Michael Bishop: Brittle Innings

“Why’d you want me to find you? Are you ready to talk?”

“ I’m ready to retire. Talking may be the way to fatten up the goose that’ll let us do it in comfort. ” He smiled. “ Or the only way to clear my head. ”

Boles said he had a story to tell. He just didn’t trust himself to tell it like a professional writer would. So he proposed that I ghostwrite it for half any advance monies, plus a seventy-thirty split of all royalties, subsidiary sales, licensing fees, and other incidental income. He had pored over too many rookie contracts not to have acquired an acute business sense. Cannily, he had also checked out my credentials, surveying both my work for the Columbus papers and my profile of the first female National League umpire in a months-old issue of Sports Illustrated . His verdict? I was no Shakespeare, but I did okay.

“Mr Boles, that’s nice to hear, but I hadn’t planned to do an ‘as-told-to’ book. I’m an interviewer and an analyst.”

“ So interview. So analyze. ”

“Sir, I want to write a book about a major-league scout’s life on the road, a book based on firsthand observation.”

“ So the goofball who lets you observe him doesn’t cut into your profits? ”

“Mr Boles-”

“ So he doesn’t get a damned thing out of it but the pleasure of your company? ”

I held my tongue. I didn’t care much for Boles’s phrasing, but his assessment of what I hoped for-a book of my own, profits of my own-hit the target dead center.

“ No offense, young fella, but your personality lacks the dazzle to make that trade-off work for me. ”

“Well, there’s also glory.”

Boles cut his eyes.

“The book I have in mind has the working title The Good Scout . You’re the good scout. It’ll chronicle a full year of your life on the road, scouting for the Atlanta Braves. It’ll also-”

“ If you did that, traveled with me a year and wrote it all up, you’d deserve the money, all of it. But that aint the book I want to do. Uh-uh. ” He sloshed himself another finger of Early Times and twisted around to snap on a portable radio balanced on the ledge above our booth. The static-riven broadcast of a ball game gabbled away behind us as we talked. Effortlessly, though, Boles followed the game’s progress, even as he outlined his own literary plans and parried my bemused objections.

Other writers, he told me, had produced good stuff-magazine articles, newspaper pieces, even entire books-about major-league scouts, limelight-shunning sandlot prophets who had immeasurably enriched the game. The topic was tried and true, even old hat. I argued that a bang-up writer and a well-chosen scout’s signature methods and idiosyncracies could reinvigorate the topic. Boles shook his head. Yeah, sure, maybe I could do an interesting book, a colorful book, about his career (I’d have to be a droning hack to render his story a total yawn), but it wouldn’t be a ground-breaking book, a book resembling nothing else ever published about America’s national pastime.

Peeved, I said, “What’re you talking about, Mr. Boles? Exactly what do you want me to help you write?”

“ Ever hear of the CVL? Of Mr Jordan McKissic? Of the Highbridge Hellbenders? Of Jumbo Clerval? Of a seventeen-year-old shortstop named Danny Boles? ”

Danny Boles, yes. Everything else, no. In fact, everything else in his catalogue had registered as gibberish. Only later was I able to sort out the separate items and give each one a distinct identity. Only later did I learn that CVL stood for Chattahoochee Valley League and that the CVL had a mysterious sub rosa cachet among older Southern sportswriters.

“ That’s right. Once I was a minor-league shortstop, a real comer in Class C ball. The league I played in lasted six seasons, from 1938 to 1943, and its final season was the only year that young Danny Boles played professionally. That’s what I want you to help me write about, sport. ”

The high-school ball game had ended. The home team had lost. You could hear the away boys monkey-hooting in their dugout. A gaggle of fans filtered into the parking lot, approaching their vehicles and closing in on Boles’s motor home. In the greenish glow of the safety lamps that had just fuzzed on, the home team’s partisans looked ghoulish: drained and unreal.

I groaned inwardly. Boles wanted me to write about his brief and obscure professional career during World War II. It sounded like a vanity set up. Here he was, arguably the most successful major-league scout ever, but a nagging sense of the illegitimacy of that career made him view his playing days as more bookworthy than his near-mythic accomplishments as a scout. Sad.

Noting my hesitation, Boles tugged one long earlobe. “ I got called up at the end of the ’43 season, but an injury, on the very day Mister Jay Mac gave me the good word, kept me from reporting. ”

“An injury?”

“ The Phillies wanted me to take over for them at short, but a spiking… Hey, you saw me limp up here from the ball field. ”

I had, but Boles’s limp, because he could still locomote with gusto, had struck me as a minor handicap. Besides, no one expected a man his age to be as svelt and rapid as a whippet. So I’d given no thought to his likely goals before signing on in 1948 as a scout with the Philadelphia Phillies.

“ The importance of that war-year season wasn’t what happened to me ,” Boles said, “ so much as it was the fate of my roomy, Jumbo Clerval, and the demise of the whole blamed league.A story unlike any you’ve ever heard. ”

I’m sorry: I doubted it. I also doubted that the Phillies (in ’44, they were renamed, for two unhallowed seasons, the Blue Jays, long before Toronto had a team on which to hang that nickname) had called Boles up to play for them. After all, not many players make it in a single jump from a Class C ball club to a starting job with a team in the Show. Thus I dismissed Boles’s claim as unverifiable and unseemly brag.

And he picked up on my skepticism. “ Wonder why I let you find me, sport? I mean, a dozen other pretty good sportswriters ’ve been after me, but I let you track me down. Any idea why? ”

He had me stumped.

“ Cause you byline your stuff Gabe Stewart. ”

“That’s my name, Mr Boles.”

“ Danny. It’s too tight in here to stand on formalities .”

“All right. Danny.”

“ I chose you because of your name. When the Phillies called me up in ’43, a fella named Gabby Stewart was playing short for em. His batting average hung around.200. Not that great a glove man, either. In ’44, Freddy Fitzsimmons, the manager, moved him over to third. Stewart upped his average nine or ten points, but the next year he was gone, whether drafted or sent back down to the minors I couldn’t say. He never got back to the bigs. Gabby Stewart was my favorite Phillie, though. His weak stick and shaky glove persuaded the front office to give a skinny, big-eared Oklahoma kid a shot. You aint related to the guy, are you? ”

“My first name’s Gabriel. Stewart’s a pretty common surname.”

Boles laughed, silently; he had taken the mike away from his throat. The crow’s-feet around his eyes crinkled. His shoulders jogged like the scapulae of a medical skeleton on strings.

Finally, he said, “ First, my book the way I want it done, then yours the way you want it done. You get a split on mine, but yours is all yours, from first pitch to final putout. Deal? ”

“Deal,” I said, surprised. How could I do better?

Boles and I shook hands. The ball game on the radio dropped away like a whistling porpoise going under. Over some more Early Times, we agreed on a series of tape-recording sessions.