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

a “proper baseball wife” such as Estelle Davis. “A baseball wife is very important to an organization man’s career,” says Woody. “She can make life miserable for him if she’s always nagging him to quit. That’s why I waited so long. But it worked out all right. I’ve even saved a little money in the two years I’ve been married, which was more than I ever did when I was single. My wife and I are very compatible, really. She knows I’m impossible to live with when I’m not playing baseball, so she encourages me to play. That’s one of the reasons I married her. Really, it is! I knew I would stay in baseball for the rest of my life, and I had to find someone who loved the game and could stand the traveling. I explained to her before we were married that baseball was everything to me. She accepted that. For example, one night a few weeks ago she had very bad pains in her chest. I took her to the hospital right away because I know she isn’t the kind of woman to complain. I stayed with her all night and most of the next day until around 6 p.m. She didn’t mind when I left. She knew I had to be at the park for that night’s game. I have never missed a game in my life, except for injuries.”
    Ann Marie Keckler Huyke always knew she’d marry an athlete, even when she was 13 years old and combining wheat on her father’s farm in Gardner, N.D. Because Gardner was a town of only about 100 people, and there was very little to do with her free time, Ann Marie gravitated to sports, as did most other girls and boys in the area. She was tall and slim even then, so it was only natural that she turned to basketball, where she competed on equal terms with some of the boys. Ann Marie played basketball all through grammar school and high school, and in her senior year led the girls’ team with a 21-point-per-game average. (She still plays basketball, and had a chance to compete with the Puerto Rican girls’ team in the Pan-American games last winter.)
    “Our high school girls’ team had won the State Championship in 1955, ’56 and ’58,” she says, “although we didn’t win it my senior year, 1960. It’s funny, but the boys’ teams never did win a state title that I can remember. They never could produce, I guess. When I was in high school, though, I always dated athletes and was sure even then that I’d marry someone athletically inclined. After I graduated I went to Fargo Interstate Business College for two years and then got a job as a bank teller in Fargo, N.D. The only fellow I ever dated who wasn’t an athlete was an actor from Fargo. I went out with him for about six months, just to see what it was like. But no matter how hard I tried I could never really enjoy the so-called “intellectual talk” of his set. To be honest, I couldn’t understand it at all, and I often wondered if they really understood it themselves.”
    In 1966 Ann Marie and a girlfriend took their first “real” vacation away from home. They left in December for Puerto Rico, and since both were sports enthusiasts, the first thing they did on arrival at San Juan was to board a bus for an hour ride to Arecibo to watch a Winter League baseball game.
    “I met Woody at that game,” says Ann, “and although we didn’t see each other too often during the next few years, we got to know each other through our letters, and were finally married in Fargo on Friday, Sept. 13, 1968. I had been a bank teller for six years, five months and three days before I quit to become a “baseball wife.” Since then I’ve become an expert at boxing our belongings in a matter of hours for a trip to a new town. But I don’t mind the traveling much. I actually like to see different parts of the country after living in Fargo and Gardner most of my life. And I think I get along well with the new people we meet at each town. I admit, though, that I still carry a picture of the house I’d like to settle down in someday.
    “I can’t complain. I’ve