Can't Anyone Here Use Kanehl?

Flying back to Springfield the little airplane was alone in the sky with the moon and a few silver-lit clouds. The combination of fatigue and the awesome sky seemed to remove the levity that is Kanehl's natural condition. He pulled on a can of beer he had carried from the ball park. The dim red instrument light reflecting on his craggy face gave him a look of eerie pensiveness. At length Kanehl said, as though he had rehearsed it, "You know what's wrong? You know what's happening? The old-line baseball man is intellectually on a different level than the kids coming along. Most of the kids now are educated, a lot of them have been to college. The old guys can't cope with their problems. I've seen kids ruined when all they needed was a little encouragement and didn't get it. Baseball is a lot like life. It's an unfair game. The line drives are caught, the squibbers go as base hits. A kid has to have somebody put his arm around his shoulder sometimes. But who've you got running minor league clubs? Donkeys. If you pay $6,000, what else are you going to get?

"For me to come back now would be a terribly selfish thing. It just wouldn't be fair to my family. I'll wait. In seven years the kids will be on their own pretty much. I'll only be 39, and a lot of my friends should have moved up in baseball. I'll just have to wait." Then he added: "Say, who's this Whitey Herzog?"

The new Met third-base coach?

"Yeh. Herzog. He's got my job, you know."