But Faraday was what we had. I remember DiPunno saying he wouldn’t last long, but not even Jersey Joe had an idea how short a time it was going to be.

Faraday was behind the plate when we played our last exhibition game that year. Against the Reds, it was. There was a squeeze play put on. Don Hoak at the plate. Some big hulk-I think it was Ted Kluszewski-on third. Hoak punches the ball right at Jerry Rugg, who was pitching for us that day. Big Klew breaks for the plate, all two hundred and seventy Polack pounds of him. And there’s Faraday, just about as skinny as a Flav’r Straw, standing with one foot on the old dishola. You knew it was going to end bad. Rugg throws to Faraday. Faraday turns to put the tag on. I couldn’t look.

Faraday hung onto the ball and got the out, I’ll give him that, only it was a spring training out, as important in the great scheme of things as a low fart in a high wind. And that was the end of his baseball career. One broken arm, one broken leg, a concussion-that was the score. I don’t know what became of him. Wound up washing windshields for tips at an Esso station in Tucumcari, for all I know. He wouldn’t be the only one.

But here’s the point: we lost both our catchers in the space of forty-eight hours and had to go north with nobody to put behind the plate except for Ganzie Burgess, who converted from catcher to pitcher in the early fifties. He was thirty-nine years old that season and only good for middle relief, but he was a knuckleballer, and as crafty as Satan, so no way was Joe DiPunno going to risk those old bones behind the plate. He said he’d put me back there first. I knew he was joking-I was just an old third-base coach with so many groin-pulls my balls were practically banging on my knees-but the idea still made me shiver.

What Joe did was call the front office in Newark and say, “I need a guy who can catch Hank Masters’s fastball and Danny Doo’s curve without falling on his keister.