The World's All Nations

The slow demise of the World's All Nations began with the sound of a baseball striking a human skull, a sound not unlike that of a book slamming shut. Not a big, fancy leatherbound bible sitting in a rich white man's parlor, mind you. More like a small prayer book, snapped closed under your nose by your wife after catching you dozing during the sermon again. An unholy sound, destined to haunt your nights and steal your sleep.

It happened as night approached in the waning innings of an exhibition game in the spring of 1917, our second of the day. I remember standing in the safety of the visitor's dugout, staring out at the area between the batter's box and the pitcher's mound littered with a thousand splintered slivers of wood that formed a broken halo. At that moment, my team began to die.



The batter was already down on one knee, the stub of his broken bat cradled in his dusky hands. Silence coated the Kansas City ballpark after the terrible sound of contact after his broken-bat hit. I can still feel the chill of the winter-tinged air and smell the popcorn and sweat and pine tar. I can still taste my own anger and bitterness. And if I allow myself, I can still hear that sound, ringing in my ears, loud as a gunshot.

A prayer book snapping shut. A life stopping in mid-stream.

Nobody could have foreseen this, not even our prescient centerfielder Mack. Even if Mack was -- as I suspect now -- somehow responsible for the death of the head coach. 

Worrell. You took your eye off the ball, you foolish white man. I wanted to tell you to get in the damn dugout. I could have prevented this. I was responsible as well. I should have acted, and I'd pay the price for my inaction for years.

No. Let's stop a moment. I'm getting ahead of myself.

I need to start my history of the World's All Nations properly, and to do that, I have to go back to before the line drive that went screaming past our dugout. Before the endless series of foul tips, before the bunts and squeeze plays, even before the letters (those damn letters), back before the crowd screamed for a win against my team and the air thundered with the roar of hundreds of boots and shoes pounding on the cold ground and the wooden bleachers.

I need to go back to the middle of that second game, when I had my last face-to-face talk with head coach Worrell.

"George," he called to me at the bottom of the fifth. The weak March sun was already sagging toward the horizon, but still high enough to stab my outfielders in the eyes. "Come here, please, and explain something to me."

He held our roster in his hand as I stepped closer and inhaled his soapy odor; the man was always clean, without perspiration. He was as tall as me, thin as a rail, but I felt like I had to look up when I was talking to him.

"Who put Mack after No Small Foot in the lineup?" he demanded in his soft, wet-sounding voice.

What I wanted to say was: Why, Mister Worrell, sir, since it's only you and me coaching this team, well, if it wasn't you, then it would have to be me, now wouldn't it, sir? We could blame the Huns overseas, if you like. And you may not have noticed that Mack has been hitting with twice the power of our Cherokee catcher lately, but I did notice, and I made the switch. So perhaps we can quit pussyfooting around and get back to the game, sir, since we are down by two runs already?

What I did say was: "That was me, sir."

Worrell shook his head, suddenly fatherly toward me with his smile, though the man was half my age. Patronizing, like so many of his kind before him.

"George," he said. He was gripping his trusty bible underneath the wrinkled-up roster. "Let's not make such decisions without consulting me, okay? With his speed and ability to get on base, Mack should always be batting second or third. No Small Foot bats cleanup. You know that, George. Do not tamper with my winning combinations, —"

I could hear the missing word of his final sentence hanging in the air: "boy." That last kick in the ribs after I was already down. I saw Worrell bite down on the word like a gob of spit before it slipped out between his straight white teeth.

Gazing up at him, I wanted to grab him by the front of his starched, spotless uniform and press him against the metal of the dugout fence. How does it feel, I'd shout in his pale face, to be always meek as a child at my age? To be unable to speak on your own Goddamn behalf? How does it feel now, to be helpless?

But all I did was turn away from him without a word.

The bottom of the inning began, accompanied by the five gongs of the big bell at St. Mary's Episcopal Church. My knees twinged with pain as my metal spikes bit into the cold, tobacco-stained ground, gouging out clods of dirt. Part of me so wanted to keep walking, away from my latest humiliation. Maybe if I left this two-bit stadium here at the ass-end of winter, and just started walking. Maybe I'd be able to find Maddie and the kids, and we'd be together for my last few years on this earth.

But, as always, I stopped at the far end of the dugout, knees aching and chest pounding. I couldn't think about Maddie right now. Not if I wanted to be of any use to my team. Twisting my fingers into the chicken wire of the dugout fence in front of me, I breathed deeply, slowly, until my blood cooled, and I gazed at the field and the players scattered across it.

My players. They were never Worrell's.

From behind the plate, No Small Foot the Indian flashed a sign for the next pitch to our colored pitcher. A burly Mexican man stood at first, a white woman covered second, and a lanky amber-skinned fellow from the Philippines played shortstop. A Jew covered third. In the outfield, a compact Japanese man waited in left field, a light-skinned Negro with feathers in his hair paced back and forth in right field, and the man I knew only as Mack prowled center.

The World's All Nations Team, the posters called us.

We were one of a kind, the only truly mixed team in those days filled with the growing rumblings of war from across the ocean. If our team's owner, J.L., hadn't gathered these players for our team, most likely they'd be working twelve-hour days in Chicago slaughterhouses or Pittsburgh steel mills or California orchards or back in their native lands, living in a slum or a tent or a shanty, trying not to starve to death on a daily basis. That was J.L. for you: a good man, even if he was white.

Continued...

(Your narrator George Grunion, 1917; photo doctored by me)