Catch as Catch Can

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind."

— Joseph Heller, Catch-22

When I used to give speeches during the winter at one of those Elks Club sports banquets around New England, I usually started out with a joke to warm up the group and to find out whether I was talking to a baseball audience or just plain folks. My big joke went something like this:

"Everybody talks about how difficult it is to be a catcher and how tough the job is and everything else. You wear all that hardware, and it's supposed to be heavy and hot and uncomfortable. The truth of the matter is, being a catcher is easy. You give a sign, you stand up and get ready to catch the ball, and when the ball is hit everybody out in the field has to run somewhere. Any time a baseball is hit there should be movement by every player. Each player should move one step at a time in the direction of the play.

Now the great thing about being a catcher is that he doesn't have to move at all. He doesn't have to do anything. But a smart, old catcher backs up first base when there's two out and the dugout is on the first-base side. He shuffles down to back up first base on an infield ground ball so that if the runner is out, the catcher can just turn to the right and sit down. What could be easier?"

OK. So it isn't very funny, but it usually broke the ice and gave me a sense of who my audience was, and after the ripple of laughter was over I could go on from there and talk about catching. Or if nobody laughed I'd know that it would be better to tell a few stories about something else.

There are things about a catcher most fans don't even think about, but these things are important as to why a sharp catcher is critical to winning a ballgame. First off, the catcher is the field manager. He's the only player who plays with the whole game right in front of him. Take the pitcher. He has his back to everybody except the catcher. And outfielders are looking at the backs of everybody else. The catcher is the only one who plays his position outside the base lines and he's the only one who has personal contact with each opposing player. A guy is in the box and you've got him 2 and 2, and the guy moves his left foot back just a little. An outfielder can't see that. Not even the pitcher is likely to see that. But that little move tells a smart catcher whether the guy is going to pull or go to the opposite field. The catcher sees every pitch and he's in on part of every play. He's the only one who needs special equipment. He's the only player that every other player on the team is facing. And the ballgame doesn't start until the catcher squats and gives the sign.

Calling signs, of course, is one of the most significant things a catcher does; that reminds me of a story I used to tell at those New England banquets. Often they were the same stories I'd heard other players tell, but mine sometimes had different endings. This happened with a tale that Ted Williams used to tell.

Now I love Ted Williams. We played against each other before the war, and after the war we found ourselves teammates on the Red Sox. This one day after a game with Cleveland when Lou Boudreau had hit us pretty good, Ted Williams walked by my locker and said, "You're a nice guy, Birdie, but you're a dumb catcher." I just looked at him, wondering what was coming next. He just kept walking. Now on that afternoon Lou Boudreau hit line drives that had sent Ted Williams chasing all over left field, and Ted must have thought it was my fault for calling the wrong pitches. He brought it up the next day while we were standing by the batting cage and I said, "OK, Ted, if you're so damn smart, you call the pitches." Right there we worked out some signs so that when Boudreau came up to bat I would look out to left field and Ted would signal me. He would put his hands on his hips to signal a fastball, or touch his cap for a curve, or hands on knees for a change-up, something like that.

Now there are two endings to this story: the one Ted Williams tells and the one I tell, which of course is what really happened. What actually happened is that the first two times Boudreau came up, Ted called the pitches and Lou hit two doubles to left, which Ted had to chase into the corner. The third time Lou came up I looked out to Ted to get the sign but he had turned his back on me and was facing the Big Green Monster, I think out of shame. So I walked out toward the mound and yelled, "You lose your nerve, Ted?"

In his ending of the story, he claimed I crossed him up and changed every one of his calls to something else. But I honored our deal, and that's my version of the story, and I'm sticking to it.

Another baseball legend I encountered along the way was Yogi Berra. This was in New York during the 1947 World Series. It was a subway Series, the Yanks against Brooklyn. A World Series is always a baseball industry event, a respite after the season that gives players a chance to catch up with old friends, so I stayed over in New York to watch the games.

It was Yogi's rookie year. He sometimes played outfield and at other times, catcher. This was, of course, his first World Series. In the first game, Jackie Robinson got on base and took a big leadoff, teasing and taunting the pitcher. On the first pitch he took off for second. Yogi's throw was in the dirt and very late, and after that every time a Dodger got on base he made Yogi's life miserable. The press was merciless and called Yogi a clown.

