“I ever tell you about the time I struck out Ted Williams?”
Lefty Clarkson had told me this story at least half a dozen times, but he never waited for an answer before continuing. Besides, when you’re a kid and a former baseball player talks to you, you don’t really care how many times he tells you the same thing. It was like being invited into a secret clubhouse. He had dozens of stories like it, each a tale of a minor league pitcher’s fleeting victory against one of the game’s greats.
“We were playing an exhibition game in spring training; that’s a game that doesn’t count. It was just after he got back from the war, and was still getting himself into top form, but for my money he was the best pure hitter ever lived. You design one of those robots they make in Japan and teach it to swing a baseball bat, you’d make it copy Ted Williams. Sweetest swing there ever was.”
Part of what made Lefty such a great storyteller was the way he used his hands. He was already old then, well into his seventies, with a paunch that hung precipitously over his belt and shoulders permanently rounded forward. The overall effect made him seem more like a lifelong office worker than a retired athlete, but his hands were different. They were wide, with long fingers, and the overtaxed veins still prominently featured. When one of my friends would bring him a baseball to sign, his hand practically enveloped it, and it was easy to imagine him adjusting that grip to cut his fastball or add a little breaking action.
“I was as nervous as I’d ever been on the mound, but I don’t think you can blame me. My first pitch went straight into the dirt. The next one went low and outside, just missed the corner. Third one was a few inches in from that spot, a strike, but I could see Williams was just trying to time me. He didn’t even move the bat, and he was still watching me instead of the ball.”
My father was the reason I knew Lefty. Pop had played baseball in high school and loved it, though he was never good enough to continue past then, and the combination of a broken foot and my being born meant he even stopped playing recreationally. He was thrilled when I started taking an interest in the sport in fifth grade, and had the excitement of an eager child when he told me he met a guy at work who used to be a professional pitcher.
“Now I was down 2-1, and I knew he was looking outside, so I tried to surprise him. I switched to a four-seamer and busted him inside. I missed, and it should have been ball three, but the umpire gave it to me. Williams didn’t take it well. He was a cantankerous sort in the best circumstances, and he gave me a glare that could’ve stopped my heart. I gulped so hard I bet he was watching my Adam’s apple swell up like in a cartoon.”
Pop worked at a men’s clothing shop on the south side of the city, back when people still went to their local store and always picked the salesman they knew, instead of just going online and searching by price. At least once a month, Mom dropped me off at Sunday school in the city; afterward, I’d catch the #50 bus south to Pop’s store so he could drive me home. Sometimes there would be little chores I could help with, but I usually just read a book or, when I got older, played video games. Of course, I also talked to Lefty on many of those occasions, since he visited the store almost every day.
“Next pitch, I aimed near the same spot, but it got away from me and turned into a prime pitch right down the gullet. I knew it was a mistake the second it left my hand. Williams swung hard, his body turning like a ballet dancer in motion, and pulled the ball down the right-field line. It looked like a home run off the bat, but the wind held it up and it drifted just to the right of the pole. He gave me a nod, like he was acknowledging that we were even and the count was deserved.”
Pop said he never saw Lefty buy anything, but he came around nearly every day. He lived just across the street from the shopping center where Pop worked, in the kind of black concrete building that looked like it had been around forever even when I was a kid. If he’d ever been married, he definitely wasn’t anymore, and none of his stories involved people he still knew or kept in touch with. I once asked Pop why Lefty came to a store all the time to tell stories to the salesmen; he thought about it for a moment and said, “I guess he must be lonely.”
“In all my years pitching in the minors, I never saw one of my pitches hit that hard, and I promised myself I wouldn’t throw anything anywhere near that last pitch. With all the concentration I could, I set myself and hurled a fastball to the outside corner. Williams fouled it off. I did it again. Same result.”
I wasn’t able to visit Pop at work much by the time I got to high school; Sundays started to mean group projects and movies at the mall with friends. In October of my freshman year of high school, he mentioned offhand that Lefty hadn’t been coming around for a couple of weeks. We got the word that he died not long after that. There wasn’t a funeral — an out-of-town relative took care of everything — but Pop and the other salesmen held a moment of silence for him and raised a toast to Lefty at the bar after work.
“He did it five times in a row, but the next one broke just a little at the end. I’m still not sure which seam I gripped differently, but it dipped just enough that he missed it by a fraction of an inch. He sauntered away, shaking his head and letting out a stream of cuss words, including a couple that were new to me. Not that I’m going to say them to a young man such as yourself.”
To help with homework during my senior year, Pop installed America Online from one of the discs we got in the mail. One night, I was watching a baseball documentary and it gave me the idea to try looking up Lefty’s stats. I tried dozens of sports sites, but couldn’t find any mention of Lefty Clarkson. Nothing under his birth name of Reginald, or even Reggie, and the only Clarksons I found played at the turn of the century. I still check periodically, since more of that stuff has found its way online, but still no luck. I’m honestly not sure if the minor league records were incomplete back then, or if Lefty just made it all up to impress people. I’ve never said anything about it to Pop; I’m not sure how he’d take it. He really liked knowing a ballplayer, and I don’t see any reason to potentially burst that bubble.
“It took a dozen pitches, but that’s how I struck out the great Ted Williams. You have to admit, it’s quite a story, isn’t it?”
Jeff Fleischer is a Chicago-based author, journalist and editor. His fiction has appeared in more than forty publications including the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, Shenandoah, the Saturday Evening Post and So It Goes by the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. He is also the author of non-fiction books including “Votes of Confidence: A Young Person’s Guide to American Elections” (Zest Books, 2016 and 2020), “Rockin’ the Boat: 50 Iconic Revolutionaries” (Zest Books, 2015), and “The Latest Craze: A Short History of Mass Hysterias” (Fall River Press, 2011). He is a veteran journalist published in Mother Jones, the New Republic, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, Mental_Floss, National Geographic Traveler and dozens of other local, national and international publications.