Fear Strikes Out by Jim Piersall, Hirshberg Page A

had been in Waterbury that she stifled her original impulse, which had been to ask me to seek medical advice.
    Anxious to be in the best possible physical condition, I started working out daily at the Catholic Youth Center gymnasium in Scranton. I had no illusions about making the Red Sox ball club that year. I was only twenty-one and had just two years of professional baseball behind me. But I wanted to make a good impression. As always when I was facing a change, I was apprehensive.
    On top of that, I was worried about Mary again, for our first baby was expected in March. I had to report on March 1, but I was reluctant to leave her. But she and her father both insisted that I go, and when her doctor assured me that everything would be all right, I left for Florida. Four days after I arrived in Sarasota on March 5, 1951, I got the phone call I was waiting for. It was Mary herself. She told me that she had presented me with a daughter that morning. We called her Eileen.
    With that burden off my mind, I concentrated on baseball. Payne Field, where the Red Sox train, has a huge expanse of outfield, and I had a wonderful time roaming all over it to catch fly balls. Lost in the sheer joy of grabbing them, I didn’t realize what kind of impression I might be making on anyone who was watching me.
    One day, after he had seen me in action for a week or so, Dominic DiMaggio, the Red Sox veteran center fielder and one of my baseball idols, came over to me and said, “Kid, from what I saw of you in Boston last year and here this spring, you’re the best center fielder in the American League right now.”
    I thanked him and strutted off, glowing all over with pride. Talk about praise from Caesar! The man I most admired as a fielder, the man beside whom I had wanted to play almost as long as I could remember, had just paid me the supreme compliment. Dominic DiMaggio had, in effect, told me that I was even better than he was himself. What more could I ask?
    As the time for cutting down the squad approached, I tensed up, expecting the ax to fall any day. But I was not in the first batch of men to go, nor was I in the second. Steve O’Neill didn’t spend too much time with me but, judging by the fact that he kept me with the Red Sox, he apparently was satisfied.
    One day he said, “You’re a big-league fielder right now, Jimmy, but I want you to become a pull hitter. If you can learn to do that, you might make this club sooner than you expect.”
    I was a right-handed batter, but what is known in baseball terms as a “straightaway” hitter—in other words, I was inclined to swing late at the ball, and it would go either to center field or to the right of center. A right-handed “pull” hitter, on the other hand, could snap his bat around so fast that the ball would go to left field.
    The Red Sox were always looking for right-handed batters who could pull the ball, for Fenway Park in Boston, their home park, has a short left-field fence. A good pull hitter could hit it often for extra bases and, if he had enough power, could clear it for home runs. If I could learn to pull the ball consistently, I’d become a valuable asset to the ball club.
    O’Neill encouraged me, and when it came time to break camp at Sarasota I was still with the Red Sox. We barnstormed our way north, and I got into several exhibition games. We were scheduled to open the season in New York against the Yankees on April 17, two days after our last exhibition game, which was against the Braves in Boston. I hadn’t seen Eileen yet, so O’Neill at my request gave me permission to go to Scranton after the last Braves game on the fifteenth. I was to meet the team in New York in time for the opener. That started me off on an intensive, nerve-racking week of mad driving which, to begin with, found me commuting between New York and Scranton, a little matter of four hours each way.
    I drove to New York from Scranton the morning of the seventeenth, a Tuesday, and then