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Baseball's Forgotten Hero

The editor of the Guardian, Hartford’s upscale weekly, wanted me to write a free-lance piece about Walloping Walt Winnock, the Bristol native who blazed through the bigs on a seven-year comet in the 50's. How does The Walloper feel about the new generation of superstars, who earn $5,000,000 million a year? Does he have any regrets? That kind of thing.

It was the kind of assignment I’d always wanted. When I was a kid, everybody else was rooting for Ted Williams or Mickey Mantle. Me, I was rooting for...The Walloper! Not only was The Walloper as good as The Splinter or The Mick, he was colorful, a throwback to players like Rube Waddell, who rode fire trucks on the days he wasn’t pitching shutouts. When The Walloper wasn’t hitting game-winning homers on Saturday afternoon telecasts, he was flashing his goofy grin and pouring a milk can of Brand X Greasy Kid Stuff over a rookie’s matted hair, then running off to commercial-time paradise with the three pin-ups who were feathering their fingers over his handsome, grease-free wave.

At twelve, The Walloper stirred my fascination with those one-of-a-kind guys who gave pizazz as well as professionalism to the game. It’s never gone away. I never thought The Walloper would go away, either. But after seven years with the Washington Senators and a .341 lifetime average with 245 homers, he retired quietly from baseball---too quietly, I remember thinking---because of a back ailment.

Baseball was never the same for me after The Walloper left. The freckle-faced All-American Boy in me stopped beaming over his autographed baseball as the new players looked and acted like corporate clones. Whenever I remembered The Walloper, though, some last nerve of youthful innocence tingled beneath the crust of cynicism that helped me cope in the grownups’ world.

That same nerve throbbed as I drove down the strip of auto dealerships, pizza joints, self-service gas stations, and discount shopping plazas to the parking lot of Walt’s Bar and Grill. Whoa! You’re 45 years old, I told my graying reflection in the rear-view mirror. You might think The Walloper’s still larger than life, but he’s flesh-and-blood frail---just like you. Give the guy a break. It was hard, let me tell ya. I toked a short pipe of reefer to calm myself, then walked across the gravel lot, serious as a reliever in the World Series.

"That’ll be two dollars," the bouncer just inside the door said, barely audible over the booming funkpump of Rick James’ "Superfreak." He held up two stubby fingers. With his white turtleneck and gold medallion, he looked like a stud cruising the over-40 singles scene.

"I’m here to meet Walt Winnock," I said, hoping to beat the cover.

The bouncer’s face brightened around the familiar, floppy-lipped grin. "You just did," he said.

While his handshake crunched my metacarpals, I took a grown-up’s look at my boyhood hero. He stood a few inches taller than my five-eight, maybe six feet even, barrel-chested and trim around the waist. He still had his no-grease wave. Then, his thigh-sized arm dropped across my shoulders. "We’ll talk in my office," he said. "No interruptions that way."

It wasn’t till he led me toward the back that I noticed the runway of multi-colored lights and the tawny, twentyish bimbette modeling the briefest of bikini briefs under the whirl of red, green and blue. Her breasts overflowed the hourglass that tapered from her shoulders to a wasp waist, then curved out to hips grinding on pin-up legs. Omigod! I thought, first at the sight of her, then at its implications: The Walloper, my boyhood hero, owned a strip joint!

"That’s Kiki. She’s a piece of work, ain’t she?" Walt said.

"‘Work’ wasn’t the word I had in mind." I sucked in a deep breath and reminded myself that I haunted sleazier joints in my own latenight carousing.

While Walt mixed me a gin-and-tonic, I checked out the wall behind his huge mahogany desk: a half-dozen citations for good citizenship from community groups. But where were his two MVP trophies, the photos of his classic right-handed home run swing, the mementoes of his life in baseball? I wondered as I sank into the quicksand-deep cushion of the leather sofa across from a wall-wide curtain.

