CLYDE, JACKIE, BURT, PREACHER, AND ME

An older friend had a tryout with Brooklyn at Braves Field in Boston in the spring of 1950. His brush with Dodgers’ legends wasn’t triumph or heartbreak, but it is an expressive, good-natured look at an unforgettable baseball experience in a different time.

One of my semipro teammates was an ex-Brooklyn Dodger of short duration. Or as he said, “I was up for a cup of coffee.” He arranged a tryout for me through an old friendship with Clyde Sukeforth, the current Dodgers’ third-base coach. I stared at the ceiling the night before the tryout. When I finally fell asleep it was deep because I woke up with my pitching arm like a dead log under me. Tabloid Headline:  Pitcher’s Arm Permanently Paralyzed on Eve of Dodger Tryout.

I also had a nervous bladder the morning of the tryout, and like all New England pitchers in the spring my arm was so sore it hurt to brush my teeth. The question was not whether you had a sore arm, it was how so sore was it? You never let on because someone else might get your job and pitched anyway light-headed from the wafting wintergreen.

Later in the morning, a muscle in my left shoulder trembled like a frog's leg wired-up for a science experiment. It was a good sign, the muscle was recovering, and it had been the angriest of several. I was still a wreck.

We drove into Boston in my friend’s salesman’s coupe.  This was not baseball weather.  A fresh breeze blew a frigid, mist-laden fog through the spectral Braves Field light towers across the Charles River. With perfect timing, a crooner on the car radio lamented, “. . .More clouds of gray/ Than any Russian play could guarantee. . .”

We met Clyde Sukeforth in the lobby of the Somerset Hotel near Kenmore Square. He was cordial, but all business and suggested that we get to the ballpark. During the ride up Commonwealth Avenue to Braves Field, my friend and Clyde reminisced about their Dodgers’ experiences. I wondered and worried about my often-futile search for the strike zone, my mind centered like the proverbial man awaiting the gallows.

My friend waited in the boxes behind the Dodgers’ dugout while Sukeforth took me to the clubhouse. The visitors’ locker room under the stands smelled of liniment and dried sweat. It was spare with penitentiary gray concrete walls and wooden benches bolted to the floor, with a drain in the middle, much like a high school facility that occasionally got hosed down.

Sukeforth told the equipment man I was trying out and left without a word.  I got a bored once-over, and the unsaid words were:  “How can I find a suit to fit this skinny marink?”  He dug deep into a steamer-size trunk and came up with a tent-sized gray shirt with the blue DODGERS across the chest. I don’t remember the number on the back, but it wasn’t single digit.

The billowy flannel uniform smelled like a musty wool blanket, and I felt scrawny and pathetic as I pulled it on with my back to the room. I was aware from the voices and commotion that the locker room was filling with Dodgers and when partially dressed got up the nerve to turn around.

Overlooking my discomfort were all the recognizable players in various stages of undress.  It was a tableau in two rows with the front row sitting and the rear standing, and all were facing me.  It was a loose locker room with Peewee Reese in the middle leading the banter.  He was built like Popeye with bulging biceps and a washboard stomach.  I wondered why he was called “Peewee” until I learned that in his youth Reese had been a marbles champ, another sport that takes great hands.

Don Newcombe was massive, Gil Hodges and Duke Snider were built like defensive ends, and Roy Campanella was constructed like a jukebox. I was hopelessly out of my league, although I felt a surge of hope when I saw one tall, slim guy dressing quietly in the back. No one said anything or gave any welcoming signals. The joking and needling continued, but they were conscious of me, observing. I was an intruder who would be watched and judged. I felt for a foolish moment that I was part of the team.

The Dodgers waited until Reese was ready, and then spikes scraping, jostling, trading insults he led the Dodgers out of the locker room. They looked big enough to be a pro football team. I didn’t know at the time that Reese was the captain, but wasn’t surprised when I learned it later. He was a natural leader if I ever saw one. I sat on the bench

listening to a dripping shower, pounding my glove, waiting for Sukeforth who surely thought I was smart enough to come out onto the field when dressed.  The clubhouse man stuck his head in, “You better go out, Kid, I gotta lock up.”

