Free The Southpaw by Mark Harris Page A

Washington, Pittsburgh and St. Louis, big towns and big parks, and there would be 30,000 people and my name on 30,000 scorecards and the music and the singing and the cheering, and I would touch my hat when they cheered, and I would wind and rear and fire and they would see, and they would know an immortal when they seen 1, and I dived back on the bed and pounded the pillow, and I shouted again, “Thunder, thunder, thunder and THUNDER,” and I felt better and went downstairs to breakfast. 

Chapter 6
    2 Sundays after I graduated from Perkinsville High Pop had a very bad day against the Columbus Clowns that he had beat many times in the past. The Clowns usually play 2 games a year in Perkinsville, coming in May for a Wednesday night and then going up to Boston for a couple with the Standards, and then back to Perkinsville for Sunday afternoon. They had whipped us the Wednesday night before, lumping up Slim Doran plenty.
    The day was hot, the kind of a day Pop likes, and there was a good crowd, maybe somewheres between 1,500 and 2,000, for the Clowns was always popular. They had a trick pepper game they played with a hollow bat 3 times the size of the regulation, and folks always got a good laugh out of that. They had 1 fellow that put on an exhibition of juggling, slick enough if you like juggling, though I always thought that kind of thing a little out of place in a ball park. When he got through a down come on the scene holding up his pants with 1 hand and his fingers to his nose with the other to show what he thought of the juggler. Then he grabbed a couple bats and tried to juggle them, but he could not, and the crowd laughed, and me and Pop just about busted our sides over this fool though we had saw him year after year.
    But when the umpire calls “Play Ball!” all laughter stops for Pop. Now he becomes dead serious, for when he is pitching he is a different man. Pitching he is king of the roost. At home we may be all sitting around, me and Pop and Holly and Aaron, Aaron blathering away and Pop sitting there and looking from person to person, and you can see that the talk is far above his head. He is like some joker in a foreign country where no safe and sane language is spoke. They could be ordering him to hang for all he would ever know of it. After awhile he might go up to bed. Or me and Pop will be walking along the road and come upon Aaron Webster, and Aaron will talk, and Pop will stand there and nod and shake his head and go down the line with Aaron.
    Yet I can see that he ain’t got the faintest notion what the score is, and I will say later, “Well, what is it all about? What did Aaron say?” and Pop will shake his head and say, “Beats me.” But dress Pop in his uniform and give him a glove and a ball and set him down on the hill in Patriots Park and he is somebody else again.  He is the master. There is nothing from the beginning to the end of a ball game that Pop does not know why and who and how and what and when and where.
    But that particular day he was not quite in form. In the first inning he throwed several curves that did not break. 1 of them got past Tom Swallow and rolled clear to the fence, and Jack Hand looked at me, and he said, “Sonny, I have watched your daddy many a year and never seen him do that before.” In the fourth the Clowns got to him for 2 runs, and in the fifth, after 1 was out, somebody singled, and Jack Hand said to me, “Sonny, why do you not go back and throw a few?”
    and I said “Why?” and he looked at me very stern. “Sonny,” said he, “you had best learn to take orders if you wish to get anywheres in this game called “baseball”. Now do like I say,” and I got up off the bench, and Slim Doran come along with me, Slim taking along a catcher’s mitt. We went back behind the fence and out of sight.
    I was pretty well warmed, for I had throwed practice, so I throwed very easy to Slim. We could not see the ball game, but we could hear it and we knowed