Destiny's Whipping Boys

Then Zimmer tore a muscle in his elbow, so badly that he could not lift his arm, so badly that he'd be out of action until after the season begins. Hodges put his plans for Zimmer in escrow, and The Boy Blacksmith began planning his next comeback.

The biggest man in the Senators' camp is thinking small. Sweating down to his 245-pound playing weight, Frank Howard is trying to convert himself from a superman to a useful baseball player. He made his first mistake late in 1958 in his first game as a Dodger. He hit a ball "over everything," and thereafter anything he did that was ungargantuan was disappointing. Last winter the Dodgers gave up on him, and he's glad.

"I'll get to play more here," he said. "Over there I'd have been a platoon player. Yes, I think the ballyhoo hurt me, because I never was really that good. People see you are capable of doing something and they...well, they want you to do it more often. I don't think I can hit, .300, or 40 home runs. I'd say 30 home runs and about .275. I really don't have more ability than that."

Howard's Los Angeles performance (he hit .296 twice and as many as 31 home runs) could get him steady work as a Senator, maybe. He hasn't become much more graceful as an outfielder, and he can't throw. At least he doesn't know if he can. "The arm is better," he said after lobbing a relay to nobody and giving away a run. "But I haven't cut loose yet."

Ron Kline is the leading wrongo of the Senators' pitchers. After losing 83 games in six years with the Pirates, he was traded away in December 1959—just in time to miss a winner's share of the 1960 World Series. He remembers his stewardship in Pittsburgh. "I had pitched six days in a row," he said. "One day in Chicago I told Bragan I was going to need a day off pretty soon. 'The way you're pitching,' he said, 'you've had the whole year off.' " Bobby Bragan was fired that night, but Kline isn't making a post hoc thing of that.

Washington's general manager, George Selkirk, holds the alltime high—or low—for wrong-time, wrong-place occupancy. His record as a left-handed hitter was a proud one, and he could do everything else well. But excellence was not enough when he reported to the Yankees in the spring of 1935. All Selkirk had to do that year was take Babe Ruth's place. If that weren't implausible enough, publicity men had not yet conceived the idea of retiring famous uniform numbers. Selkirk had to trot out to right field with No. 3 on his back.

George bore it well for two seasons, and in 1937 he got off to an excellent start. By mid-June he had 17 home runs and was leading the league. Then he broke his collarbone. "That's what they thought," Selkirk said. "When they took the sling off they found my elbow was broken, too." He had other good seasons, but never a real good one.

Perhaps, it was suggested in discussing attendance figures with Selkirk, Washington is the wrong place for a ball club to be. D.C. Stadium may, as he says, "make Shea Stadium and Chavez Ravine look bush," but people don't come. There was that rumble on Thanksgiving Day 1962 after a football game, and since then nobody knows how many fans have stayed away out of fear.

"Not many," Selkirk said. "You're as safe there as you are in any ball park. Look, they had a story about a guy who got the hell beat out of him on his way home from the stadium. You know how far away he was? Twelve blocks. Our problem is to improve the team and build the people's confidence. When we have that, we'll draw."

One hopes that when they have and they do, Gil Hodges will still be there. He is the one member of the Senators' dramatis personae who is certainly in the right place at the right time. If it were possible to follow the top line of Hodges' breeding back to antiquity, the name of Job would pop up somewhere.