The Natural

As his hitlessness persisted everyone was astonished. It didn’t seem possible this could happen to a miracle man like Roy. Enemy pitchers were the last to believe the news. They pitched him warily, fearing an eruption of his wrath, but before long they saw the worry in his eyes and would no longer yield those free and easy walks of yore. They straightened out their curves and whizzed them over the gut of the plate, counting on him either to top a slow roller to the infield or strike himself out. True, he was the same majestic-looking figure up there, well back in the box, legs spread wide, and with Wonderboy gleaming in the sun, raised over his shoulder (he had lowered it from his head). He swung with such power you could see a circle of dust lift off the ground as the bat passed over it, yet all it amounted to was breeze. It made many a pitcher feel like a pretty tough hombre to see Roy drag himself away from the plate and with lowered head enter the dugout.

“What’s the matter with me?” he thought with irritation. He didn’t feel himself (wondered if he could possibly be sick). He felt blunt and dull — all thumbs, muscles, and joints, Charley horse all over. He missed the sensation of the sock — the moment the stomach galloped just before the wood hit the ball, and the satisfying sting that sped through his arms and shoulders as he belted one. Though there was plenty of fielding to do — the Knights’ pitchers were getting to be loose with the hits — he missed the special exercise of ru

“What am I doing that’s wrong?” he asked himself. No one on the bench or in the clubhouse had offered any advice or information on the subject or even so much as mentioned slump. Not even Pop, also worried, but hoping it would fade as suddenly as it had appeared. Roy realized that he was overanxious and pressing — either hitting impatiently in front of the ball or swinging too late — so that Wonderboy only got little bites of it or went hungry. Thinking he was maybe overstriding and getting his feet too far apart so that he could not pivot freely, he shifted his stride but that didn’t help. He tried a new stance and attempted, by counting to himself, to alter his timing. It did no good. To save his eyesight he cut out all reading and going to the pictures. At bat his expression was so dark and foreboding it gave the opposing pitchers the shakes, but still they had his number.

He spent hours fretting whether to ask for help or wait it out. Some day the slump was bound to go, but when? Not that he was ashamed to ask for help but once you had come this far you felt you had learned the game and could afford to give out with the advice instead of being forced to ask for it. He was, as they say, established and it was like breaking up the establishment to go around panhandling an earful. Like making a new begi

Red squirted tobacco juice into the grass.

“Well,” he said, rubbing his freckled nose, “what’s worrying your mind?”

Roy was slow to reply. “I am worrying that I am missing so many and can’t get back in the groove.”

“I mean besides that. You haven’t knocked up a dame maybe?”

“No.”

“Any financial worries about money?”

“Not right now.”

“Are you doing something you don’t like to do?”

“Such as what?”

“Once we had a guy here whose wife made him empty the garbage pail in the barrel every night and believe it or not it began to depress him. After that he fa

“No, nothing like that.”

Red smiled. “Thought I’d get a laugh out of you, Roy. A good belly laugh has more than once broke up a slump.”

“I would be glad to laugh but I don’t feel much like it. I hate to say it but I feel more like crying.”

Red was sympathetic. “I have seen lots of slumps in my time, Roy, and if I could tell you why they come I could make a fortune, buy a saloon and retire. All I know about them is you have to relax to beat ‘em. I know how you feel now and I realize that every game we lose hurts us, but if you can take it easy and get rid of the nervousness that is for some reason in your system, you will soon snap into your form. From there on in you will hit like a house on fire.”

“I might be dead by then,” Roy said gloomily.

Red removed his cap and with the hand that held it scratched his head.

“All I can say is that you have got to figure this out for yourself, Roy.”

Pop’s advice was more practical. Roy visited the manager in his office after the next (fruitless) game. Pop was sitting at his roll top desk, compiling player averages in a looseleaf notebook. On the desk were a pair of sneakers, a picture of Ma Fisher, and an old clipping from the Sporting News saying how sensational the Knights were going. Pop closed the average book but not before Roy had seen a large red zero for the day’s work opposite his name. The Knights had dropped back to third place, only a game higher than the Cardinals, and Pop’s athlete’s foot on his hands was acting up.

“What do I have to do to get out of this?” Roy asked moodily.

Pop looked at him over his half-moon specs.

“Nobody can tell you exactly, son, but I’d say right off stop climbing up after those bad balls.”

Roy shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it. I can tell when they’re bad but the reason I reach for them sometimes is that the pitchers don’t throw me any good ones, which hasn’t been so lately. Lately, they’re almost all good but not for me.”

“Danged if I know just what to tell you,” Pop said, scratching at his reddened fingers. He too felt a little frightened. But he recommended bunting and trying to beat them out. He said Roy had a fast pair of legs and getting on base, in which ever way, might act to restore his confidence.

But Roy, who was not much of a bunter — never had his heart in letting the ball hit the bat and roll, when he could just as well lash out and send the same pitch over the fence — could not master the art of it overnight. He looked foolish trying to bunt, and soon gave it up.

Pop then recommended hitting at fast straight ones thrown by different pitchers for thirty minutes every morning, and to do this till he had got his timing back, because it was timing that was lost in a slump. Roy practiced diligently and got so he could co

Then Pop advised him to drop all batting practice and to bat cold. That didn’t help either.

“How is your eye that got hurt?” Pop asked.

“Doc tested it, he says I see perfect.”

Pop looked grimly at Wonderboy. “Don’t you think you ought to try another stick for a change? Sometimes that will end up a slump.”

Roy wouldn’t hear of it. “Wonderboy made all of my records with me and I am staying with him. Whatever is wrong is wrong with me and not my bat.”

Pop looked miserable but didn’t argue.

Only rarely he saw Memo. She was not around much, never at the games, though she had begun to come quite often a while back. Roy had the morbid feeling she couldn’t stand him while he was in this slump. He knew that other people’s worries bothered her and that she liked to be where everybody was merry. Maybe she thought the slump proved he was not as good a player as Bump. Whatever it was, she found excuses not to see him and he got only an occasional glimpse of her here and there in the building. One morning when he ran into her in the hotel grill room, Memo reddened and said she was sorry to read he was having a tough time.