The Natural

He spent hours fretting whether to ask for help or wait it out. Some day the slump was bound to go, but when? Not that he was ashamed to ask for help but once you had come this far you felt you had learned the game and could afford to give out with the advice instead of being forced to ask for it. He was, as they say, established and it was like breaking up the establishment to go around panhandling an earful. Like making a new beginning and he was sick up to here of new beginnings. But as he continued to whiff he felt a little panicky. In the end he sought Out Red Blow, drew him out to center field and asked in an embarrassed voice, “Red, what is the matter with me that I am not hitting them?” He gazed over the right field wall as he asked the question.

Red squirted tobacco juice into the grass.

“Well,” he said, rubbing his freckled nose, “what’s worrying your mind?”

Roy was slow to reply. “I am worrying that I am missing so many and can’t get back in the groove.”

“I mean besides that. You haven’t knocked up a dame maybe?”

“No.”

“Any financial worries about money?”

“Not right now.”

“Are you doing something you don’t like to do?”

“Such as what?”

“Once we had a guy here whose wife made him empty the garbage pail in the barrel every night and believe it or not it began to depress him. After that he fanned the breeze a whole month until one night he told her to take the damn garbage out herself, and the next day he hit again.”

“No, nothing like that.”

Red smiled. “Thought I’d get a laugh out of you, Roy. A good belly laugh has more than once broke up a slump.”

“I would be glad to laugh but I don’t feel much like it. I hate to say it but I feel more like crying.”

Red was sympathetic. “I have seen lots of slumps in my time, Roy, and if I could tell you why they come I could make a fortune, buy a saloon and retire. All I know about them is you have to relax to beat ‘em. I know how you feel now and I realize that every game we lose hurts us, but if you can take it easy and get rid of the nervousness that is for some reason in your system, you will soon snap into your form. From there on in you will hit like a house on fire.”

“I might be dead by then,” Roy said gloomily.

Red removed his cap and with the hand that held it scratched his head.

“All I can say is that you have got to figure this out for yourself, Roy.”

Pop’s advice was more practical. Roy visited the manager in his office after the next (fruitless) game. Pop was sitting at his roll top desk, compiling player averages in a looseleaf notebook. On the desk were a pair of sneakers, a picture of Ma Fisher, and an old clipping from the Sporting News saying how sensational the Knights were going. Pop closed the average book but not before Roy had seen a large red zero for the day’s work opposite his name. The Knights had dropped back to third place, only a game higher than the Cardinals, and Pop’s athlete’s foot on his hands was acting up.

“What do I have to do to get out of this?” Roy asked moodily.

Pop looked at him over his half-moon specs.

“Nobody can tell you exactly, son, but I’d say right off stop climbing up after those bad balls.”

Roy shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it. I can tell when they’re bad but the reason I reach for them sometimes is that the pitchers don’t throw me any good ones, which hasn’t been so lately. Lately, they’re almost all good but not for me.”

“Danged if I know just what to tell you,” Pop said, scratching at his reddened fingers. He too felt a little frightened. But he recommended bunting and trying to beat them out. He said Roy had a fast pair of legs and getting on base, in which ever way, might act to restore his confidence.

But Roy, who was not much of a bunter — never had his heart in letting the ball hit the bat and roll, when he could just as well lash out and send the same pitch over the fence — could not master the art of it overnight. He looked foolish trying to bunt, and soon gave it up.

Pop then recommended hitting at fast straight ones thrown by different pitchers for thirty minutes every morning, and to do this till he had got his timing back, because it was timing that was lost in a slump. Roy practiced diligently and got so he could connect, yet he couldn’t seem to touch the same pitches during the game.

Then Pop advised him to drop all batting practice and to bat cold. That didn’t help either.

“How is your eye that got hurt?” Pop asked.

“Doc tested it, he says I see perfect.”

Pop looked grimly at Wonderboy. “Don’t you think you ought to try another stick for a change? Sometimes that will end up a slump.”

Roy wouldn’t hear of it. “Wonderboy made all of my records with me and I am staying with him. Whatever is wrong is wrong with me and not my bat.”

Pop looked miserable but didn’t argue.

Only rarely he saw Memo. She was not around much, never at the games, though she had begun to come quite often a while back. Roy had the morbid feeling she couldn’t stand him while he was in this slump. He knew that other people’s worries bothered her and that she liked to be where everybody was merry. Maybe she thought the slump proved he was not as good a player as Bump. Whatever it was, she found excuses not to see him and he got only an occasional glimpse of her here and there in the building. One morning when he ran into her in the hotel grill room, Memo reddened and said she was sorry to read he was having a tough time.

Roy just nodded but she went on to say that Bump used to ease his nerves when he wasn’t hitting by consulting a fortuneteller named Lola who lived in Jersey City.

“What for?” Roy asked.

“She used to tell him things that gave him a lift, like the time she said he was going to be left money by someone, and he felt so good it raised him clean out of his slump.”

“Did he get the dough that she said?”

“Yes. Around Christmas his father died and left him a garage and a new Pontiac. Bump cleared nine thousand cash when he sold the property.”

Roy thought it over afterwards. He had little faith that any fortuneteller could help him out of his trouble but the failure of each remedy he tried sank him deeper into the dumps and he was how clutching for any straw. Borrowing a car, he hunted up Lola in Jersey City, locating her in a two-story shack near the river. She was a fat woman of fifty, and wore black felt slippers broken at the seams, and a kitchen towel wrapped around her head.

“Step right inside the parlor,” she said, holding aside the beaded curtain leading into a dark and smelly room, “and I will be with you in a jiffy, just as soon as I get rid of this loud mouth on the back porch.”

Feeling ill at ease and foolish, Roy waited for her.

Lola finally came in with a Spanish shawl twisted around her. She lit up the crystal ball, passed her gnarled hands over it and peered nearsightedly into the glass. After watching for a minute she told Roy he would soon meet and fall in love with a darkhaired lady.

“Anything else?” he said impatiently.

Lola looked. A blank expression came over her face and she slowly shook her head. “Funny,” she said, “there ain’t a thing more.”

“Nothing about me getting out of a slump in baseball?”

“Nothing. The future has closed down on me.”

Roy stood up. “The trouble with what you said is that I am already in love with a swell-looking redhead.”