Gerry Pirtle has a slow beer. You don’t chug it down after eleven and one-half seasons of minor league ball: you confide in a beer; you bargain with it. Might be this Miller High Life is the last: last, anyway, in a pro baseball locker room —that special, set-apart, male place. I check it out. The other Red Wings seem to be breaking from a phys. ed. class: some still have obstreperous acne; cigarettes held kid-furtive behind one thigh. And I think: my time has come. The time when we realize that The Athlete— looked up to from above, large as a father image in dreams—that The Athlete is suddenly younger than we. I have known more congenial realizations: it is a rite of passage, but going the wrong way: like when you have your first adult molar taken out.
In Levis and neck towel and imprudent Hopefulness, Pirtle is sloped back/ against the clubhouse wall: an at-ease sort. Rich mustache tends to make his smile fire out: as from a thatched duckblind. Nude torso has no definitive tone: you couldn’t judge, on sight, which arm has pitched the years away. But baseball is one sport without an off-field look: height or muscular insolence or cartilage-blurred nose. Pirtle will score $2,600 per month through a four-month season; then he may try winter ball again in Venezuela or Puerto Rico. He has had a shot: one competent ninety-day hitch with the Expos last year. But they cut him in spring training, and he had to fast-hustle this job with the Rochester team. Now, almost August, he’s 1-9. At 31 Pirtle might be called a prospect. So might Harold Stassen be.
Comments