"I really appreciate your giving me your time," I said, then switched on my cassette recorder.

Walt dropped himself onto the sofa. "Hey, I’m glad to do it, y’know? My buddies in the press box kinda forgot about me after I hung up the old spikes."

"Nobody ever forgets the Greats of the Game," I said, trying to swallow the lump at the back of my throat. God, I’d sound worse than a kid on the tape.

"Well, you know how it is. Once my back..." He tailed off. "The minute you’re outa the lineup, seems like you’re just old news."

"Speaking of old news," I said, "I couldn’t help noticing...uh...You don’t have anything from your playing days in here!"

"Well...things are different now," he said, his tone reflective. "Once you stop moving in one direction, you grow in another, y’know?" He shifted restlessly. "Listen. We don’t hafta be formal or nothin’, do we? I mean, you wanna watch the show from in here?"

"Sure. Can I have another drink?" Maybe it would pickle that throbbing nerve of hero worship. I wasn’t a kid anymore, I was a writer.

"Help yourself," he said, his tone as expansive as his gesture toward the liquor cabinet.

He pressed a remote control switch. The curtain opened on Kiki dancing on the other side of a one-way mirror.

"Slick," I said to Walt, swilling a sneak shot.

He turned to me with a worried look. "That kid on stage, uh, he come with you?"

"What kid?" The dancer was the closest thing to a kid that I could see on stage and she was all woman, as far as I could tell. I stepped toward the sofa ...Omigod! There was Little Freddie Freckles, the mythical twelve-year old that all the hacks used to show the Grand Old Game stood for God, Mom and Apple Pie, not to mention corn. Little Freddie was licking the chocolate shot off the ice cream cone in his left hand and tossing a baseball in the air and catching it with his right. What was he doing here? After The Walloper retired, Little Freddie stopped coming alive for me in those columns.

"Listen," Walt said. "I’m a family man, myself. But I can’t have no minors in here, even if he is your son."

"Don’t worry. He’s not my son."

"He didn’t come with you?"

"I don’t know how to explain this," I said. "He’s really a figment of my imagination."

"Then, how come I can see him too?"

"Trust me. It’s an old sportswriter’s trick."

The old sportswriter’s trick took me off the hook. Little Freddie Freckles had powers Walt and I didn’t. He pushed his arm through the glass and waved his ball. "He can’t be real and do that," Walt said. "This ball feels awfully real, though. Do I throw it, or what?"

"I really don’t know."

"What the hell, it’s shatterproof glass." He lobbed the ball back to Little Freddie, whose face glowed luminous as the runway lights above him.

Once Little Freddie got Walt’s autograph, I thought he’d return to the sanctuary of my imagination. Not quite. He looked at Kiki the same fascinated way I looked at the pin-ups I used to hide under my stack of Superman comics.

"I really useta like doin’ that for the kids, y’know?"

"Nowadays some players charge for it."

"Well...things are different now."

"That’s what I came here to talk to you about," I said, trying to turn my focus away from Kiki’s lascivious dance and my fear that Little Freddie might be enjoying it more than a twelve year old should. "The editor wants me to ask how you feel about what the players get paid nowadays."

"I think it’s great."

"But, don’t you wish you’d come along later? You could be making $6,000,000 a year. At least!"

"I gotta be straight with you, Bob. The day I quit playin’, I put it all behind me."

"But here you are, running a bar. Don’t you feel envy? Don’t you feel just a little bitter?" I poured myself another drink.

"No, I had my good times as a player. Plenty of ‘em."

He remembered running neck and neck with Ted Williams for batting crowns, with Mantle for home run crowns. He remembered planting hot foots and whoopee cushions, anything to keep the players loose. Before President Eisenhower threw out the first ball at Griffith Stadium one season, The Walloper shook his hand with a joy buzzer on national television. Both of us laughed about that one.

