John D. MacDonald
Take the Bum Out!
His eyes remote, his face bleak, P. J. Lace sat high in the stands behind home plate. His solid hands rested on meaty thighs and he was as wide and hard as a man of fifty can be. He sat and mourned his son. He mourned a little death that had occurred within his son.
Johnny Lace was on the mound. He should have exuded the confidence of a big leaguer in exile among the bush leagues. But there was no confidence in him. P. J. Lace, watching from afar, could see the taut nervousness, the deep-drawn lines parenthesizing the tightened lips.
The count was two and two on the batter. It was the top half of the sixth and the team for which Johnny was pitching, the Bay City Sailors, were in front over the Jamiston Jets by a score of one to nothing.
The first batter had undercut the hall for a that looped back over second base. The green second baseman had been slow to move and the ball had brushed the tip of his gloved fingers, which put a runner on first and an error on the board.
The second batter, the head of the Jets’ batting order, was a lined, tough, seasoned veteran whose fading legs had bumped him down the ladder. He was in his second year with the Jets and he knew how to crowd a shaky pitcher. He moved in on the plate and casually pulled back his head to let a high one on the inside go by for a ball.
With the count three and two, Johnny had poured one in low and on the outside, putting himself in a hole with a man on first and second and none out.
With two and two on the third batter, Johnny seemed to lose smoothness of motion. He was as jerky and erratic as a man on strings. He was taking too long a time for the pitch.
P. J. felt the tension infect him and he leaned forward a little further. His wide palms were damp and the blunt fingernails cut with steady pressure.
The man at the plate waited. In the first inning he had hit a long line drive and had been cheated out of a good base hit by a youngster in left field with legs like an antelope.
The pitch came down the alley, the batter stepped into it, and P. J. saw the white flash of the ball before the sharp crack of the impact reached him. The runner pumped toward first, his head turned so that he could watch the flight of the ball. As he rounded first he settled down to a pleased jog-trot. The three men crossed home plate. The Sailor rooters began the usual jeer. The catcher and two other infield men came out to the box, stood and spat and talked and didn’t look Johnny Lace in the face.
The pitch to the fourth batter was good. It broke sharply, cut the heart of the plate. The second pitch slanted across the inside corner for the second called strike.
The jeers of the crowd faded a little. The batter managed to tag the third pitch for a steaming ground ball halfway between the third baseman and the shortstop. The shortstop made a hopeless try for it. The outfielder came in fast enough to field the ball smoothly to second, holding the runner up on first.
Once again Johnny Lace tightened up. The jeers were renewed. He walked the fourth batter. After he had given a ball and a wild pitch to the fifth batter there was a conference at the mound. Johnny walked slowly out of the infield, his spikes scuffing the dust as he crossed the baseline. The pitcher who had been warming up came out.
P. J. Lace yanked his Panama a bit more firmly on his head, stood- up and moved into the aisle, and out of the park.
His long black sedan was parked in the open pasture by the fence. He drove slowly and thoughtfully back to the small city where he was registered in the only presentable hotel.
When Johnny Lace walked into the hotel room, his father was apalled at the changes which had occurred during the past year. Johnny was still tall, lean, bronzed, with the big hands and square powerful wrists of a pitcher.
But his gray eyes had a whipped look and there was bitterness in his face.
They were awkward with each other.
“You watch the game, dad?” The brief handshake over, Johnny turned toward the hotel window.
“Ah... yes, son. I saw the game.”
Johnny’s laugh was short and bitter. “I’m really in there, aren’t I?”
P. J. stood beside his son, put one hand on Johnny’s shoulder. Johnny shrugged it off, moved a bit away. Johnny said, “I can feel it in the air. The confidential approach. This is just a game, after all. Give it up and come back with me. I’ll find you a nice soft slot in one of my mills and you be the owner’s son and build up a good golf game.”
P. J. grinned ruefully. “I had something like that in mind,” he admitted.
Johnny was suddenly both serious and pleading. “Can’t you see? I’ve got to lick it. Once it’s licked I can quit with honor., But if they drive me out I’ll always carry it around with me.”
“I’ve thought of that. But maybe you’re taking too much out of yourself trying to lick it.”
It had been very different four years before. Johnny had come out of an Ivy League college with an impressive string of victories. It had been pretty well determined that after school he would go into the family business. But the scouts were clustering around to sign him up and it had seemed a good thing to spend a few years on a professional ball club. After all, there had been plenty of time. Johnny had been just twenty when he got out of college.
Paul Lace remembered taking the time off travel over to Massachusetts and see Johnny starring on the farm team of the club that had signed him up. That first year his won-and-lost record had been impressive.
And the following year Johnny had graduated into the big leagues — a capable kid, popular with his team mates, a reliable performer on the team’s pitching staff.
There had been no reasonable way to explain it. During the season he had knocked out of the box a few times on off days. He had taken it with good grace.
It happened in the third game of the Series. Johnny’s team had taken the League pennant, was conceded a good chance to take the Series. They lost the first game. The manager threw in the top man of his pitching staff and lost the second Series game at 2–0. He had tagged Johnny Lace to pitch, and win, the third game.
There was no logical reason for the way Johnny reacted. There may have been emotional reasons. The Series is big time. Fast, hard, rough, dangerous big time. The boys don’t fool. The crowd doesn’t fool. It is hair-trigger baseball and a large boo for the boy who pulls a dummy play.
And, in front of nearly eighty thousand people, with an additional twenty million listening in, Johnny Lace was knocked off the mound in the first half of the first inning. The manager left him in as long as he could, but when the earned runs reached four, he had to snatch him out of there. They lost that game and the Series.
A boy plays hard, plays with all the guts and courage and energy he can muster. And it isn’t good enough. Something happens to him. Something that isn’t pretty. It happened to Johnny Lace.
Oddly enough, the manager didn’t catch it in all its implications until the actual schedule started the following season. Up until that time he hadn’t censured Johnny. He thought of it as just a bad guess. Series fever. Too bad. But nothing to get excited about.
And then, as Johnny started to pitch in the second season, it became obvious that he could hold his own until somehow two men managed to get on base. Then the Series situation was duplicated in Johnny’s mind and he lost the fine edge of precision necessary to continue pitching. The fat pitches over the heart of the plate were murdered, and the other men were walked and Johnny Lace was thumbed out of the game.
After the fifth time it happened Johnny was sent down to a Class A farm league. He lasted two months.
When Paul Lace spoke in quiet fashion of Johnny’s taking too much out of himself in the process of fighting this weakness of his, the young man’s face became the face of a stranger.