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5. Watch Out, Babe, Dixie Is Coming
- The University of Alabama Press
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54 / Chapter 4 A bird dog saw young Frederick Ewart Walker play several games on local sandlots. He liked what he saw. That left-handed swing was quick and level. He played with intensity. His arm was good from the outfield. He could throw. He covered ground easily, not as fast as some, but adequate for a big league level. He knew a ball from a strike, rarely chasing another kid’s pitch over his head or down at his shoe tops. He was tall, good looking, trim, athletic looking. “The hardest part of baseball,” Lee MacPhail said in a conversation, “is looking at a kid of sixteen or seventeen and projecting what he might be, what he might look like at twenty-two or twenty-three. Try that with your own kids. See how many times you are wrong.” So many factors take a youngster away from maximizing his athletic potential, girls in lots of cases, drinking, drug use, lack of desire, outside interests, different career possibilities, family pressures, or dozens of other factors. The bird dog asked Fred Walker if he was interested in coming down to the stadium of the independent Birmingham Barons baseball team for a tryout. No promises. “Sure,” Walker said, knowing the ways of the game from his dad’s experiences. “Why not?” His father was pleased but not excited. He knew the ways of the game, too. Flossie was aggravated. “They’ll just break your heart,” she said. “Go back to the mines.” The scout told Dixie Walker that they wanted to give him a good look, a full tryout over two weeks with lots of instruction from their coaches, hitting drills, fielding, running, throwing, the works. When could he do it? “TCI wouldn’t give me the time off,” Dixie told Bill Lumpkin for his Birmingham Post-Herald series in 1981. “I was operating an overhead crane at the time. I decided if they wouldn’t let me off, I’d get laid off. I was moving a vat of hot steel and jerked it on purpose. The handle on the vat snapped and the metal spilled out on the floor below.” Dixie wasn’t hurt in the incident but the floor foreman thought the seventeen-year-old boy was a danger to others in the mine. He de- Walker Family Baseball Dynasty / 55 cided to send the youngster away, hoping he would mend his ways and come back as a more careful worker. Eighteen dollars a week for a kid that age wasn’t to be sneezed at. “They laid me off without pay for two weeks,” Walker remembered. “The next day I went to work out with the Barons.” Fred Walker saw his name on a chalk board when he arrived at eight o’clock at the Birmingham ball park that early spring morning in 1928. He was listed among the youngsters who would move to the deepest part of the outfield and show the grizzled old coaches, some chewing tobacco , some smoking cigarettes on the field, few seemingly interested, if he could run. If a kid can’t run he will never hit, field, or throw in a baseball tryout camp. That’s just the way it was. Now the DH has changed all that. If he can hit he might be able to play. Someone else would run for him when it mattered. So he ran. Good enough to get into the field for some fly balls. He caught all of them easily. He was asked to throw. He did that, accurately , hard enough, intelligently, to the right spot where an infielder could make a play on it. Then he hit. That stance. The bat back, the small crouch, the quick bat, the fast follow-through. The sounds of the baseball jumping off the bat. Whack, whack, whack. There is no sound like it. No music, no parade, no artificial ball park entertainment in the twenty-first century. The scouts listen for it. The experienced ones never even have to turn around to watch. Good hitters make that perfect contact. Mickey Mantle used to stop practice with the Yankees in his first spring training camp in Phoenix, Arizona, with them in 1951. Whack. The scouts knew. The other players knew. Even the fans knew. Stop eating that hot dog. Just listen. Whack. At the end of the two weeks, with his mining job probably behind him, with no education to speak of, with no skills to call on...