Sixty years later I remember a conversation I had with Yogi following that first game. I remember it because it was the first time we talked. I only knew him as a Yankee and I was playing for somebody else. I found out that Yogi was a real down-to-earth, nice man. Always has been. Very real. Something in baseball that we sometimes lose sight of is the fact that there are great players out there who are real.

After that first game I was walking through the lobby of the Edison Hotel in the Theatre District in New York and Berra came by. As we were passing, he turned and said, "Hey, I want to talk to you."

I said, "OK."

And he said, "You saw what happened out there today. These guys are driving me crazy."

"Hell, yes, I saw it, and it wasn't your fault, Yogi. Your pitchers aren't holding the runners on." I looked at this guy and thought about it. He was what, maybe 12 years younger than I was? You've gotta like this guy. There was something so pure about the way he spoke. I said, "Yogi, before the first pitch tomorrow you'll take the ball and you'll throw it to second base, and you'll make a real good throw to second base, and you'll prove to everybody in the whole goddamn world that the pitcher is the reason that they're stealing the bases. But if you go ahead and you hurry your throw when you really don't have a chance to get the guy anyway, then, Yogi, you're going to be the bum, and there's no reason for that. Make the pitcher hold them on."

And that was the first conversation I ever had with Yogi. The fact that he stopped me and brought it up made me feel pretty good. Later on when he became manager of the Yankees, he wrote me a letter about something or other. I kept it — a nice letter that sounds just the way he talks.

I'm sure Yogi would agree that it's awfully hard for a young catcher to catch a great young pitcher if he has never caught a great old pitcher. In other words, when you're going to catch a rookie Mel Parnell just coming up to the big leagues and you've caught a Lefty Grove, you know from catching the one what the other needs to learn. You know by comparison what one can do and what the other has to master in order to be great. The result is that when you're catching the young pitcher you can steer him into that groove of greatness that otherwise might take him a year or two longer to find. And if the young catcher himself doesn't know his pitcher's potential, then you have two guys battling each other and a lot of talent and time going to waste while the rookie pitcher learns to come into his own — if he ever does!

As a catcher you must understand, and you must make your pitcher understand, that not only is each pitch an important part of each game but also that each pitch is of equal importance. Usually I could keep a pitcher's mind from wandering just by firing the ball back to him as hard as I could. And if that didn't work and we went ball one, ball two, then I would walk out there and say, "Hey, God damn it, give it a little more effort."

The only guy in baseball who gets to know everybody is the catcher. He's the guy who's there when the umpire comes out and when the batter comes out. And when the batter comes up you say, "Hi. Hello. How you doing?" No other ballplayer gets to talk to every other ballplayer. The catcher is closest to every other player, and over time can form many a friendship. It could happen to a first baseman, but a batter would have to hit a lot of singles to make a friend of a first baseman.

The Nashua Millionaires

"That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

My mother always said what a great guy my father was and I had to believe her. But I don't remember him. I was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1912. He was Charles Tebbetts, a clerk with the Swift meatpacking people, and soon after I arrived he was transferred back to his hometown of Nashua, New Hampshire, where he died. I was only three and never knew him; nor did my older sister, Kathryn, or my brother, Charlie, remember much about him. From how people talked, we came to assume that booze had something to do with his early demise. So there was Ma, alone in Nashua with three little kids and no income.

My mother was named Elizabeth, daughter of James Ryan, whose forebears arrived from County Cork during one of Grover Cleveland's presidencies. Ryan raised a large, healthy, devout brood of Catholics. When each child graduated from high school, they were expected to help provide or get out.

My Aunt Anna, a gentle, tentative, timid woman, went to work in what they called the "shoe shop," sewing the tongues on the uppers of Thom McAn shoes. She would live as a spinster into her eighties, spending all of her working days there, helping maintain the Ryan home up on Crown Hill. Another of my mother's sisters, my Aunt Eva, just barely 18, clutching a brave heart, a cardboard suitcase, and a high school diploma, boarded a train that carried her to New York City. At Brooklyn Hospital she began training as a nurse. She liked the discipline, order, and visible results of the operating room and found herself working beside a young intern. Soon they were dining together under the gaslights at Gage and Tollner on Fulton Street (it's still there, unchanged, and still a great restaurant), and on Sunday mornings they would promenade across the new Brooklyn Bridge. Once the young doctor's practice in a small town upstate was under way, they married and begot my cousin Jimmy, who is responsible for assembling this book.

