Lefty, page 5
The profits from the Gomez dairy were kept in a sugar bowl. The kitchen account turned out to be safer than a deposit at the local bank. On September 26, 1929, members of the notorious Fleagle gang shot their way into the Rodeo branch of the Bank of Pinole and forced the manager to open the vault. The gang’s ruthless ways had stunned the nation, and they had been pictured on wanted posters. The Fleagles grabbed the gold bullion and money bags containing the Union Oil payroll, $27,000, and stuffed the bank’s customers inside the vault. The sound of shotgun blasts brought the town’s one constable, Arthur “Jerry” MacDonald, rushing to the scene. MacDonald managed to hit one of the bandits with a shotgun blast to the chest before being gunned down himself. The wounded outlaw, later identified as Jake Fleagle himself, fled to a waiting car, “leaving a trail of blood.” After MacDonald’s body had been removed, a number of Rodeo’s residents stood in the street outside the bank, gawking at the bullet holes in the window. “Of course, the Fleagle gang got away and the successful robbery was played up in the newspapers,” Lefty observed. “And even though Rodeo mourned the death of their constable … and Jerry was a good ol’ constable … the town was delighted to make the front pages.”
Although he sold sporting goods to put bread on the table, Al Erle’s passion was semipro baseball. Employing the telephone, pencil and paper, and an exhaustive list of contacts, he booked thirty to thirty-five games in the Bay Area each weekend for teams such as Orange Crush, Motion Pictures, Wurlitzer Music, Mechanics Bank, and Piggly Wiggly. Half of the sixty or seventy teams involved would be traveling, of course, some as much as three hundred miles. Keeping the scheduling straight was almost a full-time job, and Erle already had one of those.
Elemental baseball fan that he was, Erle was always on the lookout for new talent. The minute he saw Vernon Gomez pitch for the Rodeo town team as a fourteen-year-old eighth grader, Erle asked him if he was interested in the semipro circuit. Vernon would venture up and down the California coast for the next three years, from Monterey to Eureka and inland from Fresno to Mount Shasta. “I’d go anywhere to pitch.”
On these weekend journeys, Vernon generally had an unlikely companion, his older sister Gladys, who went along for an unlikely reason. “Gladys was an outstanding ballplayer. Incredible talent. She was passionate about baseball and her ability humbled me. Five feet two, petite and wiry, she ran like the wind and pitched to the corners of the plate. Her fastball knocked the glove right out of my hand. She wanted desperately to be a ballplayer and it broke her heart she couldn’t get to the big leagues. Ornery as a hog on ice, Gladys beat me royally whatever the sport. At track, she exploded toward the finish line, broke the tape, turned, gave me a thumbs-up, and grinned. I was ‘worm’ or ‘squirt’ and she punctuated her remarks by tweaking my nose. How much can a kid brother take?”
If the game was on a Sunday, the two Gomez siblings finished milking the cows and running the dairy route by 6:00 a.m., then found their own transportation to whatever ballpark was scheduled that day. “I didn’t even ask Dad,” Lefty noted. “I already knew his answer. Besides, who’s gonna ride hundreds of miles in a horse and buggy so his kid could pitch nine innings? Even our horse said no.”
Occasionally they hitched a ride, but generally they had to catch the bus. “Most times Gladys and I stood on the corner, our eyes peeled for the once-a-day bus that roared through town. There were no traffic lights to stop it. To flag the bus down, we ran out into the middle of the road, windmilling our arms and screaming, ‘Stop!’ The driver saw we were desperate and slammed on the brakes.”
The bus rides would dissuade all but the fervently committed. “We rattled down dirt roads, stopping at every one-horse junction. Our backsides were tattooed from jouncing around on the iron springs popping through the torn leather seats.” Vernon tried to do his schoolwork on the journey, which presented some unique difficulties. “I pulled out something like Chaucer’s Old English. I focused in on the print and the bus hit a pothole. I fell on the floor cross-eyed.”
Long trips to towns such as Eureka, three hundred miles from Rodeo, or weekenders, where Lefty pitched a game on Saturday and another on Sunday, irritated Coyote all the more.
“My brothers covered my chores at the dairy. They doubled their own workload, a fact duly noted by Pa. He was less than pleased that his youngest son and daughter were traipsing around the countryside playing baseball. ‘Meanwhile,’ he grumbled, ‘the family business is going to hell.’ I think Pa suspected that baseball was fun.”
