Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts Read online

  “What if the guy on third can see right away that it’s not a baseball?” he asked Swain.

  So they took one out to play catch. To Bresnahan’s delight, the potato in flight looked more like a baseball than it had on the kitchen counter.

  Now, if Gomez would only schedule Bresnahan to play the second game. Poehl was scheduled to pitch the first game, and he had already made his feelings about the stunt clear. Besides, during the second game it would be dark and they would be playing under the lights…it would be perfect.

  Bresnahan went to the ballpark that afternoon with a knot in his stomach. On the lineup card in the locker room, Gomez had penciled him in as catcher for the first game—Poehl’s game.

  That was that. Bresnahan set the carved potatoes on the shelf over his locker and began dressing for the game, half depressed and half relieved. But when the rest of his teammates saw the carved tubers on the shelf, there was real excitement in the locker room for the first time in months.

  “It’s Potato Day!” one shouted, playfully tossing one of the spuds across the room.

  “Are you really going through with it, Brez?” one asked.

  Bresnahan leaned over to Poehl, who was getting dressed before his locker.

  “If I decide to throw the potato tonight, is it all right with you?” he asked.

  “No way,” said Poehl. “I don’t want a run counting against me.”

  Bresnahan shrugged to his teammates, as if to say, What can I do? They started ragging Poehl.

  “Lighten up, Mike,” said Swain.

  “Look, this is serious business for me,” said Poehl. “If that run counts, it counts against me, not all of you.”

  Gergan then told Poehl about the conversation with his friend the major league umpire.

  “There’s nothing in the rule books about it, Mike,” he said. “The run can’t count.”

  Poehl felt himself outnumbered.

  “Do whatever you want,” he said, reluctantly.

  Poehl pitched three good innings that night before Reading outfielder Steve DeAngelis singled in a run at the top of the fourth. The Bills failed to answer it.

  So the Bills were down 1–0 at the top of the fifth. The sky had begun to darken behind the small stands at Bowman Field. The infield was mostly illuminated by the overhead lights, but the wooden outfield walls were still in sunlight, the two effects mingling to create a setting that seemed eerie, unreal. The large wooden panels of the outfield wall were painted with advertisements: “Singerland’s Lawn & Landscape Service,” “Knight Confer Funeral Home Inc.,” “WNEP-TV—Channel 16,” etc. A crowd of 3,258 was watching.

  Reading’s big catcher, Rick Lundblade, singled to left to open the inning. Then Phils pitcher Mike Shelton moved Lundblade to second with a sacrifice bunt. One out, man on second. Behind the plate, Bresnahan had butterflies in his gut. He knew the moment he had been waiting for was near.

  With a left-handed batter, Bresnahan signaled to Poehl that he wanted a low breaking ball inside, a pitch calculated to produce a grounder to the right side of the infield that would be perfect to move Lundblade to third.

  Poehl’s pitch worked like a charm. The batter grounded out to second base, and the scene was set. Two outs, Rick Lundblade towering there on third base, glowing with earnest, unsuspecting ambition for home.

  It’s now or never, Bresnahan thought. He stood up before the next batter could step into the box and waved his catcher’s mitt at home plate umpire Scott Potter.

  “The netting’s busted,” Bresnahan said.

  “Go ahead, get another one,” said Potter, waving Bresnahan to the dugout.

  Down at third, Swain put his head down, kicked one of his spikes at the infield dirt, and turned away to keep from laughing as he saw Bresnahan waddle off purposefully toward the dugout. Poehl had profound mixed feelings. He gazed over at Lundblade at third base and just shook his head. He did a quick mental calculation to see how the run would affect his ERA.

  In the dugout, Bresnahan dropped his mitt and reached into his bag for another. All the other players on the bench watched with a mixture of disbelief and hilarity. Only Gomez was oblivious to the catcher’s intentions.

  As Bresnahan trotted back to home plate with the potato cradled in his new mitt, he worried how he was going to catch Poehl’s pitch without anyone spotting the potato. He would have to take it out of the mitt somehow…

  Crouched down behind the right-handed batter, Bresnahan signaled Poehl to throw a slider low and away. Then he gingerly removed the potato from the mitt, cupping it in his right hand, which he draped over his right knee.