Sukeforth was talking to someone at the grandstand railing as the Dodgers took batting practice. I stood by the cage and watched Snider and Hodges hang ropes while Campanella and Furillo waited to hit.  Then Sukeforth was at my shoulder saying, “Let’s throw over there,” motioning to the warm-up mound along the first-base stands.

With the chilly weather and stomach knots, I had trouble getting loose.  As usual I was wild high and outside. They once said of Forties’ Dodger fireballer Rex Barney that if the plate was located high and outside he would have gotten into the Hall of Fame. In my case, I might have made it to Class D ball.

Brooklyn Manager Burt Shotton stood watching in the dugout only a few feet away.  Like Philadelphia A’s manager Connie Mack, Shotton wore civvies. He looked like a banker in suit and tie, topcoat, and hat. 

I was as loose as I was going to get and only getting twinges in my shoulder rather than the usual ice-cream- headache pain. I threw a few curves that broke sharply; and

Sukeforth gave that peculiar, but familiar, inclined head nod that catcher give pitchers after a good pitch or when they need to get with it.

One of my Dodgers’ socks was falling down, and I gave Sukeforth the one-second sign. When I looked up Jackie Robinson was standing at the practice plate, as hitters do, to get a feel for the speed and stuff and timing. In my awe and confusion, I threw the next pitch extra hard and unintentionally right under his chin. Robinson swiveled his shoulders away from the pitch, looked at me with wide, quizzical eyes and walked to the batting cage. I wondered later if he figured me for a crazed Cracker.

When Sukeforth signaled it was over, having put up with too many pitches in the dirt and out of reach, Shotton called me to the dugout steps. Looking out at me from behind his glasses he said in a kind, firm voice, “Son, you have a Major-League curve, a minor-league fastball, and sandlot control. Try again next year.”

After that pointed critique and dismissal, I walked behind the batting cage heading toward the clubhouse. Robinson with his patented hitch and weight shift was whistling line drives to all fields. As batting practice wore down, Billy Cox implored, “Come on, Jackie.”  Robinson pleaded in his high-pitched voice, “One more Billy, just one more.”

I retreated to the dressing room and changed. A shower was out of the question, no sweat worked up, and I doubted that a towel would have been offered. I felt better about what had happened than I thought I would, and I liked Shotton’s Major-League curve comment. Even though I was lousy, I loved being out there around the Dodgers. While

I was folding and saying goodbye to the uniform, ex-Dodger-star Pete Reiser, then a Braves part-time player, was entertaining, in suggestive pantomime, some of his former teammates who had come in from the damp.

Reiser, still in his early thirties, looked old and bloated. He had been the youngest batting champ in major-league history at 22, when he led the National League with a .343 average in 1941. Reiser was beaned a few times and fearless in pursuit of long drives, barreling into unpadded fences with reckless abandon. Newsreels of the time showed him hitting walls in full stride and crumpling unconscious.  On one catch, the umpire pried open Reiser’s glove to make sure the robbed extra-base hit was in it. The injuries shortened his career and probably his life.

I joined my friend in the stands. He was gracious, but I know he was disappointed. He’d probably built me up to Sukeforth as the second coming of Warren Spahn and then delivered Mr. Sandlot Control. The Dodgers’ infield and outfield practice soon diverted me. The infield drill was full of hustle, chatter, and simulated game conditions. In those days, pregame practice was exciting, skillful, and followed an exacting ritual. Serious fans did not miss it.  Nowadays, if they have it at all, it’s a lackluster, going-through-the-motions, can’t-wait-to-get-to-the-dugout charade.

A double play was executed flawlessly with Reese gliding to his left, scooping the hard grounder and, in one motion, shoveling it to Robinson who wheeled and fired to a stretching Hodges. Reese was a textbook shortstop who took ground balls with his tail low and back of glove on the dirt like someone cruising around with a Geiger counter.