There have been lots of accounts of how the nickname "Birdie" came to be, all of them wrong. As the family tells it, my Aunt Hilda peeked into the cradle when I was a little squirt and remarked about the size of the baby's tiny mouth. "Like a bird's," she said, and from that day forward little Georgie's name inside the family was Bird. The "Birdie" corruption came later, and who cares how?

But a nickname is important to any ballplayer. If he becomes a great ballplayer, the nickname somehow allows fans to put themselves on an equal footing with the great one. And the more fans, the more money in the guy's pocket. If he's just a run-of-the-mill ballplayer, the well-chosen nickname somehow confers a wacky kind of affection on a personality that might not otherwise be all that interesting. I'm thinking now of "Ducky" Medwick and my old friend "Schoolboy" Rowe. Rowe's given name was Lynwood. What ballplayer would want to be called Lynwood? See what I mean? A good nickname also gives a ballplayer a certain cachet in newspaper accounts and helps convey some sense of personality off the field, which is important if you are negotiating with tightwad owners for a pay increase.

The Tebbettses were poor. My widowed mother took in wash and sewing and other odd jobs to keep bread on the table. We kids bathed every Saturday night in a big basin set in the middle of the kitchen floor, and every Sunday morning we'd go to Mass at St. John's, then go up to Crown Hill where Grandmother Ryan lived to help shovel sidewalks, mow grass, and haul out the ashes from her huge cast-iron kitchen stove. Our reward was a dime.

Charlie and I did lots of things to earn money. I was custodian in a pool hall, which is where I learned to play pool and eventually got so good I was the player for the house and made good money. Charlie and I also sold sandwiches after school aboard the trains that ran between Nashua and Boston. On Friday nights when Charlie and I would put our earnings on the kitchen table, Ma would scoop it up and stuff it away somewhere, leaving each of us a quarter.

I ran away a lot. Years later when I was visiting the home of Dizzy Trout, the great Detroit pitcher, we swapped stories about running away from home. A funny thing happened as I was telling Dizzy about escaping from home by walking up the railroad tracks as a tyke. It dawned on me while telling him my stories that I had unconsciously timed my escapes so that I would always happen to run into Uncle Gene O'Leary coming the other way. He was a firefighter and always walked home along the tracks at the end of the day, so when I ran away my survival instincts must have driven me in the direction of Gene. Dizzy and I had a good laugh over that.

There was a playground on Pearl Street right next to the tenement where we lived, and on summer nights after the others had been called home to bed, I was always the last to leave. Nashua was a mill town then. It has since gone high-tech, but back then it was blue-collar. The kids I played with were second-generation Italians, Poles, or, like me, Irish. The Canadian province of Quebec was just a few hours away, and there was a big influx of French Canadians as I was growing up in the twenties. We learned how to get along with each other on the playgrounds long before anyone ever heard of such a thing as ethnic harmony. That stood me in good stead as I moved into the larger world of baseball.

I had no father and not even a memory of one, so I went out and found one. He was Arthur Ryan, Ma's older brother. Arthur was manager of the local semipro baseball team, the Nashua Millionaires. Arthur was a magnificent man. Big, buff, strong, and patient. I attached myself to his team, became its mascot and batboy, and along the way began to learn catching skills from the Millionaires' catcher, a guy named Clyde Sukeforth. Then when I was about 13, or maybe 14 or so, a major league barnstorming tour came to town. There was a lot of excitement in the days before the barnstormers arrived. The star pitcher was going to be the great Lefty Grove, who threw the ball at nearly 100 miles an hour. He was guaranteed $25 for every local batter he struck out. I sat down and figured something out. If he pitched only seven innings and struck out everybody, that's $525! Just for working maybe an hour!

When Lefty's team arrived at the ballpark to play the Millionaires, the major leaguers were missing a catcher. After a conference around home plate, Uncle Arthur offered them his nephew, little Georgie Tebbetts. I remember looking up at Lefty Grove's face when he looked down at who his catcher was going to be and saw murder in his eyes. I don't remember what happened after the game got under way, but legend has it that I always dropped the first two strikes and managed to hold on to the third. After the game, Uncle Arthur told me not to tell Ma that I played that day, that she'd kill him if she found out he let me stop Lefty Grove's fastball.

My family would tell that story for the rest of my life. It makes a great story, and most of it I guess is true. If it doesn't explain Arthur it certainly begins to explain me and the beginning of my long journey through the big leagues. Arthur Ryan was the only father I ever knew, and he set me on a course from which I never wavered for the rest of my life.