The Lenny Green Story

Everybody remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard John Kennedy was shot-standing in line at a Red Owl store with a loaf of Wonder Bread and a half gallon of skim milk, maybe, or if, my own age, they remember Sister Mary Margaret's spelling class interrupted by the principal's disembodied voice on the intercom, and the prayers that followed. Everybody remembers, but I don't. I am not, however, without memories of sudden loss. I remember instead the day I learned that Lenny Green would no longer play for the Minnesota Twins.

Who knows why he was my favorite player, why l developed an almost fanatical identification with him? Who knows? Certainly I, a seven-year-old, didn't. Probably his name had something to do with it; Lenny Green, a great baseball name, Lenny-friendly, not too ordinary or too formal, with suggestions of speed and fluid, easy movement, the beautiful simplicity of the one syllable last name, never necessary to abbreviate in box scores: Ruth, Cobb, Green. Maybe I was attracted to him because he was usually the team's lead-off batter; perhaps my love for the game, especially for the teevised road games, became focused on the first  player to step to the plate.

As I watched or listened to the games, always charted his performance on lined notebook paper using a primitive scoring system of my own devising. In alley softball games, though I never revealed it, I was Lenny Green. I imitated his calm self-assurance at bat, rubbed gravel between my hands pensively before taking my cuts, studied the signals of imaginary third-base coaches between pitches. I ruined a perfectly good t-shirt by writing “Twins” across the front and number seven on the back with a black felt tip pen. I paid a dollar for Lenny Green’s baseball card to a neighbor, who, unfortunately for me, had a precious sense of supply and demand. Lenny Green was scarce that summer; I was demanding. I paid happily. 

I heard the news on a Saturday afternoon. 

I was in the front yard, pitching a rubber ball against the house with a transistor radio on the steps blaring out the pregame show. Knowing exactly which bricks constituted the strike zone, I pitched to batter after batter, either striking them out of walking them. I had a perfect game going in the fourth inning against the Yankees and a full count on Tom Tresh when I heard.

“The Twins have dealt Lenny Green to the Baltimore Orioles.”

Though I understood the idea of trades, realized that players frequently switched teams, knew that Lenny himself was a former Indian, still, though I understood all that, 1 was stunned for a moment. It took a while to assign a meaning to the words.

I hurled one last desperate pitch at Tom Tresh’s head and ran in the house.

“They traded Lenny Green,” I yelled to no one in particular, and locked myself in my bedroom. I cried. Three hours later I was coaxed out. It took a phone call from my grandfather, a fellow baseball fan, who played seemingly endless fames of catch with me, threw thousands of ground balls at me, baffled me with his mysterious “ins” and “outs,” which he promised to teach me when I was older. It was best for Lenny, he said. He hadn't been playing every day and with the Orioles he would. They needed him. We would go to the game when Baltimore came to town and see him. We would be happy for him.

In the sports section the next day, there was a story about Lenny Green, giving the highlights of his career, such as they were, saying he was the best defensive center fielder the Twins ever had. He was a gentleman, the story said, he had been a credit to the organization. For a few days afterwards, I check the box scores to see how he was doing. He never broke the starting line-up, only pinch running occasionally. After a while, I forgot to check. 

I heard or saw little of Lenny Green until several years later when he turned up in a pack of baseball cards. He was wearing an oversized Boston uniform, the baggy shirt and pants of an earlier era. He was half-heartedly holding a black fungo bat cocked over his left shoulder. He looked old and unhappy.

Since then I've suffered other losses: my grandfather, both my mother and father, several close friends. Always people talk of the deceased as merely moving on to a new state of greater happiness. I never listen, because I know better. No one is happier in Baltimore; no one ever plays regularly again; new uniforms never fit. And so I sit here with the radio on, waiting for the phone to ring, expecting always to be informed of the next bad deal.

From Minnesota Monthly