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The Thirty-Second Summer of John Sartain

By Bill Porterfield |

For most of his life John Sartain went steady with baseball, only to marry economics. He thought he had outgrown games. He settled into solid pursuits, such as marketing work and teaching at Southern Methodist University. He established himself in a fine old home on Turtle Creek. His pretty wife, Merrily, went to Aerobics. His three children went to Greenhill. Every day, John went downtown. He gained some paunch and some opinions. What he really wanted, he decided, was to go to Washington. He could do some good there fighting inflation. He became quite serious about it. He became damned serious about it. He developed a stance. Moderate Democrat. He filed for Congress from the Fifth District. He campaigned so long and so hard he lost 22 pounds. His business took a backseat and that cost him. On top of that he ended up with a political debt of $42,000. And this was nothing compared to the loyalty and support he owed family and friends.

But, fellow Americans and fans, it was worth it.

John Sartain would not be where he is today if he had not run for Congress. He is, of course, not where he had hoped he would be when he announced for public life two summers ago. Who would have thought that John Boaz Sartain, a congressional contender at 31, would end up at 32 the second-string catcher on the Dr Pepper amateur baseball team that just won the city championship?

It was not easy. You don’t make it behind the plate or even on the bench at 10, 2 and 4 merely by running for Congress. You have to run for Congress and lose – lose your ass and show it, like third in a three-man race – so ignominiously that you want to forget you’re a grown man and go bury your face in a mask of childhood. For John it was a catcher’s mask, behind which he was able to mend again and play like a boy and hit like a hero.

Now he can even look back on that political summer with humor. It is not surprising he puts it in a baseball metaphor. John is all jargon these days.

He was the rookie. Mike McKool was the old pro, a minor leaguer as often in the dug-out as on the field, but always a player. Gutty, smart, McKool had every pitch but a fast ball. He had been up before trying to make it, and now here he was again. The other man to beat was another old pro of sorts. Earl Luna had always been in the farm systems as a coach, but now he was offering himself as a player. He didn’t have the stuff that McKool had, but he was shrewd and conservative. He rarely got behind a batter. And Sartain? Well, he was the kid, kind of cocky at the beginning of camp with his fast ball.

The only problem with his smoke was that it tended to rise – often above the head of the catchers. He would rear back and let go with something like: “The on again, off again policy of the Federal Reserve contributes to confusion and inflation. The rate of growth of the money supply was excessive in 1972. By money supply, of course, I mean deposits plus currency. But then in 1973 the Fed turned around and reduced the growth of the money supply to almost nothing.”

Oh, it was swift, but way off the mark. McKool, on the other hand, was cooling, throwing it right down the alley. “The price of pinto beans is 89 cents a pound.” That was his pitch. He could deliver it all day long and nobody could knock it. He became the hustler to beat, and Luna and Sartain faded. Now we know that later, when McKool went up against the stalwart young arm of Alan Steelman, he was shipped back to the minors.

But he had taught Sartain a thing or two. And all through the winter John dwelled on it. “The price of pinto beans is 89 cents a pound.” It pounded in his head like a migraine. Oh, the humiliation. The errors. Sartain would go to his office and read his sporting news, the Wall Street Journal, and then sit all morning, staring at the walls. His partner, Eddie DeSpain, continued to do most of the work. During the campaign John and Merrily had gotten into the habit of rushing home at 5 to rejuvenate themselves with a shower and a drink before hitting it again that night. They continued to do this, couldn’t help themselves, couldn’t stop! Only now they ended up at restaurants, stuffing themselves in their misery. Re-entry was hell. John got fat again.

Then, this past spring, John Sartain did a funny thing. He went out for baseball. He figured he could do some good catching in the Dallas Amateur Baseball League. By good he meant do himself some good. Really he was looking for a beer league, a deal where the pitcher takes a drink of brew, sets the can down, throws the ball, the batter hits it, the guys stumble around in the outfield, the runner rounds the bases and comes home to have a cold one himself. The final score is 21 to 17. And after the game the party continues at the corner pizza parlor. Just like a beer commercial. Politics was a bunch of beans. John wanted to relax and forget he had ever tried to make it in the big league.

