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The PS 9 Nine
by
Harry Buschman
The family
somehow got through a long hard winter. A winter of
both physical and mental discontent. With the first
breath of spring, last year's
newspapers dating back to October were unstuffed
from the window cracks and
the gentle
air of April filtered in. In a week or so the dark
brown smell of onions and
cabbage were neutralized and the old apartment
smelled a little sweeter.
The coming of spring affected people in different
ways. The danger of ice
was
gone and Mrs. Savino on the ground floor washed and
swept the front stoop
every morning. My father spoke with barely
concealed enthusiasm about a used
car
he saw in his brother-in-law's shop in Grave's End
Bay. "It wouldn't take
much," he told my mother, " .... to put it in
shape." He could have it back
on the
road in no time. Ernie and me, with less lofty
goals, decided to try out for
the baseball team at PS 9.
There were more girls than boys in the eighth grade
class at PS 9. All of
them had more intelligence and better physical
coordination than the boys
did,
but as everyone knows baseball is a boy's game --
however badly they play
it.
Coach Hanrahan was faced with fifteen nondescript
rookies, some too short,
some
too fat, some wearing glasses and even some who had
never seen a baseball
game. With barely enough boys to make up a team,
Ernie and me managed to
make the
cut by default.
Coach Hanrahan didn't ask for much and he didn't
get much in return. With
his
expectations at a low ebb he was grateful for the
little talent he got. I
found myself at 1st base, which for those of you
not acquainted with the
game,
requires someone with long arms and the ability to
talk the pitcher into a
false
sense of his ability when he flounders. "C'mon
baby, no hitter in there --
stick it in his ear." Without such encouragement
even the high priced
pitchers
of today will suddenly lose their self-confidence
and falter.
Ernie was stationed at third base, a position
requiring someone of short
stature and lightning fast responses to anything
hit in his direction. Ernie fulfilled the first part of the requirement but not
the second. Bobby
Dumphy, who
wore thick glasses, was stationed in right field.
It was a lonesome
position,
for as you know, only left handed hitters hit to
right field and all the
left-handers at PS 9 were in the art and music
classes. Furthermore, Bobby
had to
remove his eyeglasses before he was allowed to bat
and without them he
couldn't hit a barn door.
Coach Hanrahan pinned what little hopes he held for
a respectable season on
Eddie Fox. Eddie, though still in grammar school,
was the age of today's
average sophomore high school student. He was
nearly as tall as the coach
and
could, with ease, have wrestled him to the ground.
Eddie was a hostile
athlete as
well. He would have been better suited to a contact
sport like football,
where
physical violence is encouraged. Eddie was our
designated pitcher -- our
only
pitcher, by the way. He could throw a ball harder
than anyone in school and
with a fair degree of accuracy. Better than that,
he was willing to bean a
batter if the coach felt it was necessary.
"Punchy" Edelman got to play left field where he
would be out of the way
most
of the time, and "Goofy" Margolis was our catcher.
Squatting was a position
"Goofy" assumed naturally, even when he wasn't
playing baseball. He would
rather squat than stand. Furthermore, he was the
only one who could catch
Eddie's
fast ball without breaking his hand.
PS 9 was a city school on city streets. It had no
baseball field. Our
practice sessions were limited to the little we
could accomplish in the
concrete
school yard. Eddie would rifle his fast ball into a
peach basket nailed to
the
shingled wall of the vegetable store, I would
practice catching the erratic
throws from members of the infield and our outfield
would try and catch fly
balls
thrown at them from the fourth floor window of the
music room. Our uniforms
were passed down to us from last year's losing
team. Incomplete as they
were, we
wore them proudly, but only after our mothers had
boiled out the stains from
last year's disastrous season.
Our scheduled games were played on Saturday
afternoons in the barren dirt
fields back of the Brooklyn Museum. There were no
buses and it was up to us
to
get there and back home again as best we could. We
lost our first game,
nearly
won the second and got trounced the next three in a
row, but Coach Hanrahan
never lost his faith in us, and he continued to
have high hopes that we
would
emerge victorious in our final game with PS 42.
But we were very aware of our limitations -- they
were glaring, boundless,
and irreconcilable. Other than pitching we had
little to look forward to.
