The Pebble, Jewel of the 1960 World Series

April is sweet. April is cruel. April is spongy. And on opening day the squish of rain-soaked grass under a skittering baseball achieves the sound of summer coming on slowly. The pinwheel drizzle flying off the rolling ball stirs up hope. Foreshadows letdown. Prompts figments of supple deeds.            

I was a ball player, a catcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1960 when we took the National League pennant and went to the World Series to play the New York Yankees. It was an intoxicating year for the players on that team and the public wanted to know all about us.

I heard this story from someone I don’t remember – a player, a reporter, someone. In hot July when we were in first place in the National League and had been since May, Myron Cope, freelance sportswriter, landed an assignment from a local newspaper to profile the players. He began with the team leader, shortstop Dick Groat, doing an interview, writing it up, and seeing it published the next day. After that, when the Pirates played home games, he booked in turn each player a day ahead and arranged to meet them before or after the day’s game.The project clicked along. An artist did up an agreeable line drawing of the featured player that went with the stories, printed at eight inches high, three columns wide. On July 14, 1960, Cope checked his list. Bill Virdon, outfielder, today, Dick Stuart, first baseman, tomorrow. Stuart had just returned to town from a day off that he’d spent performing in two television episodes of “Home Run Derby.”  He’d won one match, lost one, taking home a winner’s check for $2,500 and a loser’s check of $1,000.  When Cope asked him if he’d be available the next day, Stuart said yes, as long as Cope was willing to pay.

            “None of the others asked for pay,” said Cope.

            “They got their own lives. I want paid.”

            “I’m not going to pay you.”

“Then I’m not doing an interview.”

Myron Cope said, “Outstanding.”

And did not interview Stuart and didn’t think ill of him, either. In those days, we didn’t get paid like ballplayers today. A lot of us had regular jobs between seasons. My teammate, outfielder Bob Skinner, worked full time for a newspaper out in California. Skinner once made the all-star team but couldn’t live on baseball earnings. When I asked him what exactly he did out there he said: “Circulation,” with a tiny growl and I asked no further questions.

Cope did an ace job writing me up. He wrote that, as a kid, I’d been the best athlete in my neighborhood, then the best in my high school, and that I made all-state in Illinois twice playing quarterback. But, he wrote, I loved playing baseball more. As a catcher, I got a contract and in the bush leagues I was still the best. Then I got to the majors and was the best no more. Cope didn’t mention that.

Now, I’m dead. I’ve no body. We’re like molecules up here. I’m lonely in heaven. I float around, visit with guys like Shakespeare and Newton. They have time for me. They have time for everyone. There isn’t really any “time” at all. Shakespeare helped me to find paper. Newton helped me track down a typewriter. Newton is good with the technology stuff, but I didn’t think even he could come up with a computer. Paper and typewriters are rarer than rare in heaven. You need a real specialist to somehow materialize the things. So I owe them one. They didn’t have to do it. I saw a reporter I used to know. He was no help. He didn’t care about my story. I had to get those laughing guys, those fun guys, Newton and Shakespeare, surrounded by thousands who want some “time” with them or something else.

You’d think time wouldn’t matter in heaven. It does. It’s similar to time on earth, except here it never ends, so you can wait for a long time to be with Shakespeare, and then it doesn’t last long, he’s on to another hanger-on. I sat around for about three years waiting for my turn. That’s all right, three years is like nothing. And it’s like everything. I can’t tell you exactly. I mean, three years! Christ! It can also feel like three years. Shakespeare is always sandwiched. All these ghosts press against him – and I mean flat right up against him and he’s just hard to get to. I began to notice that no one came up to me. What? Didn’t they know I’d done something big? Didn’t they want to know all about it, what it was like, how it affected me? I’m writing this to correct the matter.

The spirit world is strange. It’s crowded at certain spots, certain personalities are popular, even though we have the whole universe and can really get lost in it, if that’s what you want. With all that space, you’d think people would take advantage. But they don’t. They stick around earth like sad puppies. Earth and earthlings, especially the Shakespeares. They also scheme about how to get back in the action. Some of them take over bodies down there, they whisper in the wind, they try to have an effect down there which always turns out small. Nothing like what they want.

