Mordecai Brown by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Mordecai Brown

Page 132

Inside the clubhouse, the Reds were a strange collection; young hopefuls, castoffs, and the ghosts of the old Cubs dynasty. Joe Tinker still moved with a kind of wiry grace, though his hair had thinned. Jimmy Sheckard joked loudly but tired quickly. Johnny Kling, once the proud receiver of Brown’s best curves, now played in fits and starts, his hands stiff from years of catching.

They were all older than they meant to be.

One afternoon in May, Brown sat beside Tinker on the bench as the Reds fell behind early; again. The crowd was thin, restless, and already turning its attention to the pennant race far above them, where the Giants and Phillies traded blows and the Cubs, improbably revived, still clung to relevance.

Tinker nudged him. “You ever think we’d end up here, Brownie?”

Brown rolled the baseball in his crooked fingers. “Didn’t think much past the next pitch back then.”

“Yeah,” Tinker said softly. “When all the world was young.”

The words hung between them, and Brown felt something twist; not in his hand, but deeper.

He remembered 1908; the roar of the West Side crowd, the way Chance slapped his back after a shutout, the feeling that the