BENCHPRESS

TAKE AN OLDTIMER TO LUNCH

BENCHPRESS

Billy Altman

The year is 1962, the place New York City. As a chartered bus carrying members of the Boston Red Sox baseball team rolls out of the Big Apple and off towards the nation’s capitol, where the boys from Beantown are scheduled to engage in battle against the pesky Washington Senators, the back doors of the vehicle suddenly fly open as two of the inhabitants leap out and quickly disappear into the teeming streets of Manhattan. When the refugees fail to return after a few bewildering minutes, the bus continues on its course and the two shipjumpers—pitcher Gene Conley and infielder Pumpsie (nee Elijah) Green—are officially declared AWOL.

The duo’s whereabouts remain a mystery until some 48 hours later when a forlorn Green, previously best known as the last first-ever black player on a major league ballclub (when the Bosox finally gave in to public pressure and suited Pumpsie up for championship play, the calendar read 1959, a good 12 years after Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn debut), quietly turns up at the Red Sox’s Washington hotel and confesses to his much-missed mates that he had simply grown too dazed and confused to accompany Conley on the intended pilgrimage. Pilgrimage? team officials ask. What pilgrimage? Green goes on to explain that the underlying motivation behind the two’s desertion from the rest of the squad had been Gene’s burning desire to sojourn to the land of his savior, the land of milk and honey, the homeland of homelands—Israel. His mission? To find God, and thereby render his curveball effective again.

The next day, Red Sox detectives do a little bit of sojourning of their own, ending up at La Guardia airport, where they locate the not-exactly-hard-to-spot Conley (unless, of course, you’re not looking for a six-footnine-inch, totally sloshed and dishevelled looking guy flashing a plane ticket to Jerusalem to anyone who wanders by) and bring him back to the fold, semi-alive. Surprisingly, most of Conley’s teammates aren’t very surprised by Gino’s aborted slouch towards Bethlehem; besides being much too tall, and a pitcher, Conley has spent the last few years playing professional sports nonstop, 12 months a year, filling the time during baseball’s off-season as a member of the Boston Celtics basketball team. It was generally assumed that something, besides not enough air, was bound to go to his head sooner or later.

Some 20 years after the incident, Gene Conley—now a successful paper-products plant owner—retells his tale to author Ed Kiersh in a chapter of the highly entertaining Where Have You Gone, Vince DiMaggio? (Bantam), recalling the lost weekend of his sports career with equal parts of angelic innocence and devilish glee. “I told Pumpsie, and I still believe it,” he says, “if we had been able to make it there, and find God, he would’ve hit .350 and I would’ve won 20 games. I’m sure of it...Part of me would do it all over again,” laughs Conley. “I wasn’t a (Warren) Spahn, so I had to be known for something.”

Indeed, just about all of the 56 former baseball players whose stories unfold in the pages of Where Have You Gone, Vince DiMaggio? (55 if you’re inclined to count as one joyboys Johnny and Eddie O’Brien, the identical twins whose Alphonse and Gaston act provided some much needed comic relief from the generally dismal play of their mid-’50s Pittsburgh Pirate teams; and yes, they certainly did make it a habit of taking each other’s place when the Topps bubblegum card folks came around to take their pictures) are known for something or other. Some are known for things that happened to them, like the mysterious loss of all of Steve Blass’s pitching talents for no real reason other than simply sheer fate—Blass’s record went from 19-8 in ’72 to 3-9 in ’73 to Sayonara in ’74—others for what happened to baseball because of them, such as Hector Lopez’s uncanny ability to turn absolutely every routine pop fly ever hit to him in left field at Yankee Stadium into grounds for heavy betting as to the exact location of the ball’s ultimate landing site.

Traveling across the United States and Puerto Rico along with photographer Harvey Wang, writer Kiersh made it a point to mainly try and “track down those guys who weren’t in the headlines every day,” leading to this collection of then-and-now portraits of ’50s and ’60s ballplayers whose main memories are not highlighted by the fine print contents of zillion dollar, no-trade, no-cut contracts, but rather by the glories they either witnessed or partook in between the foul lines of the ballfield, and whose stories of life after athletics deal more with the bowling alley that didn’t make it or the real estate job that fell through than with municipal exempt trusts and promotional duties for Atlantic City casinos. After all, agents, accountants and lawyers didn’t start gaining control of the business of baseball, at least not from the players’ side of the bargaining table, until the free agent floodgates swung open in the mid-’70s. As Harmon Killebrew notes, “The average salary today is more than my all-time high ($125,000). That’s hard for me to swallow.” Sure is, especially when you realize that Killebrew, who slugged a whopping 573 homers in his career—good for fifth on the all-time list and the most by any righthanded American League hitter ever—retired just eight years ago.

And so, whether or not you actually saw some of these players perform, whether or not you can shake you head with a knowing smile at the thought of old flubdub Mickey Lolich whipping up a batch of donuts, and whether or not you can feel the ironic emptiness of relief ace Elroy Face’s retreat from the cruel as a carpenter in a state mental institution, Where Have You Gone, Vince DiMaggio? (Answer: to a peaceful existence in L.A. as a Fuller Brush salesman) vividly paints a composite picture of an alltoo rapidly fading baseball past, a past where men played a game for boys until they were forced out to confront a world not of their own making—the real one, where the cheering usually stopped as soon as the uniforms had turned to street clothes, and where tomorrow replaced today before many were ready for the change.