There are some, like me, who never bothered to tell their story when they were alive. And now, like me, they’re obsessed. It’s all folly. Believe me, heaven-paper is like a ghost. Now I have some and can get all this down, but getting it to earth where I want it get is – almost impossible. I know that going in. But I can’t be stopped. I’d call myself desperate, greedy, motivated – but, let me tell you, any kind of emotion in heaven is watered down to the point where you can barely feel it. It takes months and months of concentration to begin to feel it, even though you know it’s there to be felt. It’s no kind of existence. It’s not life. And yet, I exist. A molecule. I have to work hard to feel terrible.

And I’m desperate, or something approaching desperation, I think, to tell my story to the living people on earth. How many of them don’t know they are in the best place? Many act just like they are in heaven, with nothing to lose forever.

I’ve got the paper, I’ve got the typewriter, and I’m going to put it all down, hoping that the ghostly manuscript, if left in tree stump or something on earth will by magic materialize. Maybe. I’ve heard that this can happen, but I usually believe it is all talk. I am a man of little faith. No one in heaven has any proof of this. They say it can be done, but – I don’t know, I don’t have much faith. So I have felt, since dying, although I am not totally dead, strangely, I should have written my story.  

Here it is. I hit a drive of 425 feet over the left field wall at Forbes Field for a home run in the bottom of the eighth inning during the seventh game of the World Series for the Pirates against the New York Yankees. Mel Allen, the Yankee broadcaster, announced (and I quote): “That is one of the most dramatic hits in the history of the World Series… that base hit will long be remembered.” I’m not so sure. There is a line in the movie Eight Men Out . . . “Nobody cares about your batting average, Bucky.” That’s true. But I can’t help it. I want you to know about my batting average.

I found a guy here. Clyde something. Clyde puffs himself up and recites Homer from memory. I puffed myself up and made ears. Yes, Clyde’s voice moves the air, if that’s what you want to call it up here, and makes sound waves where you can hear with your puffy ears some words, some of the time. I followed Clyde for a while. He has followers. I spent decades following him across the firmament trying to get the whole poem into myself. I did that because of this one part that I heard loud and clear early on. Clyde recited: “The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” I thought, yes, perhaps they will sing about me. My fortune and misfortune. See, I had both.

I hit a game-winning home run in the eighth inning of the seventh game of the World Series. Except that isn’t true. It is true to some extent (see Mel Allen). I mean it is very close to true. It is so almost true that I taste it every day. I tasted it every day of my life, and now in afterlife, where memory helps but doesn’t really do much to really make you feel it, taste it. No. I only remember tasting it. Memories, in life, you tend to take for granted. In afterlife, they are all you have practically. But I won the game, or almost did. It is a very strange feeling, let me tell you. I almost lived it, I almost did.

I got to the mountain top. I was there, at a place that few could climb – or hope to climb. My dream came true. My ten-year-old’s soul found nirvana. And this it what it was like: it lasted fourteen minutes. You couldn’t believe what happened next. The New York Yankees, experts at dismantling dreams, and not just dreams, sometimes teams, and very often players. But some dreams come true, don’t they? Except the bastards, the winners, the ever-loving destroyers, had done it again – only this time it wasn’t the Dodgers. It was  me. My baseball luck disappeared after that.

I didn’t start the game and watched from the bench. We blasted ahead in the first two innings and held the lead for the first half of the game. In the 7th inning, our catcher Smokey Burgess got on base with a single. Smokey was a good hitter but ran like a sack of sweet potatoes so the manager sent in a pinch runner and told me I’d be catching starting the 8th inning. The Yankees had been picking up runs, the way they do. Singles, doubles, a home run. By the time the Yankees finished batting in the 8th, they were ahead 7-4.

This late in the game the infield base path was getting pretty beat up. It wasn’t too good to start with. At some point during the season, one of the Pirate players remarked, “That dirt comes from a sand and gravel place out in Beaver County run by gangsters.” The sand was loaded with pebbles. Not small boulders, maybe, but you could pick them out with your fingers and throw them around if you wanted. Pure, glistening, well-raked white sand it wasn’t. By the 8thinning, the surface was pocked with footprints. Tiny potholes. Natural cups for pebbles to settle in. We were used to it.

