We All Had A Ball

No. I lied. The truth was I had found my strength as a hitter. Which turned out to be very similar to my strength as a defensive back in football—which is that I am too slow to take a fake. My strength as a hitter, I now realize, is that I haven't got sense enough to be set up. Why do you think a person becomes a writer? It's because he can never figure anything out until afterwards. In baseball down through the years I've often been trying, during the seventh inning, to figure out what happened in the fifth. And what happened was that I wasn't paying attention because I was wondering what I did wrong in the third. And what I did wrong in the third was boot one because I was thinking, "I've got to concentrate with every fiber of my being. Hmm, interesting phrase. I wonder what all the fibers of my being in concert would look like? A nice wool shirt?" Oh, those rare great moments in sports when my mind isn't working and my body is!

Another thing I do in this game is throw four guys out with my hose. My mind is a blank then, too.

Did you talk your triple and a half over with Beckert and Jenkins later?

No, not exactly. But I will say this. In my time I'd exchanged various glances with ballplayers. And a major league manager once mistook me for a member of the Hall of Fame. That was when I called Billy Martin on the phone, and hearing my voice, he cried, "Mick? Mick? Is it the Mick?" He thought I was Mickey Mantle. When he realized I wasn't, we were both very disappointed.

But I had never exchanged a glance with a ballplayer that contained any hint that I, too, was a part of the actual ball-playing experience. One time a Venezuelan sportscaster, Juan Vené, and I told Manny Sanguillen, when he was catching for the Pirates, that we had played baseball on opposing press teams.

"Softball?" asked Sanguillen.

"No, hardball."

Sanguillen was one of the most gracious ballplayers I've ever met. But Sanguillen shook his head and said, "You guys!"

That evening in Scottsdale after the second intrasquad game, I exchanged glances with Beckert and Jenkins that, to me—and I am talking in terms of diamond experience now—contained a hint of "us guys."

Tell me. This is another thing I have always wondered about. Do you ballplayers put your pants on one leg at a time, like everybody else?