  Out on the mound, Poehl shrugged off his reservations, reared back, and fired the pitch low and outside.

  Bresnahan watched the pitch come in, pleading silently, Don’t hit it!

  As umpire Potter shouted “Ball!” Bresnahan speared the pitch in his empty mitt, leapt to his feet, and threw the potato hard, aiming just over Swain’s head. The third baseman was startled because the damn thing was bearing right at him—Brez had made a near-perfect throw! For a fleeting second Swain noted that Lundblade was far enough off third that he wasn’t going to get back in time…but, of course, this wasn’t a ball!

  Swain lunged at the potato and deliberately missed it.

  Lundblade stood off third, momentarily frozen, as the throw sailed off toward left field.

  At home, Bresnahan threw his catcher’s mask to the ground and swore theatrically.

  Reading third base coach Joe Lefebvre was screaming, “Go! Go! Go!”

  Lundblade started home. Bresnahan had turned and was kicking the dirt, looking dejected. At third, Swain watched as the big Dominican leftfielder, Miguel Roman, sprinted in to scoop up the ball…and then stopped dead in his tracks.

  Roman, who had not been in on the planning for this moment, gave Swain a look that said, What the hell is this?

  Lefebvre stared out to left, wondering why Roman was just standing there looking confused.

  And just as Lundblade was about to lumber across home plate, Bresnahan turned toward him with a grin and tagged him with the ball.

  “Hey, Rick, you’re out,” he said.

  Then Bresnahan turned, rolled the ball back out to the mound, and started trotting off the field.

  The whole stadium was silent for a moment, bewildered. Lundblade stood at home plate, looking back out toward the third base coach.

  “Brez!” shouted umpire Potter, breaking the spell. “What the hell did you do?”

  “It’s a fucking potato!” shouted Lefebvre, who had sprinted out to left field to examine the contents of Roman’s hand. He was striding back with the offending object to show the umpire. Reading manager George Culver had run out on the field to have a look.

  “You can’t bring another ball on the field!” stormed Potter.

  “It’s not a ball, ump, it’s a potato,” said Bresnahan.

  Potter was fuming.

  “You’re trying to show me up,” he said.

  “I’m not trying to show you up,” said Bresnahan. “And that run doesn’t count.”

  Gergan, who had trotted in laughing from his position at first base, towered over Potter, who was flustered and angry.

  “Hey, lighten up, ump,” he said. “It’s only a joke.”

  “This is professional baseball; you guys can’t be out here showing me up like that,” said Potter. “That run counts.”

  “You can’t do that, ump,” argued Swain, who had run in from third.

  “It’s just a joke. Just do it over.”

  “No, the run counts!”

  “Come on, ump.”

  “The run counts!”

  Orlando Gomez took it personally. While Bresnahan and the rest of the team retired the last Reading batter, the manager called Jeff Scott, head of player development for the Indians’ farm clubs. For the time being, Bresnahan stayed in the game, but Gomez was angry.

  The manager knew how much the team liked Bresnahan, which he had al
ways seen as a vague threat to his own leadership. He knew the second-string catcher was no prospect but felt there was a chance Bresnahan could end up with a coaching job. He hadn’t liked sending Bresnahan down to Class A ball, and he suspected that the catcher resented him for it. Now this! This was just too damn much. As far as Gomez was concerned, there was nothing funny about it. He saw it as Bresnahan’s way of thumbing his nose at the manager.

  When Bresnahan headed to the dugout after the inning was over, Gomez told him to take off his gear.

  “You’re out,” he said. “I’ll talk to you after the game.”

  Rob Swain was the first Bills batter up in the top of the sixth. From beneath his catcher’s mask, Lundblade grinned up at Swain.

  “Man, that was awesome!” he said.

  The episode fired up the Bills. They came back to score four runs and win the game. Mike Poehl ended up with a five-hitter. He stayed mad for a few hours, but then he cooled off. He still doesn’t laugh about it as hard as his teammates, but he has no hard feelings.

  After the first game, Gomez called Bresnahan into his tiny office under the stands.

  “What you do, Brez, is very embarrassing to the team,” he said, placing the accent on the third syllable of the word “embarrassing” in a way that tickled Bresnahan so that he could hardly keep from laughing.

  Gomez fined Bresnahan $50. His teammates took up an immediate collection.