But industrial league semipro was the perfect place for a kid with major league aspirations to gain experience. It was highly competitive, with players on the rosters who had played minor league or even major league ball. And they had knowledge as well as ability.
Lefty was in demand from the first. “Erle said the managers were burning up the telephone wires, clamoring for my services after my reputation as a flamethrower made the rounds. Pretty heady stuff for a pipsqueak like me, 125 pounds and built like six o’clock. I went out to the faraway diamonds with fire in my eyes, a greenhorn who thought he could stand on the hill and stare the hitters down.”
Gladys insisted on warming Lefty up before games. “Take or leave it,” she told Al Erle. Then she egged her brother on. “ ‘Burn ’em in,’ she’d whisper in my ear. ‘There might be a scout at the game.’ ” Talented as he was, at fourteen Lefty wasn’t always up to facing former major leaguers. “The hitters laughed at my arrogance. They slammed me hard, knocking me out of the box on my fanny. But sometimes they didn’t. When a pitch mowed them down, damn, it felt good. The game within a game. I loved it.”
There were other advantages. “Traveling the semipro circuit with Gladys was great. It was our first time away from home. We discovered a bigger world than the one we knew in Rodeo, a world beyond hayfields and riding the range. My sidekick and I peered into windows, poked into shops, talked to the locals passing by. Sometimes their opinions agreed with ours, most times they differed. It opened our eyes wider.”
Semipro status implies pay, although the Gomez siblings never saw any actual money. “If I pitched and won, the team treated Gladys and me to a feed at the local diner. If I lost, it was a boot in the pants. That’s the way they worked it. I was there to gain experience, not make a living.”
Semipro baseball attracted not only players who could not make the major leagues but those who were not allowed in the major leagues. When he was fifteen, Vernon Gomez was booked by Al Erle to pitch both ends of a doubleheader. The opposing pitcher would also pitch both games. The other pitcher’s name was Leroy Paige, but even at this point, in what probably was his twenties, Paige had acquired a soaring reputation and the nickname “Satchel.”
Gomez, generally as self-possessed as they come, was awestruck. Before the first game, he stood on the sidelines, chatting with a pitcher already thought to be the equal of any in the game. At one point Lefty asked him what he was getting for a win.
“Satch poked me in the ribs. ‘Share of the gate,’ he said. ‘What are you getting?’ I told him a pair of Guaranty dress shoes. Satchel looked down at my size thirteen feet and he broke into a sly grin. ‘Either way, kid, a win is gonna cost them leather.’ ”
In the first game, Paige ambled out to the mound as if someone had just woken him up from a nap. “Then he reared back with his high leg kick and blazed a pitch that seemed to come out of his foot. The hitters complained they couldn’t see the fire, only the ashes left on the plate. Satch had promised the crowd he’d strike out the first nine men he faced. And he did. Satch could wipe you out on charisma alone.”
Gomez didn’t do so badly either. He was so excited to pitch against the great Satchel Paige that the catcher couldn’t hold on to his fastballs. Lefty’s team won the second game, and not because his team scored a lot of runs.2 But Lefty had received a lesson in pitching that day—getting batters out was as much art as power. “Satch could beat you in so many ways. Overhand, sidearm, submarine. Then there was his ‘hesitation pitch’ that hung in midair.”
Once he understood that pitching was a craft, Lefty soaked up all he could from men who had played the game for longer than he had. Al Erle remembered that “he listened to the veterans and tailor-made their advice to suit his style. I saw it happening when I sat on the bench. He’d watch a veteran and the next thing you know, he’d be asking, ‘Can you teach me what you’re throwing out there? How do you throw that pitch?’ Everyone knew he was major league material. They all talked about it. High-kick delivery. Whiplash arm. The players were unfailingly generous to Gomez, because he was smart enough to know his limits and ask the experts for help. And he was a nice kid.”
Underneath the easygoing demeanor, however, Lefty was a fierce competitor. “He was shy away from the ballpark,” Erle added, “but on the field aggressive as all get-out.”
