Growing Up Lefty

"He's Not Bob Feller. He's Just a Kid."

There were six kids in the McDermott family and we were always hungry. Breakfast was a couple of slices of Wonder Bread painted with canned evaporated milk and sugar — a formula Benjamin Moore may have borrowed from Mom for his first house paint. I helped fill the holes in our stomachs with pocketfuls of doughnuts borrowed from the bakery downstairs. Mrs. Gillespie wasn't blind. I think she just looked the other way.

But, hey, I'm not complaining. A sugar high is better than no high at all. And we were better off than most because my old man — back in the days when big and Irish was the job description — was a big Irish cop. And during the Great Depression of the thirties, that was the kind of steady paycheck that men selling apples and pencils on street corners envied.

It wasn't the job Maurice McDermott Sr. wanted. What he wanted was to use his powerful 220-pound 6'5" frame for blasting major league home runs like his and everybody's idol, the Babe. He was well on his way, playing first base at Hartford in the Eastern League, when a young upstart named Lou Gehrig came along and took his job away. They sent my old man down to Oneonta, and the way he got over his disappointment was by drowning it in tidal waves of beer. And then, because he couldn't feed his family on a bush-league pittance, he went home to make his police force job full time year-round.

It's a shame. Years later, Eddie Sawyer, who played with him then and later managed the Whiz Kid Phillies of 1950, gave me the full father appreciation course at a reunion in Scranton. "Let me tell you something, Mac," he said, "your dad was a great ballplayer. He could play first base. He could pitch. And he could hit the ball 90 miles. He could have been another Gehrig." Sawyer picked the wrong name out of his baseball cap. There was only one Gehrig, and he could hit the ball 100 miles. Which I guess is how come he took the first-base mitt away from my old man at Hartford.

Well, if he couldn't do it, one of his three sons had damn well better. It wasn't gonna be Jimmy, who was buried in a kid-sized casket at age seven. Penicillin, the new miracle drug that was supposed to cure his pneumonia, closed his throat in an allergic reaction and killed him instead. And when Billy was born with twisted legs, my father had to dump his dream on me — which was no problem because I'd been tuned in to exactly the same dream since I was old enough to throw a golf ball. But what happened to two of his sons ... in a way, it destroyed him.

About that golf ball. My old man wasn't about to let any grass grow under my armpit, and at the age of three my hand was too small to hold a baseball, so he used the next best round thing. Out in the backyard we went, and my pitching class began with a golf ball. I turned out to be pretty good at breaking cellar windows. One day when he went to the john I broke six of them with pinpoint three-year-old accuracy before he could get out and stop me. But that was OK. A pane of glass cost only 22 cents, putty was practically free, my Uncle Eddie supplied the labor for nothing, and, hey, it was an investment.

My hands grew and so did I. In my ninth summer, baseball with my Polish buddies began at 7:00 a.m. One day I reporter at game time in two-thirds of my father's old Hartford uniform. I'd found it hanging in the closet, took a scissors to it, and cut the sleeves and pant legs down to my size. Approximately. "Geez, it don't fit ya worth a damn!" was the unanimous decision, but I knew they were just jealous. My father wasn't jealous. He was furious, and my backside paid for it. My mother sewed it back together so the seams hardly showed. I got even years later. I pitched a two-hitter against his old team, Hartford.

We played on an empty lot, part of what the Sisters guardedly called St. Francis House but which we casually identified as (brace yourself — I'm going un-PC) the St. Francis Funny Farm.

Our families didn't see us again until, it being too dark to see the baseball, we were at risk for cerebral hemorrhages. Eddie Stelmach was one of us and a pretty darned good infielder. A few years later a New York Giants scout signed him. Unfortunately, he never got to first base.

First base was my father's old position, so, gangling as I was, with long arms that reached halfway to second, it's where I started and expected to stay. But at St. Mary's Grammar School when I was 12, coach John Shannon noticed that I tossed the ball across the diamond with curves as impressive as Rita Hayworth's, so he switched me to the mound.

OK, one year later on a Saturday morning there's this skinny 13-year-old kid sitting on the front porch of a beat-up frame house in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His old man says, "Go get your glove and ball."

"What for?"

"I got something in mind. Your Uncle Eddie's comin' down from Poughkeepsie. Show him your fastball. He's got connections."

Uncle Eddie pulls up in his green Chevy. He gives the kid a grizzly bear hug and slips on a fielder's glove.

"Eddie," the father says, "I think you better put on a catcher's mitt."

Eddie grins. "Whattya talkin' about? He's not Bob Feller. He's just a kid."

He turns to me, lifts his glove, and says, "OK, kid, loosen up." We throw catch for a bit and then he says, "Alright, let 'er rip." I do.

The ball explodes in my uncle's glove. He lets out a howl like a wolf with pancreatitis, yanks off the glove, and waves his fingers limply in the air. "Holy Jesus!" he exclaims.

"What's the matter, Eddie? Can't you take it? He's just a kid," my father laughs. "I can take it," Uncle Eddie groans, "but my thumb can't. I think the kid broke it."

I guess stories like that are what brought Bill McCarran, a Boston Red Sox scout, around. That and the fact that besides breaking thumbs I was breaking records — averaging 20 strikeouts a game in the parochial school league for St. Patrick's High.

One afternoon, pitching for St. Patty's against St. John's Academy, I struck out 27 batters. Not half bad, but what makes it better is it was a Catholic Conference regulation game: only seven innings, not nine. (Geez, where was Robert "Believe It or Not" Ripley when I needed him?)

Here's how it happened. At 4'2" my catcher was such a small crouching target that pitching to him was like throwing at a mole with a helmet on. I'd whip in a fastball, the batter would swing and miss the third strike, the ball would get by my midget teammate, and the batter...