So he gives Jim Chappell a ring. Chappell is the head of the local league. Sartain says he is 32, that he played high school and college ball, and that he is looking for a team. Chappell gives him the names and phone numbers of four managers who still have rosters to fill. Well, the first two managers aren’t interested in signing on a geriatric. The third pilot was enthusiastic. “Come on out,” he said. “Matter of fact we’re working out this afternoon in Waxahatchie.” John said he loved baseball but he didn’t love it enough to drive to Waxahatchie. Sam Carpenter of the Dr Pepper team was not as eager, but he said he needed a backup catcher and that John was welcome to have a swing at it. John smiled. Carpenter obviously didn’t remember him. But he would in time. They had played against one another in high school. Sam was a little left-handed pitcher for the Thomas Jefferson Rebels when John was catching for the Hillcrest Panthers. They had knocked him out of the box. It sounded as if Carpenter’s team was just about his speed. That night John ran around his house once to limber up.

On a Monday night, Sartain reported to the team as they were warming up for a game at Loos Field in Farmers Branch. He took along Merrily and the kids and a six-pack. He strode into the park expecting to bump bellies with a collection of characters like himself. Once schoolboy hotdogs, now fat asses and beer guts. John wore jeans and a T-shirt and tennis shoes.

He quickly added to his finery a red face.

The Dr Peppers looked like the Texas Rangers. The first thing that struck Sartain about the players – on both sides – was that they were well-uniformed and in their late teens and early twenties. The second thing that struck him was how hard they hit the ball. They knocked the dog out of it. He hoped it was because the pitching was lousy. John felt like a rube in his jeans and tennis shoes and he had second thoughts about approaching Sam Carpenter, but hell, Merrily and the kids were all arrayed expectantly in the stands, right behind home plate to watch Daddy. Carpenter looked at Sartain for a long time before he said anything.

“You got a mitt?”

“No.”

Carpenter slapped one into Sartain’s soft belly.

“Here,” he said, “get behind the plate and catch batting practice.”

It had been ten years since Sartain had hunkered down behind a batter. He had a helluva time getting the face mask to fit over his horn-rimmed glasses. He fumbled with it but never got it right. The glasses looked up one way and his eyes the other. The pitcher hadn’t even thrown the first pitch and John was already sweating up a storm. The first pitch came in. THUNK. God they threw hard. This wasn’t that under-handed soft stuff. This was overhead hardball. Sartain was in a strain. He was down, more or less like a pro, but could he get up? The first ball he threw back to the mound took a full two minutes to reach the pitcher. If Boog Powell had been on, he could have stolen three bases.

From behind him, in unmistakable, ear-splitting earnestness, Sartain heard his nine-year-old daughter call out, “Daddy, Daddy! Have you made the team?”

John pretended he didn’t hear.

The rest of the night was a blur. He remembers that he remained behind the plate until everyone had hit but him, and that then they pushed him up there and that he actually got the wood on the ball a couple of times. He didn’t send it screaming the way they did, but he got it out of the infield. He remembers taking to the bench when the real game started, that it was rained out in the third inning, and that he called Sam Carpenter “sir” when Sam told him to report back to the next practice.

The only thing that still stands out in sharp relief is Sophie’s voice, louder than the PA system, calling out, “Daddy, Daddy! Have you made the team?” She repeated it all night long.

And Merrily’s remark.

“Well what did you think honey?” he had asked.

She had laughed. “John, you were the only one out there with a big bottorn.”

He signed a contract – literally.

Incredibly, Sartain had made the team.

There were 75,000 players filling up every diamond in the city, and Sartain was the second oldest of them all. Dr Pepper played 32 games, three a week, and won 28 and lost 4. John played in 11 games, suited up fine as everyone else, usually catching the second game of a double-header. He hit .275. The rest of the team averaged .338. They won the city championship and aimed to go to the world series of amateur ball, but they lost out in August in the regional tournament.

The contrast between this and the summer before was curious. Before he was a rookie and a loser. Now he was the old veteran and a winner. His teammates looked up to him, especially after the second game he played when he hit a double and scored two runs. John had never been the player these kids were now, but he found that he had years of savy that worked for him once he got settled down and sure of himself. He was as much coach as player, and he got all excited about the potential he saw in this kid and that.