  The next morning’s newspaper failed to see the humor in Bresnahan’s prank.

  “BILLS SPLIT BILL WITH PHILS, FINE THEIR POTATO-THROWING CATCHER” was the headline on a story that called his caper “a foolish stunt” and quoted Gomez as saying, “Bresnahan did an unthinkable thing for a professional.”

  In the story, Gomez was also quoted as saying that Bresnahan would never play for him again.

  That morning, the manager summoned Bresnahan back to his office and fired him.

  Bresnahan never expected his baseball career to end when he threw the potato. He figured he’d get tossed out of the game and probably get fined. But Gomez’s decision just floored him. When Brez talked to Jeff Scott, the Indians’ head of player development, after Gomez had given him the bad news, even Scott had to admit the prank had style.

  “Brez, what are you trying to do, get on Letterman?” Scott asked, chuckling. But Scott, who had real affection for the catcher, said he would have to back the manager on this one.

  Bresnahan drove home and broke the news to his teammates, who were flabbergasted. For all of about an hour he was depressed, thinking maybe the stunt had been a bad idea after all.

  But that feeling passed when he called his dad later that day to tell him what had happened, and his father laughed and laughed. Brez ended up coughing and crying with laughter at the other end of the phone.

  Bresnahan went back to the ballpark on Wednesday to clean out his locker. He stopped at Weiss market on his way and bought a bag of potatoes. In the locker room, he placed one potato on the shelf of each of his teammates’ lockers. Then he dumped the rest on Gomez’s desk.

  As an afterthought, he went back and wrote the manager a note:

  “Orlando—You really do not expect me to pay the $50 fine levied on me. However, I will oblige you by paying you these fifty potatoes. This spud’s for you.—Brez.”

  EPILOGUE: Dave Bresnahan now works as a real estate agent and a broker in Phoenix. Despite the sour initial reaction to his practical joke, the legend of the potato-throwing minor league catcher has been warmly embraced by baseball fans all over the country.

  Within two days, the Williamsport Bills received inquiries about the incident from more than thirty newspapers and radio and TV stations. The Chicago Tribune last year named Bresnahan its “Sports Person of the Year” for “attempting to have a little fun with life, to inject some lost levity into sports.”

  Spurred by this groundswell, the Williamsport Bills braved the disapproval of their parent organization to hold “Dave Bresnahan night” at Bowman Field on May 30. Dave was flown back to town to autograph baseballs and potatoes and to have his number retired. It’s out there now, No. 59, on the wooden fence in straightaway center.

  “Baseball purists ask, Why? He made a travesty of the game,” said Bills general manager Rick Mundean. “But we think Dave did something that is the essence of the game—he had fun with it.”

  Orlando Gomez, who was demoted this year to Class A ball in Kingston, North Carolina, still thinks Bresnahan’s stunt was “unprofessional.”

  “I can’t believe all the attention he’s gotten over this thing,” complained Gomez.

  “I love this game. What he did was to make a joke out of it.”

  Precisely.

  A BEAUTIFUL MIND

  JANUARY 2004

  In the three years I covered the Philadelphia Eagles for The Inquirer, I used to write a weekly story called “Inside the Game.” The idea was to pick a player, watch him carefully during a football game, and then interview him in depth about that game the day afterward, usually a Monday. The “Inside the Game” story would run on Tuesdays, and each week it offered an insider’s perspective that illuminated the game, the featured player, and his position. It always struck me that the players were the ones who really knew what happened during a football game, while writers were just watching from a distance. Why not let the participants tell the story? I am particularly fascinated by the mental aspects of the game. In my years of writing about pro football, I have never met a stupid player, and the most consistently bright and articulate are offensive linemen. The “Inside the Game” stories had to be reported and written in a day. The Atlantic gave me a chance to do the same kind of piece, only with more time to report and write it, and more space to tell the story. Hank Fraley couldn’t have been nicer. As it happens, when this story ran in 2004, the Eagles were just one game away from playing the Patriots for a second time in the Super Bowl—which would have made both the magazine and me look amazingly prescient. Alas, the Eagles lost the NFC championship game to the Carolina Panthers.