“If I got beat, it killed me,” Lefty said. “Anytime, anywhere, if I lost, it ripped me to shreds. I let the team down. Myself down. But I didn’t run home and wail about it. I learned early on not to use a loss as an excuse to argue with the people I loved. I kept it inside. The loss kicked my ass to go out and win the next one. I didn’t have to look outside my family to know you played tough.”
1 Many years later, when Erle was well into his eighties, he attended a San Francisco Giants dinner at which Lefty was the keynote speaker. As soon as Lefty saw Al, he called to him. “You remember me?” Erle asked incredulously. “Hell, yes,” Lefty said. “You charged me double for my first pair of steel spikes because I had such big feet.” “Yup,” Erle chuckled, “that’s me.”
2 In the end, Lefty never got paid for the win. He said later, “It crossed my mind to call up the Guaranty Shoe Company and tell them they owed me a pair of shoes for a game I pitched fifty years ago, but I knew I wouldn’t get past the switchboard.”
5.
“ABOUT AS SKINNY AS YOU CAN GET AND STILL BE LIVING”
The road from East Bay semipro to the major leagues went through the Pacific Coast League, and the best team in the PCL was the Seals. But to get to the Seals, Lefty had to break through a wall almost as formidable as Coyote: the team’s chief scout and eventual manager, Richard Lloyd Williams, known to everyone as “Nick.”
Nick Williams was one of baseball’s many great characters of whom almost no one has ever heard. He was the kind of guy who shows up in old movies played by stock-character grouches like William Frawley. He came to scout for the Seals after a stint as manager of the Moose Jaw Robin Hoods in the Western Canada League, where he finished third behind the Calgary Bronchos and the Edmonton Eskimos. A poor kid himself, a graduate of both the San Francisco sandlots and the University of California, Williams had been half of a “reversed battery” with Orval Overall, who would win fifteen games for the Cubs in the 1908 season, plus two in the World’s Series.1 Overall would pitch and Williams would catch, then the roles would reverse for the following game. Williams never made the majors, his playing career limited to seven years as a pitcher, catcher, and first baseman in the Pacific Coast League, mostly with the Seals. His last year on the field was 1910.
But Williams was a lifer. He umpired for a season when he could no longer play. He managed in the B leagues at Portland, left for a stint in the army in World War I, returned to the B leagues in Spokane, then moved to Moose Jaw in 1920. After two years in the wilds of western Canada, Williams returned to San Francisco at age forty-one to scout. He was named manager in 1926, then fired in 1931 after a pennant-winning season for “unsatisfactory personal habits,” likely involving fighting and alcohol.
As the man responsible for ensuring that the Seals would have an ongoing flow of quality ballplayers, Williams was crusty, no-nonsense, knowledgeable, and stubborn as a stuck door. He knew what it took to make it in the game, or at least was convinced he did. But Williams equated weight with stamina. Overall had stood six foot two and weighed 225 pounds; Gomez was the same height and a hundred pounds less. “Vernon was about as skinny as you can get and still be living,” said Tom Keena, one of Lefty’s buddies. There was no way Nick Williams was to be convinced that a kid that insubstantial could stand up to the rigors of the Seals’ two-hundred-game season.
But Lefty was determined to play for the team. After facing down his father, Vernon Gomez was not going to be dissuaded by Nick Williams. A battle of wills began between the crusty old pro and the kid of fourteen.
The first skirmish came at the end of the Seals’ 1923 season, when the team held its annual tryouts. Nick would choose about seventy-five players he considered prospects, generally ages sixteen to eighteen, then have them report to spring training the following year. About fifteen of those were then signed to contracts and sent off to the lower minors to develop their skills. Some went on to stardom while others languished in virtual exile until their dreams of major league ball were scorched out of them.2
The tryouts were held on Saturday mornings in Recreation Park in the Mission Delores district, where the Seals played their home games. The stadium was actually Recreation Park II, the first having been destroyed in the earthquake. Nonetheless, locals called the new facility “Old Rec,” and a wreck it was, constructed in 1907 largely of warped lumber that creaked in the San Francisco wind and seemed perpetually on the verge of collapse. The grandstand contained an eight-row, ground-level section enclosed by rusted chicken wire called the “Booze Cage,” a vestige of pre-Prohibition days when the forty-cent admission included either a slug of whiskey, two bottles of beer, or a ham and cheese sandwich. Most patrons chose the whiskey. After passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, hip flasks replaced the shot and patrons often shared the contents with players so inclined. The men who chose to sit in the Booze Cage—women were not allowed—sat on raised, pew-like benches and mixed their baseball with profanity, fistfights, and vomit. Only fifteen feet separated the boozers from the foul lines, thus providing an intimacy between spectator and player that encouraged not only shared whiskey but insults, needling, and left hooks.