Eventually I was refilling my glass so I could tune out his stories. But Little Freddie looked in from the runway, wide-eyed, especially when Walt recalled his after-hours escapades. "Back then, we had curfews. But we still managed to sneak in some good times...lots of em. I never used booze or drugs. I took good care of myself. I still do....work out every day...But I got to admit, I was a Sex Addict."

"A sex addict?"

"Yeah. Even with curfew. One thing I always led the league in was scorin’."

Freddie’s eyes opened as wide as mine in wonderment.

"It cost me my first three marriages, though."

"Three marriages! The papers always said you were a family man."

"I was. I mean, I am. I was always dedicated to whatever family I had at the time. Of course, my problem got in the way, so I had to do something about it."

"That was before they had twelve-step programs, wasn’t it?"

"I dunno. I just looked in the mirror and told myself to straighten up."

"And did you?"

"Oh yeah. It’s not safe, what with alla the diseases out there. Now, it’s just me and my wife...and a coupla the dancers here."

The freckles on Little Freddie’s face glistened like glitter. I squirmed.

"Uh, getting back to the game...Did you ever consider coming back as a manager, or even a batting coach?"

"No, I got too much going on with business to go back."

Walt talked excitedly about the business career that began with hair tonic endorsements and public relations stints with soda companies, typical off-season jobs for players of the 50's. At one point, he owned a miniconglomerate of fast-food restaurants, sporting goods stores, real estate agencies and supermarkets. But he went bust in the early 80's, when the recession hit. "I’m used to it," he said. "In life, you got ups and you got downs. I learned that when I was a player."

"Well, you had your streaks and your slumps," I said, hoping to wring more baseball material out of him. "Mostly, I remember the streaks."

"Oh, I had ‘em alright," he said, a far-off look in his eyes. "But I was thinkin’ more about the way I left the game."

"It certainly came as a surprise to me, Walt. Your back trouble...."

"What back trouble? I never had no back trouble."

"Well, the papers said that’s why you retired."

"Yeah, they did say that, come to think of it. But no, I had back tax trouble. The IRS, they come in to audit me and told me I never reported the royalties I got from this rubber company. See, the IRS wanted to take my salary. The guy who owned the team, he called the Commissioner to try and stop ‘em. I thought it’d be okay. Next thing I know, I’m in a closed-door meeting, hearing how I’m bad for baseball and if I don’t retire, they’ll have to suspend me."

"That’s pretty extreme for tires."

"It wasn’t tires. It was this."

He reached into his pocket, then handed me a little packet. Printed in the middle of an oval like the labels on baseball bats was: "THE WALLOPER."

The Walloper! What a goof! Horny men wearing designer condoms to wow their women---or make themselves think they were! What a goof Walt was, too! The hero to a generation of youth making his nickname into a dickprint! Still, the thought of those horny old men...

I laughed along with Walt till my eyes watered. Then, my eyes darted apprehensively toward Little Freddie, whose eyes were bulging toward the condom. Kiki was running her hand lightly over the front of his bluejeans.

Walt swallowed his laugh. "Yeah, they said it was bad for the game’s image. But it was a great business move. By 1964 every roadside joint with condom dispensers had a machine stuffed with "The Walloper" condoms. I was makin’ as much from them as I ever got from the team. More." He leaned toward me. "Do you know those cheapskates never paid me more than fifty grand, not even after I won the Triple Crown?"

Now, there was something for the article. I had a hard time believing it. But I was having a harder time believing that my boyhood hero quit the game to collect royalties from his line of custom condoms.

"It’s all water over the dam now," he said, a glow of pride haloing his goofy grin. "The go-go bars started up, the Sexual Revolution happened. I was rakin’ the bucks in, hand over fist. The tattoo parlors started usin’ the design so much that I bought into a chain."