Third baseman Billy Cox’s gloved hand was like a Venus flytrap picking off short hops and bad bounces like they had been rehearsed. Campanella pounced on the simulated bunts like a cat on a rolling toy, rifling the ball to all bases with balance and precision. Furillo, with his weight-lifter’s body, threw bazookas on a line to third and home from deep right field with little strain.

The umpire soon hollered, “Play ball,” and along with a paucity of loyal fans we hunched shivering in a windy drizzle straight off the Atlantic. The Braves got only a few scattered singles off lefty Preacher Roe whom I recognized from the locker room. The Dodgers didn’t hit much better but managed to bunch theirs for a one-run win.

As I watched Roe finesse the Braves, I recognized that he was everything I wanted to be in a pitcher: economical, relaxed, and hitting all the right spots. I longed to ask him for some tips like how he got his pitches on the corners at the knees, but further access to the Dodgers was blocked by my earlier display of wayward overthrowing. It was back to the sandlots.⁴⁹

My friend said that the importance of throwing a pitch to Jackie Robinson in 1950 didn’t register until much later. He said that even though it was a side session, and he messed it up by nearly hitting Jackie Robinson, it was a privilege to have had the connection, however fleeting, to a great ballplayer and hugely influential American hero.

  . . .

When General Manager Branch Rickey brought Jackie Robinson up from Montreal to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 the country changed. We don’t know whether Robinson’s Major League debut and immediate success swayed President Truman’s decision to integrate the armed forces and put a civil rights plank in the Democratic National Convention platform in 1948, but it may have. It’s also possible that the Harlem Globetrotters stunning defeat of the all-white Minneapolis Lakers pro basketball championship team further influenced Truman to recognize the rights of blacks to participate on a level playing field, not just in sports but in all aspects of American life. It’s doubtful whether President Johnson would have proclaimed “We shall overcome” to a joint session of Congress and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would have been voted into law without the weight of the earlier landmark events.

Jackie Robinson was a symbol of courage and maturity in the face of extreme hostility. Brooklyn General Manager Branch Rickey told Robinson that he would suffer abuse and have to take it, and suffer and take it he did¾with dignity, as in one 1947 game in Cincinnati, a torrent of scurrility poured from the stands and opposing dugout. Pee Wee Reese, a southerner by birth who was also getting screamed at for even playing with Robinson, walked over from his shortstop position and put his arm around Jackie’s shoulder, as if to say “He’s one of us so lay off.” Pee Wee’s spirited gesture quieted the crowd and was a defining moment for Jackie Robinson and for all black athletes  struggling for acceptance. (The NBA wasn’t integrated until 1950. Pro golf was an all-white fraternity. Blacks in pro football had come nowhere near achieving the parity in player personnel they deserved.)

"What a decent human being. How much he helped me. But he refuses to take the credit."

-Jackie Robinson on Pee Wee Reese⁵⁰

POSTSCRIPT: Dave Anderson of The New York Times mentioned in a recent telephone conversation that Clyde Sukeforth scouted Jackie Robinson for the Brooklyn Dodgers. When manager Leo Durocher was suspended just before the 1947 season began, Sukeforth filled in. Brooklyn opened the season against the Boston Braves on April 15, 1947 at Ebbetts Field. It was Jackie Robinson’s first game in the big leagues, and the park hummed with anticipation. Sukeforth was the first manager to put Robinson’s name on a Dodgers’ lineup card. He managed for only a few games before Burt Shotton took over and led the Dodgers to a pennant.⁵¹ (See “Mug Meets Mirror” in this chapter.) (In 1947, the baseball writers began the naming of a Major League Rookie of the Year and selected Jackie Robinson. He was 28 years old, an advanced age for a rookie. Beginning in 1949, the award was made in each league)

This story was excerpted from Guts in the Clutch: 77 Legendary Triumphs, Heartbreaks and Wild Finishes in 12 Sports, with a Foreword by Drew Olson of ESPN.

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