the roots of my failure, a failure that has always bewildered him. George remembered me only as I had been in high school, when there was little I could not do on a pitchers mound. Or in Little League, when my successes, which he shared, were close to total. In those days I often pitched to him on the sidewalk in front of our house. Our parents sat on the front porch and watched. They applauded my efforts. After a fastball that cracked in his catchers mitt, my brother would yank his hand out of the glove and shake it fiercely as if to shake off the hot pain. And they would applaud. My brother, tall, gangling, wearing a white button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, would grimace in both mock and very real pain as he shook his burning hand. How I responded to that gesture!

One day when George couldnt work with me, as he used to call it, I badgered my father into catching me. I was 11, I think, and already threw quite hard. My father, a lefty, had never been much of an athlete. He had been an orphan, and in his teens he turned to gambling for his satisfactions, and in later years for his livelihood. His interest in sports was less fervid than that of the rest of us. My mother was passionately devoted to Joe DiMaggio, and George and I were just as passionately devoted to my pitching, which we thought of even then as potentially a career. For my father, sports were never something to be played, but something to lay nine-to-five on. He was in his early forties then, and, although hed ceased to gamble full-time, he was still a betting man. And occasionally he would deal cards in a late-night poker game. He was an excellent dealer and was paid handsomely for his efforts. It was in the hands, he said. His fingers were small and soft and plump; my mother said they were like the link sausages she threw in the spaghetti sauce. But how they flashed when dealing cards! He used only his left hand. His fingers were pressed together in the shape of a trowel. They supported the deck. He dealt with a flick of his wrist, his thumb shooting cards around the table with such speed and precision one listened for clicks.