  If you take a walk half an hour before game time around Lincoln Financial Field, Philadelphia’s new football stadium, you will find a summary history of the city’s seventy-year-old NFL franchise in the jerseys worn by its fans. Many old-timers still wear the team’s traditional kelly green, a cheerful shade that matched the infamous synthetic turf in Veterans Stadium—the much-reviled gigantic concrete bowl, home to Philadelphia’s pro baseball and football teams for thirty-one years, that sits brooding, empty, and forsaken across Pattison Avenue, awaiting its date with implosion. Marking that old era you’ll find jerseys bearing the numbers of retired heroes such as Harold Carmichael (17), Bill Bergey (66), Ron Jaworski (7), Randall Cunningham (12), Seth Joyner (59), Jerome Brown (99), Reggie White (92), and a multitude of others. Nine years ago the team’s current owner, Jeffrey Lurie, began remaking the franchise, and one of his first changes was to chuck the cheerful green for a more à la mode shade. (We live in a period that disdains bold colors.) So now a dark metallic shade of green predominates among the masses who move into position before a game. Just about every starting player on the current Eagles roster is represented, from the obvious ones—quarterback Donovan McNabb (5) and running back Duce Staley (22)—to receivers, defensive backs, kickers, linebackers, and even linemen. The scarcest jersey numbers are those of offensive linemen, but even they are here. Pro Bowl tackles Jon Runyan (69) and Tra Thomas (72) are represented, as are guards Jermane Mayberry (71) and John Welbourn (76). But search as you might, and I have searched high and low, you will be hard-pressed to find one among these thousands sporting the number 63, worn by Hank Fraley.

  This despite the fact that Fraley has started almost every Eagles game for the past three seasons, and has handled the ball on at least three fourths of the team’s offensive plays during that period—the most successful stretch of football the Eagles have played in more than twenty years. He played a critical role in orchestrating most of those plays. He was rewa
rded for his skills last year with a $1.4 million signing bonus and a five-year, million-dollar-a-year contract extension—precisely the kind of deal sought in vain by Staley, the Eagles’ star running back.

  Fraley is the center. He is the guy who squats and offers his wide rear end to the quarterback before almost every offensive play, who snaps the ball into the star’s hands and then braces himself to be run over. He has never scored a touchdown. He has never passed, kicked, caught, or carried the football in a game—not in high school, college, or the NFL. Not once.

  He doesn’t look like a professional athlete. He weighs more than three hundred pounds. Even when he’s wearing shoulder pads, his middle is the widest part of his body. He looks soft. His midsection spills over the stretched elastic waist of his skintight white-and-silver uniform pants. It is not a pretty sight. Even in the ever-rounder, oversized, overweight world of football linemen, Fraley seems especially doughy. And the impression comes from more than just his physique. He has a mildness, a sweetness of character, that goes with the apparent softness of his body. His teammates dubbed him “Honeybuns,” or “Buns,” after a practice session in his rookie season when he was beset by a stubborn bumblebee, which prompted Tra Thomas to joke that he must be “sweet as a honeybun.” He has small, narrow eyes of pale green, a pug nose, and pouty lips. These features are all pinched at the center of a broad, flat, pink landscape of cheeks and neck. His chin is little more than a lightly cupped shadow in the great roundness that rises from the neck of his jersey. Even his wan stubble of fair beard fails to suggest so much as a hint of jawline.

  Fraley likes to come out to the field early on game day, hours before kickoff. It calms him. There is something cathedral-like about the empty stadium in the pregnant calm before game time: the lush flat rectangle of pampered, perfect grass, carefully manicured and lined, is surrounded by towering walls of silent seats. It is thrilling to stand at the center of such a monumental space, and humbling. Small flocks of pigeons soar in sudden graceful fits in the empty enclosure. High above, the big gray undersides of commercial jets slide low across the framed patch of sky on their approach to nearby Philadelphia International Airport. The new stadium has an airy feel, as though it were constructed from ropes and cloth instead of concrete and steel. It is the boldest achievement yet in Lurie’s ongoing makeover of the Eagles, and is such an aesthetic triumph that many locals worry it may be too nice—that it doesn’t feel like blue-collar Philly and could ruin the team’s surly, working-class image. Fraley has no such worries. He spends much of his time on the field crashing into that turf, and he appreciates the more yielding texture of real grass, even if it is threaded with millions of green-plastic strands to make it more durable.