Since I’d last looked his way, Little Freddie had grown into a nineteen year old sailor on a shore-leave spree. While he swilled a fifth of whiskey, Kiki danced around him, waving a bottle of India ink. Then he sneered at me and flashed a cobra tattoo that covered his left arm from shoulder to elbow. His dead-eyed stare told me he’d snatch a grandmother’s purse just for kicks. Kiki ran her fingers admiringly over his hooded bicep.

"Like I say, everything got its ups and its downs," Walt continued. If he saw what I saw on the runway, he didn’t say anything about it. "During the recession, ‘The Walloper’ sales started to drop off. Then, y’know, the AIDS scare came in and nobody got tattoos. It was a rough coupla years. But I talked to the president of the company and they started sellin’ ‘em again. Now they’re goin’ Big Time."

"But what about disease?" I asked, starting to panic for Little Freddie and all the real-life kids just like him. The booze was fueling my feeling of urgency.

"No problem. I got these special wash-off models." He showed me "The Walloper" in decal form.

Freddie was standing still but breathing heavy while Kiki licked his hard cock and slipped the decal onto it. I watched her with as much desire as disapproval, I’ve got to admit. To keep my own stirring under control, I turned away. But whatever was churning in my gut made me queasy when I caught the glow on Walt’s face. I thought each of us was imagining the same thing, only he with pride and me with horror: an entire generation of Little Freddies flashing "The Walloper" in lavatories, locker rooms, back seats of cars...I looked toward the runway. There were a thousand just like him out there.

"I dunno, Walt. Don’t you think this might lead kids into risky business before they’re ready to handle it?"

"Things are different now."

"Not that different. A kid’s still a kid."

"And boys will be boys. Even with AIDS out there."

Kiki was tearing open "The Walloper" condom’s wrapper.

"It’s kinda...whaddayacallit, ironic?...Yeah, ironic...that the thing that made me leave the game is gonna make me a leader in Safe Sex."

"A leader in Safe Sex profits, you mean."

Walt blocked my remark with his hand. "Relax. Boys will be boys, and business is business. I wanted you guys in the press to come talk to me. I want you to tell people I’m givin’ somethin’ back."

I don’t know what got into me...the booze, my larger-than-life hero shrinking to sleazy mortality right before my eyes...All I know is that I found myself outside Walt’s office, climbing onto the runway one knee at a time.

"He’s just a kid," I told the bimbette. "You can’t do that. He’s not ready."

Freddie leered at me over his throbbing hard-on. His freckles had gone---vanished into sneering adulthood. I found myself losing my stare-down with a reflection of...of a younger me!

"Put it on me, not him." I staggered forward and fumbled with my fly. As much as I wanted to protect Little Freddie, I wanted her. God, I wanted what her knowing grin promised: the best time a man could ever have.

"Sorry, guy. You’re history. He’s the future." She turned to Freddie.

I tried to pull her off the little guy, but Walt’s arms locked around my chest and dragged me back.

"I don’t care what you do to that kid, but you keep your hands offa her," he growled into my ear.

Kiki slipped "The Walloper" onto Little Freddie, who grinned ecstatically as she led him offstage and into God knows what reality.

Walt eased his grip. I spun away, my body english so vicious that I fell into a row of empty chairs. "You know, you were my hero when I was a kid."

Walt shrugged. "Hey, I was just a guy tryin’ to make a living."

"You’ll make a fortune corrupting dreams."

"I don’t do dreams. Just the accessories."

I reeled toward the door. Drunk as I was, I saw with sobering clarity that Walt, Little Freddie, me...boys would always be boys, men would always be men, and fools would always be fools.

All the way back to Hartford, I wondered if Little Freddie would show up again with his baseball or with Kiki moaning in the back seat. But he was gone, along with my last trace of reverence for the heroes of my childhood.

I knew I couldn’t write a story about what actually happened. The Guardian might be progressive, but hallucinatory journalism wasn’t their thing. I’d just write about Walt Winnock, the bar owner who didn’t miss the big bucks or the big time.

I didn’t do dreams, either. Just the accessories.

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