Our
performance on the field was disgraceful, anything
hit to the infield
invariably
found its way to the outfield, and anything hit out
there was as good as
gone. None of us could hit worth a damn, and if by
chance we managed to run
one
out, we were almost sure to get caught off base
shortly afterwards. Eddie's
pitching kept us in most of the games due to his
intimidation of the
opposing
batters. He kept most of them back so far from the
plate that they couldn't
reach
the ball. As things stood that year, we found it
difficult to share Coach
Hanrahan's optimism for a final victory.
But! Coach Hanrahan had an secret up his sleeve.
She was Ralph Mandeville's
sister Emma, the female equivalent of Eddie Fox. A
bona fide black tigress.
She
had single-handedly crippled opposing soccer teams
and, although I was never
privileged to witness it, some of her friends
insisted she could do 50
push-ups with one arm behind her back.
There was nothing in school regulations that
prohibited girls from playing
baseball, even on an all boys team. Baseball has
never been considered a
contact
sport, but it was just one of those things nice
girls didn't do. Coach
Hanrahan, desperate for one victory in three steady
seasons of defeat,
decided to
give Emma a go. He gave us strict instructions not
to fool around and to
watch
our "language," as he put it. It was O.K. to say
'hell' and 'damn,' and
even,
in the heat of battle, a few pejoratives relating
to the legitimacy of an
opponent's birth.
"But, I don't wanna hear nobody say YOU KNOW WHAT
in frunna Emma,
unnerstand?"
Shades of Abner Doubleday, Emma was a natural born
wonder! If anything she
was more competitive on the field than Eddie Fox
and she could hit any ball
he
threw at her in practice -- even those he aimed at
her head. In the outfield
she could run like a deer and had that rare
combination of soft hands and a
rifle arm. The ball would come straight at you on a
line -- no trajectory at
all,
and when it hit your glove it sounded, (and felt)
like a firecracker had
gone
off in your hand.
Our last game of the season found Emma in center
field. It was the coach's
strategy to have her play up close to second base
knowing she could catch up
to
anything hit over her head yet also cover the
grounders fumbled by his
butterfingered infield. In essence then, Emma
covered the entire field from
deep
center to second base. She was a chatterer too, she
kept up a constant
stream of
encouraging words to her teammates and showered a
withering flow of ridicule
on
the opposing players.
Eddie walked the first two batters and hit the
third. With the bases now
loaded, it looked bad for PS 9 almost before the
game had begun. Their
clean-up
batter, who seemed to be older than he should be
for an eighth grader (in
fact
he had a mustache) hit a line drive right at the
second baseman -- who
froze.
The ball whistled past his ear and Emma got it on
the fly in short center.
She
ran in, stepped on second base and threw home all
in one gloriously fluid
movement. "Goofy," our catcher, oblivious to what
was going on, stood mesmerized
on home plate and didn't expect it. Emma's throw
hit him like a cannon ball.
It
hit him so hard it embedded itself in his torn
chest protector. He collapsed
in a heap on home plate effectively blocking it
from the runner coming down
from third. After the umpire had figured out what
had happened, and went
through
an instant replay in his head he declared that an
unassisted triple play had
been accomplished.
Coach Hanrahan looked much like Moses must have
looked when he beheld the
parting of the waters. His team had accomplished a
triple play! Never in his
wildest dreams! Never! In fact he'd never seen one
accomplished at the
Dodger's
games in Ebbett's Field -- and now, by his bumbling
Public School baseball
team!
It had to be a miracle! We, of course, had no idea
the inning was over. We
stood at our assigned positions until Emma waved us
in and told us the
inning
was over. To her the event had been routine and not
worthy of the growing
crescendo of adulation now mounting from the
sandlot spectators.
The play completely demoralized PS 42. It also
spurred us on to heights we
had never accomplished without Emma. I got a hit
and Ernie got three. Emma
got
five hits and three walks. In the field we were
magnificent. We made plays
that
brought tears to the eyes of Coach Hanrahan. He sat
on the bench in
disbelief
crying, "You guys!" -- "You guys!" -- "You too
Emma!" In short, our final
game was our only win of the season. It was one
that the school cherished
and
commemorated with a double page spread in its 1930
yearbook. The fact that
we
had a girl on our team was completely ignored in
the euphoria that spread
over
the school. Emma was one of us, and our team
picture shows her well muscled
form standing front center with Eddie Fox and the
somewhat shorter coach
Hanrahan
between them.
It was the closest any of us would ever get to
Camelot.
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