“But you’re Mickey Mantle,” I said again, almost trying to work it out in my own mind more than anything. “Mickey Mantle, my dad’s favorite player!”
“Listen kid,” Mantle showed the slightest irritation. “We don’t have much time. Your dad sent me to help you out here; so let’s work on that fastball.”
“You know my dad?”
“Guy like me meets a lot of people on the other side,” he said. “Hard to say how well I know any of them. But yeah, you could say I know your dad. He sent me here to give you a couple of tips on some things that can maybe help you become a better ballplayer.”
I have to stop here for a minute, because the memory takes me back to a place in time when I was vulnerable. That summer, we almost lost the farm, and to say that makes it sound like another sad farmer’s story, like maybe the farm didn’t need saving and the laws of economics should have been allowed to prevail. But that’s not a fair assessment at all.
The first couple of years after the Gulf War were the hardest emotionally, but there was some government money and that helped keep things above the water line. Then in 1993, my mom met a guy at the county fair and they dated a while before deciding to tell me they were getting married. Alex was his name. He bought me lots of baseball cards and tried to talk about the game with me, but he always smelled like sour beer and cheap cigars; so I never warmed up to him. Anyway, after a couple of years, Alex just left. No word on why or where, he was just gone. My mother cried a lot when dad died, but I don’t think she shed one tear when she woke up and found her side of the bed empty one morning in 1995.
This being Texas and all, we soon found a Mexican family looking for work and needing a place to stay. They moved into the old carriage house between the barn and the main house and over the course of one long sweltering summer, the father, a thick man named Rodrigo Montoya pieced the farm back together. I befriended his kids, Jaime and Rolanda and taught them to ride the horses, how to put out hay for the cows. We even played an odd kind of three-way baseball with one of us batting, another pitching and the third one covering the section of infield where we always seemed to chop our grounders.
Over time, the Montoyas became like a surrogate family. We invited them into the main house for meals, and honestly, Senora Montoya was a much better cook than my own mom. Still, they swapped recipes, the list of ingredients in mom’s fried chicken batter for the Montoya family secret to making enchiladas verdes. The Davidson family apple pecan pie recipe for a lesson in making carnitas de puercas. In time, Rodrigo’s mother came to live with them, and the cooking got even better. Fresh handmade tamales, camarones a la diabla, and a molé sauce that a guy could sit and eat on corn tortillas all afternoon.
We knew they were illegals, but most of the Hispanics in Texas are as well. This was a desperate time and mom needed more help than I could give; so we made our deal and tried to find some peace about it. Then one day in February of 1997, close to the start of baseball season, the folks from immigration services raided the local Mexican restaurant. Seventeen people were deported that day, including Rodrigo’s wife, Alba and his daughter, Rolanda. I came home that afternoon and found Rodrigo sitting with my mother in the kitchen. He was apologizing and she was crying. The rest of the Montoya family was gone by dinner time the next day.
A couple of months later, my mother caught me in the kitchen before practice.
“You know that I’m going to need your help around the farm this summer,” my mom said.
“Yes ma’am.”
“That means you may have to miss a baseball game or two.”
“But mom!” I shouted at her, not meaning to raise my voice, but not ready to concede after one sentence.
She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and sat down and the table, looking up at me with her hands out in front of her, a pleading gesture if ever there was one.
“I’m sorry,” I answered her expression. “It’s just that I know we’re going to the state playoffs this year. I can feel it. This team –“
“Do you know how much money we have in savings?”
She said ‘we’ and it touched me then and gets me to still; ‘we’, as in, we’re in this together, just you and me, kid. But I looked away, not because I didn’t care how much money she had managed to save. Even at seventeen years old, I knew it was the end to any further discussion. No money, no mortgage payment. No payment, no farm, and no farm meant no place to stay for either one of us.
“You won’t have to miss many,” mom continued. “It’s spring and the farm won’t need as much work until summer really sets in.”
“I’ll work every night after school,” I said, not realizing what I was committing myself to and in the moment, not remembering that I had practice a lot of those nights.
“It’s going to take more than that,” she said.
“At least let me just make it to the games,” I begged. “I can miss some practices, but the team....” I started to say how the team needed me, but realized how ephemeral a baseball season was in the broader scheme of things.
“We can try to accommodate the games when you pitch,” she said shaking her head lightly, “And I’ll call Mr. Peterson to explain our situation.”
In the end, we also decided it would be my last season. We just had to make it through May. The playoffs were held during the first week in June and for the rest of the summer, I could work morning to night to put things back in order.
