The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories Read Free

National League, they won exactly forty-nine ball games. And by mid-August of that campaign a “crowd” at Tebbet’s Field was considered to be any ticket-buying group of more than eighty-six customers.
    After the campaign of that year, the team dropped out of the league. It was an unlamented, unheralded event pointing up the fact that baseball fans have a penchant for winners and a short memory for losers. The paying customers proved more willing to travel uptown to the Polo Grounds to see the Giants, or crosstown to Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees, or downtown to any movie theater or bowling alley than to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers stumble around in the basement of the league season after season. This is also commentative on the forgetfulness of baseball enthusiasts, since there are probably only a handful who recollect that for a wondrous month and a half, the Brooklyn Dodgers were a most unusual ball club that last season. They didn’t start out as an unusual ball club. They started out as shlumpfs as any Dodger fan can articulately and colorfully tell you. But for one month and one half they were one helluva club. Principally because of a certain person on the team roster.
    It all began this way. Once upon a time a most unusual event happened on the way over to the ball park. This unusual event was a left-hander named Casey!
    It was tryout day for the Brooklyn Dodgers and Mouth McGarry, the manager of the club, stood in the dugout, one foot on the parapet, both hands shoved deep into his hip pockets, his jaw hanging several inches below his upper lip. “Try-out days” depressed Mouth McGarry more than the standing of his ball club, which was depressing enough as it stood, or lay—which would be more apt, since they were now in last place, just thirty-one games out of first. Behind him, sitting on a bench, was Bertram Beasley, the general manager of the ball club. Beasley was a little man whose face looked like an X-ray of an ulcer. His eyes were sunk deep into his little head, and his little head was sunk deep in between two narrow shoulder blades. Each time he looked up to survey McGarry, and beyond him, several gentlemen in baseball uniforms, he heaved a deep sigh and saw to it that his head sank just a few inches deeper into his shoulder blades. The sigh Bertram Beasley heaved was the only respectable heave going on within a radius of three hundred feet of home plate. The three pitchers that scout Maxwell Jenkins had sent over turned out to be pitchers in name only. One of them, as a matter of fact, had looked so familiar that McGarry swore he’d seen him pitch in the 1911 World Series. As it turned out, McGarry had been mistaken. It was not he who had pitched in the 1911 World Series but his nephew.
    Out on the field McGarry watched the current crop of tryouts and kept massaging his heart. Reading left to right they were a tall, skinny kid with three-inch-thick glasses; a seventeen-year-old fat boy who weighed about two hundred and eighty pounds and stood five-foot-two; a giant, hulking farm boy who had taken off his spike shoes; and the aforementioned ‘‘pitcher” who obviously had dyed his hair black, but it was not a fast color and the hot summer sun was sending black liquid down both sides of his face. The four men were in the process of doing calisthenics. They were all out of step except the aging pitcher who was no longer doing calisthenics. He had simply sat down and was fanning himself with his mitt.
    Beasley rose from the bench in the dugout and walked over to McGarry. Mouth turned to look at him.
    “Grand-looking boys!”
    “Who were you expecting?” Beasley said, sticking a cigar in his mouth. “The All Stars? You stick out a tryout sign for a last division club—” he pointed to the group doing the calisthenics, “and this is the material you usually round up.” He felt a surge of anger as he stared into the broken-nosed face of Mouth McGarry. “Maybe if you were any kind of a