Read Online Parker Field by Howard Owen - Free Book Online

good reporter can do is not get in the way.
    Before I can ask him what was wrong with Les, he answers the question.
    “Les wasn’t like that. Les was already married. He was a little older than some of the other fellas, and maybe he was just more decent. Anyhow, when they’d start laughing about ol’ Frannie Fling, he’d just move away or tell them to act their ages.
    “One time, I heard him ask Holt, who’d managed to take pictures of Frannie the night before, buck naked, how he’d feel if that was his sister.
    “Holt just stared at him like he was crazy. He said, 'My sister wouldn’t do shit like that.’ They all respected Les, mostly because he could have kicked most if not all their asses, but you could tell the Frannie Fling thing kind of drove a ledge between him and the other boys.”
    I’m sure Jimmy means “wedge,” but I’m not about to interrupt now.
    “I wondered if all the shit that summer, and what happened in Florida next spring, wasn’t the last straw that broke the camel’s back for Les. I mean, he kind of knew his day had come and gone, but it seemed like the fun had gone out of it for him. The Vees had up and left for Toledo, but Les came back to Richmond that spring. He was done with baseball.”
    “But about Frannie Fling …”
    “Oh, yeah. Well, by July, she had worked around to Whitestone. Which was bad news.”
    Lucky Whitestone, I already know from my research and what Bootie Carmichael has told me secondhand, was the Chosen One on the Vees that year.
    “They thought he was goin’ to be the next Yankee superstar,” Jimmy says. “And he might have been, if he hadn’t screwed up and got himself traded to Cleveland for a pitcher with a dead arm and an outfielder that couldn’t hit left-handers. He developed some bad habits, the way guys do who have too much looks and talent and time on their hands. But he still had a pretty damn good career. Ten years in the bigs. Lifetime batting average was .278. Not bad for a shortstop.”
    When Frannie and Whitestone hooked up, the rest of the team kind of backed off. There was a pecking order, as there always is, whether you’re a lawyer or a left fielder, and Lucky Whitestone was at the top of it.
    Many of his teammates, Jimmy says, were surprised that a guy leading the International League in batting and slugging percentage while playing an above-average game at shortstop would cast his lot with someone who’d already slept with several of his teammates.
    “But Frannie was something. I swear to God she could of been a movie star, if she’d of gone in that direction. She could charm the pants off you.”
    Obviously, I observe.
    “Whitestone had this orange GTO convertible, and they’d come driving up to the park together, waving at everybody like they were celebrities. He’d been able, with his signing bonus I guess, to afford more than the other boys, so he had his own apartment, which gave ’em a little bit of privacy. But the GM wasn’t happy about it, and one day the Yankees sent some suit down to give him a talking to. It wasn’t what future Yankees did, the suit told him. Whitestone told the guy to go fuck himself. Or at least, that’s what he told everybody he said.”
    Lucky Whitestone hit .317 for the Vees that year, with twenty home runs. When the IL season ended in late August, he was called up to the Yankees. He was twenty-three years old, and his future seemed as safe as General Motors stock.
    Jimmy throws down his smoked-out butt and stomps on it.
    “I doubt if Whitestone knew, when he left, that she was pregnant.”
    Jimmy says he figures he was the first one connected with the ball club to know. When the 1964 season ended, so did Frannie Fling’s employment with the Vees, because their scumbag carpetbagging owner moved them to Toledo, Ohio, and left us without a team in 1965. Also, the general manager who’d hired her was now convinced that she was a bad influence on the players. So, she was back to waiting