Free Suitors of Spring, The: The Solitary Art of Pitching, from Seaver to Sain to Dalkowski (Summer Game Books Baseball Classics) by Pat Jordan

well-hit ball to center field, he immediately walks off the mound. He takes long, determined strides that carry him into the dugout before any of the other Waterbury players arrive from their positions. Red Davis, who was smoking on the top step of the dugout, leaps onto the field just as Kison arrives and walks quickly to Woody Huyke, who is waiting for him by home plate. Davis and Huyke confer for a few seconds, and Woody can be heard saying, “I think it’s still sore, Red.” Davis’ head bobs up and down nervously and then he trots out to his third-base coaching box.
    John Humphrey (Red) Davis was born 55 years ago in Laurel, Pa. Since he began playing professional baseball, at the age of 20, he has lived in over 25 U.S. cities, not to mention the few foreign countries, such as India, where he served in the Air Force during the war years of 1942-45. Presently he lists his home as The Hotel Jefferson in Dallas, Texas.
    Red is gaunt-looking, with the slack, mottled skin and excessively sharp features of a man who has lost too much weight too quickly. His once bright red hair and blue eyes are now faded, and his thin fingers are permanently stained with the nicotine of a thousand doubleheaders. After 35 years in professional baseball, of which only 21 games were spent in the majors, Red Davis has acquired an assortment of twitches and gestures that give him the appearance not of a former athlete but of some anxiety-ridden drummer who has stopped too often in Greenville and Mayfield and Corpus Christi.
    The year 1970 marked Red’s twenty-fourth consecutive season as a minor league manager. He has managed in leagues as low as the Class D Kitty League and as high as the Triple A International League, and yet his front office has never given him complete authority over certain of the players he was managing. His year at Waterbury was no exception. And Bruce Kison was one such player.
    A few days before the Pirates were to leave for Elmira, Red decided to pitch Kison in his team’s last home game. When Harding Peterson found out he immediately told Red it would be best to give Bruce a few extra days rest. Even though his team was fighting for a pennant, Red was perfectly willing to comply.
    “Bruce is a fragile piece of property,” says Red, “and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be the one to ruin his career. If he gets hurt it’ll be my fault for not holding him back longer. If Bruce was an organization man I could take a chance on him. That’s their job, to play when hurt. An organization man knows that will impress the front office in case a coaching or managing job comes up in the future. Often that’s the only reason they have a job in the first place, because we can do things with them we’d never think of doing with a prospect. This makes it easier on them, too, in a way. An organization man doesn’t have to worry about his batting average or his ERA. He’s not getting paid for those things. For instance, if Huyke is hitting only .230, it doesn’t bother him that much because he knows he can help the team in other, less obvious ways, like keeping the guys in good spirits or helping Bruce along. Now, if a prospect was hitting .230, he’d be useless. He’d be worrying so much about his average that it would affect his fielding and base running, and eventually he’d hurt the whole team. The only thing that really matters to a prospect is his own success. But that’s understandable, too, because that’s all the front office judges him on. An organization man is evaluated by how much he helps the team. If he has any kind of personal success, that’s it. That’s why an organization man takes the pressure off a manager while a prospect puts it on him. I’d as soon have eight organization men in the lineup anyday. Most of the time they’re better players, too, which makes you wonder why they never made the major leagues. Maybe they never got the breaks or didn’t have anyone behind them. Who knows? Hell,