In addition to the Booze Cage, Old Rec sported its very own “Gamblers’ Section” in the upper grandstand beyond first base. Gambling was illegal, of course, but the local coppers turned a blind eye to the proceedings. Sometimes they participated in them. Those placing wagers used hand signals, not unlike floor traders on the New York Stock Exchange, and were careful to never openly exchange money.
Lefty was already attracting raves for his speed and control, so Milfred decided to see if his kid brother really had the goods. “He was too young to be a full-fledged prospect,” Milfred said, “but I wanted to know if we should give any credence to people who were saying he was big league material.”
There were no bridges in those days, so getting to Recreation Park meant a ferry ride across the bay. Getting to the ferry, in turn, involved a train ride to Oakland on the local. “Then,” Lefty said, “you walked over the railroad tracks to the Mole, the Southern Pacific Ferry pier where the ferry was docked. The ferry captain left port when he felt like it. More than likely, just as you arrived, the boat pulled away from the pier without you, and over the ever-widening gap of churning water, a passenger yelled, ‘Hey, bonehead! Why don’t you swim the bay?’ After flipping the bird to Mr. Nice Guy, you waited for the ferry’s return. After you actually boarded the boat, in twenty minutes you were in at the Ferry Building in San Francisco, walking down Market Street.”
Not surprisingly, the Gomez brothers didn’t arrive at Recreation Park until the tryouts were already under way. When Milfred and Lefty walked up the ramp to the field, they saw “more kid ballplayers than blades of grass.” Pitchers warmed up in the bullpen and were then waved to the mound one by one by a glowering Nick Williams, standing like an inquisitor on the first-base line. The kids threw until Williams told them to go, some after only a few pitches.
Milfred left his brother in the bullpen and waited in the stands. When Williams finally called Lefty to the mound, Nick craned his neck forward. Lefty owned only the first baseman’s mitt, so he had bummed a fielder’s glove off a right-hander and wore it backward, with his pinky in the thumb. Williams asked him about it, and Lefty told him, “I don’t own a left-hander’s glove, but it doesn’t take away from the fun.” Nick Williams actually laughed and told Lefty to throw a few. He was still chuckling to himself when Lefty went into his windup.
The fun stopped when Lefty threw his first pitch. “The catcher’s mitt popped and so did Nick’s eyes,” Milfred said. “When Vernon had thrown some more, Nick called me down from the stands. ‘He’s got the arm all right,’ Nick said. ‘No doubt about it. But he looks sickly. He’s gotta fatten up or forget the Seals.’ ”
But Williams was not about to let a high-powered fastball get too far away. He told Lefty he could report to the Seals training camp at Monterey for a couple of weeks in the spring if he could get permission from his school principal. And Lefty had to have a regulation glove by then. The Seals didn’t supply equipment to kids trying out.
Milfred had his answer: his brother could pitch. Of Lefty’s two immediate obstacles, the glove was to prove more formidable than the principal. Raising the money to buy it meant a trip back to Union Oil. “There was always work to be had at the refineries in the summer. Their market exploded when Americans went mad for Henry Ford’s Tin Lizzie. Every-body wanted a set of wheels. By the end of the twenties, twenty-three million cars were roaring across the land. Every one of them needed gasoline, lube oil, and roads paved with asphalt or tar.”
Lefty and a few of his buddies, all of whom needed money for something, got hired on at the refinery in Oleum for work on the yard gang. There is no grimmer form of employment in the oil business, as Lefty soon discovered. “The stills were filled with crude oil that was ‘burned’—refined—and then the lids on top of the stills were opened to the outside air to cool the oil down. When it dropped to a certain temperature, the oil was drained out of the stills into the waiting trucks and ships. During the cooling process, some of the impurities—sludge—dried hard and stuck to the walls of the stills. Before they could be filled again, the sludge had to be cleaned out.