The first string catcher was Jim Marco. Jim was 20, a strong-armed squatter with the University of Piano. Most of the team played with Piano during the spring college season. Jim Murphy was on first. At 25, he was one of the best. He had played with the University of Tulsa and had gotten in a couple of years as a pro in the minors. At second was Larry Uribe, out of Piano. James King was at shortstop, again of Piano, and the third baseman was Randy Phillips, a Piano player and brother to Mike Phillips of the New York Mets. Out in left field was Tommy Parma of the University of California at Los Angeles. Paul Stewart was in centerfield out of Stanford University, and the right fielder was Brian Cowan who played at Texas Tech. The two main pitchers were Pete Stare, an ex-pro out of Montreal and San Diego, and Gilbert Bernal, out of Piano. The two pro prospects, the two guys who might really make it, were Randy Phillips and Gilbert Bernal. And then there was Tom Rior-den who would have had to hang up his cleats if the designated hitter rule had not been established. Tom had hurt his arm and would never be able to throw, but he could slug as good as any cleanup man, and that is where they played him. The others were talented and just as earnest. There was not much horseplay and no roisterous beer-drinking, not even after the game. The kids were serious. They kept in shape working summers at places like the freight docks. They wore their hair a little long and they often brought dates to the games, but they seemed to be good straight kids who didn’t need hype to turn them on. They turned Sartain on. He had to hustle to compete. He left his six-pack at home and lost ten pounds. He also won his own kids back. He had rarely seen them during the political campaign, and then when he had lost they had been disappointed. Now he was a hero. The other kids played soccer. The Sartains – Keith, 12, and Bo, 7 – got gloves and worked out with their dad in the afternoons. No one in the family missed a game, and Sophie didn’t have to ask if Daddy had made the team.

The best part of all, for John, was finding out that baseball had not changed. In a world gone dizzy this was somehow comforting. Oh, there had been a few changes – the designated hitter – and a revolution in equipment, but the game itself was what it had been when he was a boy. It seemed . . . so innocently American. How it brought back the memories and childhood friends!

That first night he had reported to the team, who should he see but old Joe Murphy, the umpire who had stood behind John a hundred times when he was a Little Leaguer. It turned out that Joe was now head of the whole city umpire association, still called a game now and then, and could count as his nephew John’s new teammate, the first baseman Jim Murphy.

The Dr Pepper left fielder, Tommy Parma, was the kid brother of Wilson Parma, John’s teammate on the 1956 Red Ball Motor Freight team of the Connie Mack division. Wilson Parma, in John’s view, was the best athlete he had ever played with. They were 13 years old when they played for Red Ball. Wilson went on to star at Wil-mer-Hutchins in baseball, football, basketball, track, tennis and golf, then capped his career as a halfback with the Air Force Academy.

The whole summer was a plunge into nostalgia. The first baseball Sar-tain ever played was when he was eight and catching for the East Dallas Rotary Pee Wee team. His best buddy on the team was Ward Williford, now a Dallas attorney. Ward’s father, Ed, was their coach. In his salad days, Ed Williford had played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. His favorite story was the day the Dodgers took on the New York Yankees and Ed went 4 for 4 and Babe Ruth 0 for 4.

The next year John played in the Civitan League for Fleer’s Double Bubble. His brother, Ed Sartain, was one of the pitchers. Ed that year wore a Mohawk haircut. The team’s other pitcher was a round little Mexican guy who was the ace of the league. He could hit like a Baby Ruth and fire the ball like a jumping bean. He lived in a shack down behind the Glen Lakes Country Club. His name was Lee Trevino.

The year before John played for Red Ball, he caught another Dr Pepper team coached by Jim Powers, Sr. Powers is now a major league scout. Sartain went on to letter two years for Hillcrest High. He was captain for the team his senior year. They won the 1960 city championship and John made All-City. Hit almost .500. He played freshman ball at the University of Texas at Austin, and then transferred to Virginia to play for a small college, Hampden-Sydney, when; he again was captain his senior year. Then he hung ’em up, put away childish things and didn’t touch a bat until his 32nd summer.

Politics maybe. He’s up again, and pinto beans are down to 49 cents a pound.

And if not that, then surely baseball. If, as Sophie wonders, he can make the team.

Michael Ryan



A Shadow of Pavese



Death arrives. He has your eyes.

He follows you all day

and through a sleepless night,

deaf to complaint, like an old regret,

like a favorite vice.



But those eyes-

two wrong words after a howl and silence-

you face them each morning

in the mirror, alone.

O dear Hope, on this day,

men finally know you’re vital

and nothing at all.



For each death has the same look.

(Death arrives. He has your eyes.)

When he snatches that vice,

do you watch the mirror

for a face to collapse?

Do you listen to closed lips?

Do you hear the greeting that’s always mute?

“A Shadow of Pavese” is a reworking from a translation, an experiment of sorts, and resembles the original poem perhaps as a shadow does the man; hence of course the title. If you want to check what I started with, you can find the poem in the Penguin anthology, Modern European Poetry.

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