The first Pirate batter was Gino Cimoli who sent a smooth bouncing popup over the infield for a single. Centerfielder Bill Virdon came to bat and slammed a hard grounder straight at Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek for a sure double play. Except on the second bounce up out of the infield dirt the ball took a freakish line off a pebble and plowed into Kubek’s throat. The runners were safe. Without the pebble, Kubek makes the double play and there are two out and nobody on. With the pebble, there are two on base and nobody out. Kubek has blood in his mouth and a cracked windpipe. An ambulance takes him to the hospital. And we start to have some fun.

Cimoli, Virdon, Groat, Skinner, and Roberto Clemente all get hits, score two runs, and I come up to bat with two on base. I hit a home run. The Pirates score a total of five runs in the 8th and lead the Yankees 9-7. The most famous seventh game winning home run in World Series history. That was me.

But, no.

Bobby Richardson, Dale Long, and Mickey Mantle all get hits to start the Yankee 9th inning. One run scores, Mantle on first base, Long on third, and Yogi Berra at bat. He hit a hard ground ball to first baseman Rocky Nelson. A sure double play, Mantle out at second, Berra at first. With one out already, game over. We win the World Series 9-8. But Nelson stepped on first, scrapping the double play. It’s only natural. The first base bag was right in front of him where he caught the ball. Mantle suddenly stopped, maybe seven feet off first, turned around, faked going to second, then goes back to first base diving low under Nelson’s glove holding the ball. It’s a freakish move. How did Mantle know he had to get back. Nelson slack, Mantle quick. The runner on third scores. Tie game.

Most of America knows what Bill Mazeroski did when he came to bat in the 9th inning. A home run. It won the game and the Series. Only a few know what I did in the 8th.

Now that I’m dead and can see all of history, if I like, right down through the smooth talk and the great battles and into the grit and beyond the grit down to the lifespan of a single amoeba, or anything in all of history, if you can believe it. “Time” is funny that way. I once saw in the first moments of my demise that there were something like ten thousand boys watching the game on television who jumped up from their seats a split second before the pitch and shouted to their fathers and uncles:  “He’s going to hit a home run.”

He did.

I write these sentences on this stupid heavenly paper and the heavenly ink in the lines above keep disappearing. I am determined to finish. I’ll write this again and again until the whole thing sticks.  

My career went down after the World Series. I drifted around the league playing for different teams for a couple of years. Something changed in me. I lost the feel for the game. The split second decisions… I couldn’t make them any more. On balance, I sliced into the speed. I started thinking too much. As a player, I was dead.

In the noisy locker room after the game, the smell of beer, players dumping champagne on each other, lots of people said to me: “Nice job.” I thought, that pebble did a nice job, too. When things quieted down, and the celebrators began to drift away toward home, I went down the tunnel to the dugout and onto the field. I had very firmly in mind precisely the spot that baseball hit before it ruined Tony Kubek’s day. I walked across the diamond. There was still a little light, the sun just about to go down. I spotted the hole and in the lowest part of the hole, a pebble. It was about the size of my thumb knuckle, white with a swirl of brownish coloring that looked like a thread wrapped around it. It was a very eminent pebble. I picked it up. Put it in my pocket. I carried it the rest of my life and took it to my grave.

The following assisted with writing this review

The fictional ghost narrating these events is based on Hal W. Smith, Catcher, Pittsburgh Pirates, 1960-61. Any similarity to the historical Hal W. Smith is purely coincidental.

Interview with Myron Cope, 1999.

Shoenfield, David, “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” ESPN Archives, October 13, 2010.

Sandomir, Richard, “50 Years Later, a Slide Still Confounds,” The New York Times, September 30, 2010.

“The Knife and the Hammer,” Sports Illustrated, October 17, 1960.

Parker, Clifton Blue and Bill Nowlin, “Hal Smith,” Sweet ’60: The 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, 2013.