The next night, after I finished an hour’s worth of chores, I grabbed my glove and the old bucket of balls to go out and throw a few before the sun set.
I had just loosened up my arm with a few stretches and some long tosses from across the pasture when I saw Mickey Mantle walking across the field with another guy. For the briefest second, I thought it was my dad, but the sun was blaring behind them, reducing their faces to darkened silhouettes in the bright light.
When they came under the shade of the oak tree next to the barn, I recognized the newcomer from the picture on his baseball card.
“Hey kid,” Mantle started to introduce his friend. “This here’s –“
“I know who you are!” I shouted, “You’re Lou Gehrig! ‘The Iron Horse’.”
“This here’s Henry,” Mantle said, shaking his head. Gehrig extended his hand and I shook it heartily, beaming from ear to cheek as I did.
“Charles says you have some kind of curve,” Gehrig said.
“But he needs another good pitch,” Mantle opined. “Or else they’ll sit and wait for the fastball, take their chances that he’ll miss with the curve.”
“What about a ‘snapper’?” Gehrig offered. “That thing that Gibson up in St. Louis threw. It kind of sits between a fastball and a curve, breaks across and down.”
“You mean a slider?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Mantle agreed, “Did you see Guidry’s in ’78?”
“But you can’t come around on it,” Gehrig continued. “You’ve got to kind of snap it to get the movement, but not too much or then it’s a curve ball that’ll hang and miss every time. Might as well be throwing batting practice if that happens.”
Mantle showed me the grip, two fingers together over the top on one seam while Gehrig moved down by the tire at the edge of the yard.
“I want to see how this thing breaks,” he called back.
I wound up and tried to fling the ball the way I thought it was supposed to go. It missed like a bad softball, up and out over the plate with no real momentum on it.
Gehrig mimed the motion of smacking through the ball and lofting it over the fence in deep center.
“You kinda came around on it,” Mantle laughed, “But then you caught yourself and left it flat. Henry hit that one all the way to China.”
Looking down, I kicked at the dirt on the mound and sort of looked away.
“Hey,” Mantle said, “It was one pitch. Don’t worry about it. Get your focus back and give me another.”
Reaching down into the bucket, I gripped the next ball and rolled my shoulders a bit before going to the wind up. For a minute, it all seemed too surreal. The ghost of Mickey Mantle was standing behind me, had just encouraged me to try a slider like the one Bob Gibson threw, and Lou Gehrig was standing down by the barn waiting to see if I could get it to break.
“Wait a minute,” I stopped and asked the question that occurred to me as I was standing and getting ready to try the slider again. “Bob Gibson is still alive. I saw him on TV just the other day. That means…” It took me a minute to work it all out. “You guys still watch baseball?”
“Well yeah,” Mantle answered, “You can take the kid out of the game,…”
“But you can’t take the game out of the man,” Gehrig finished.
“And you wouldn’t believe some of the games we get into,” Mantle added.
“Ruth, Campanella, Clemente,” Gehrig agreed. “We got some guys to hit around with.”
“And none of ‘em can hit much off Young,” Mantle said. “It’s like that guy invented baseball or something. He’s got this incredible fastball, and he can put it anywhere he wants. That’s control.”
“I don’t get it,” I said after thinking about it all for a minute. “You guys can be up there playing with some of the greatest players who ever played the game, and…”
“We don’t see many youngsters on the other side,” Gehrig explained.
“And the ones we do get to meet,” Mantle finished the thought for him. “Well a lot of times, they don’t care about baseball anymore.”
“Don’t get us wrong,” Gehrig continued, “It’s a nice place and all.”
“The nicest!” Mantle agreed.
“But sometimes we see a kid who’s got a heckuva fastball,” Gehrig said, “A pretty good curve and the desire to really do something special. Well that combination’s always a winner.”
“Guys, I gotta be honest with you,” I started to tell them about the farm, about the whole entire situation with my mom and the season and these being the last few games I’d ever play. But before I could say a word, Mantle slapped me on the shoulder.
“Try that slider again,” he said. “This time remember to snap it, but don’t come around on it.”
He smiled and pointed at the old tire nailed to the side of the barn wall. I looked down towards the makeshift batter’s box and saw Gehrig smiling as well. He motioned with his hands for me to go ahead and give him the pitch. It was then that I realized they already knew about the farm, about the season, everything. It was also the reason why Mantle said there wasn’t much time the night he first walked out to the mound to coach me.
CONTINUED…
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