Ralph Branca’s Second Chance

Mad Eddie walked the beaches of Rockaway shouting greetings to his customers. “We murdered them last night, Mr. Solomon. The Phillies is our cousins. . . . Beware the Pirates, Mrs. Ryan. The Pirates is sneaky fast.”

The combination—a loopy grin, a drunkard’s gait, puffs of orange hair that foamed bright from under the Dodgers cap—always put me in mind of a Ringling Brothers clown. But Mad Eddie was simply the man who stowed beach chairs and umbrellas. He had an informal franchise—from whom? The city? The parks department? Both were possible; he had pals everywhere, he was everyone’s pet. Cheerful, reliable, dim-witted or not, he kept track of feuds and favorites. Your chair always settled among friends.

In season, Eddie managed a living. You paid him monthly and tipped him on Labor Day. Some of the town’s artisans exchanged free services for choice umbrella sites. Dr. Schwartz fixed his teeth; Mr. Beradino fixed his shoes. Harold Parrott, the traveling secretary of the Brooklyn Dodgers, presented him a genuine hat and team jacket. In the years before merchandising, only players and Mad Eddie wore the royal-blue rayon warm-up, “Brooklyn” scripted like whipped cream across the chest.

I figured he was called Mad Eddie because of his understandable fury at the fates, who annually found new and agonizing ways to deny the Dodgers the world championship. In 1941, it was an error of Greek proportions, a ball that squiggled by the best fielding catcher in both leagues. In 1947 and again in 1949, the Dodgers met the hated Yankees and lost both times. The next year, they squandered the pennant in the final game of the regular season.

But it wasn’t anger that gave him his name. My mother had it right. “It’s not that, dear. Eddie’s . . . special.”

My mother spoke in the pauses rather than the words. The full stop that preceded “special” was elegant and unmistakable. I took note and watched closely. Deviation interested me. Mad Eddie’s pear-shaped head balanced on a pear-shaped body, lolling so you sometimes thought it might fall off. His age was somewhere between twenty and fifty. He paid no mind to the trickle of spit down his chin, but then neither did I. His shallow-lake eyes, a color match for the jacket, roamed the skies unrestricted by his thoughts and by each other. And his talk was, well . . . special. He didn’t track what you said; his conversations were more like throwing a ball against the stoop than playing catch. And he had a grip on the supernatural.

The reasons for the Dodgers’ failures were complicated, if you believed what you heard. Their ineptitude, the air pressure, Ebbets Field, the Republicans, the front office, the fluoride in the city water, the Democrats. Joe McCarthy, the Yankee manager; Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator.

Not Mad Eddie. He pegged it on Dark Angels.

That summer of 1951 I was thirteen, too old for camp and too young for employment. I invented a job and spent the days at an intersection hustling car washes from motorists paused at the light. “Sponge you off, half a buck.” In the long evenings, I went down to the beach and helped Eddie stack chairs. When we finished, he gave me a dollar and a warm can of Schaeffer. He kept a cache of beer and bagged pretzel sticks stowed behind a pile of spare footrests. He would fish about, pull out an opener on a sash cord, and punch triangular holes in two cans. We sat, our backs against the wood chair frames yellow as the sunset, and spoke of the world.

That is, Mad Eddie spoke. I listened. Korea, Dimaggio’s heel, Truman and the steel strike, Spahn’s curve, MacArthur (whom he liked), and Vice President Alben Barclay (whom he didn’t).

“Ever see him throw? I seen him in a newsreel, tossing out the first pitch. He throws like a girl.”

I wasn’t interested in foreign policy. Domestic either. And I had a capacious but finite appetite for baseball. I was interested...