Read Online Still Pitching by Michael Steinberg - Free Book Online Page A

off year by their best hitters, fewer victories from Carl Erskine and Preacher Roe, a key injury to Ralph Branca, and the loss of their ace, Don Newcombe, to military service—the Dodgers managed to fight off another Giant stretch run and win the pennant by four and half games. They lost the World Series to the Yankees again, but it took the Yanks seven games to beat them. When the season ended, the New York press once again wrote the Dodgers off as inveterate underachievers, if not out-and-out losers. But to my mind, they’d made a remarkable recovery by just winning the pennant.
    The team’s resurgence was in part due to the performance of a rookie pitcher, Joe Black, a previously unknown twenty-eight-year-old pitcher. Pitching mostly in relief, Black won fifteen games and saved fifteen more. Except for the Yankees’ Joe Paige, the Giants’ Hoyt Wilhelm, and a few select others, relief pitchers in the early ‘50s were undervalued role players. For most of the game, they’d huddle together in the bullpen, apart from the rest of their teammates, watching and waiting for a chance to contribute. Often with the game on the line, they’d be called in to pitch. If they succeeded, they’d earn what, in baseball lingo, is called a save.
    I could identify with these relief specialists a lot more easily than I could relate to most of the other players. Their borderline status, coupled with the pressure of having to come though in clutch situations, made them perfect role models for a kid who had an aching need for the spotlight.
    By midsummer I was starting to obsess over the prospect of having to defend myself in school this fall. So I took out three library books: The Amboy Dukes, A Stone for Danny Fisher; and Knock on Any Door —all of which were about teenage street gangs. Two of the three main characters, Frank Goldfarb and Danny Fisher, were Jewish. Nick Romano, the third one, was Italian Catholic. They were all roughly my age.
    The book that captivated me most was The Amboy Dukes . The gang leaders and henchmen had hoodlike names like Black Benny, Moishe, Larry Tunafish, Bull Bronstein, and Crazy Sachs. They sported Vaseline-slicked duck tailed (DA) haircuts and wore pegged pants—and they belonged to exotic sounding clubs like the Sutter Kings, the Killers, the D-Rape Artists, and the Enigmas.
    All of them grew up in post-Depression New York—in rough neighborhoods like Brownsville and East New York. They regularly cut school and hung around pool halls and seedy clubhouses—smoking reefers and planning petty crimes. To maintain respect or stature they had to prove they weren’t afraid to fight, steal, lie, cheat, and deal drugs. They picked up young girls and bragged about having sex with them. They robbed neighborhood candy stores and shops, often at gunpoint. Some gang members even put their lives at risk.
    The character I felt the most sympathy for was Frank Goldfarb. He was more intelligent and compassionate than the rest of the gang. His dream, in fact, was to marry his girlfriend and go to college. But he was too caught up in that world to ever escape. In the end, his misplaced loyalty to the group cost him his life.
    I couldn’t be more unlike these characters—even Frank. Yet there was something compelling about them and the world they inhabited. I yearned for the kind of camaraderie they shared. Sometimes, I even wished I had the chutzpah to live as close to the edge as they did.
    P.S. 44 was less than a five mile bus ride from my house. The turn-of-the-century red brick building and its fenced-in schoolyard sat squarely in the heart of the Arverne-Hammels-Holland section of Rockaway Beach—one of the roughest, most rundown areas in south Queens. But it might as well have been on another planet. Nothing we’d experienced, either at home or in six years of grade school, could have prepared us for this junior high.
    The forty-five minute bus ride to