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Freddie "The Flea" Patek, also called "The Flying Flea," "Eveready Freddie," "Mighty Mite," "Midge," "The Little White Hope," "Freddie Fearless," and, in certain company, "Moochie," has come out of hiding. He has had enough sad silence. Twelve years of silence. He wants to hear cheers at the ballpark again.
"I needed to lay low," he says. "I was kind of lost for a while
there."
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Wait. A memory hits Fred Patek. Memories hit him all the time now. It is 1976. It has just rained in Kansas City; the air is soaked and steaming. Summer rain means something to everybody, of course. To Fred Patek rain signifies wet artificial turf at Royals Stadium. And fear.
See, Patek was a shortstop, the best little shortstop to play major-league baseball
in the last 75 years. When rain fell, the turf was drenched. When the turf was
wet, baseballs skimmed and whizzed over the surface like stones skipping on
a still lake. It was dangerous to play shortstop.
Those moments after a Kansas City rain, Fred Patek says, were the only times
he ever felt real fear on a baseball diamond.
"Those balls would be on me so fast, I could not even get out of the way,"
he says. "It did not matter how far back I stood. The baseball would find
me. It was like being in a shooting gallery. Man, those balls came off the turf
fast."
He smiles. "I wonder why I remembered that," he says. Patek never
knows what memory will hit, where it will come from, what it means, what emotions
it will ignite. Sometimes, suddenly, he just breaks out laughing. Sometimes,
suddenly, he chokes back tears. Memories hurtle at him at random — memories
of baseball and his father and his daughter and friends all swirling together
— and they come at him so fast, as fast as a baseball on wet turf at Royals
Stadium. And he can't get out of the way.
***
Wait. Another memory hits Fred Patek. It's 1992. The doctors have just told
him and his wife, Jerry, that their youngest daughter, Kim, will not make it
through the night.
"They said her whole body had just shut down," Fred says. "They
said there was nothing they could do."
Kim had been driving in from St. Joseph at night when her car flipped. Nobody
knows the reason. She was thrown from the car. She was paralyzed instantly.
By all reason, she should have died on the highway, but she somehow made it
to the hospital. A doctor called Fred and Jerry at 2 a.m. The doctor said they
should hurry if they wanted to see their daughter before she passed away.
She made it through that night. And a few more nights. And then came the day
of the memory when everything in her body started to fail, and doctors realized
that too much had gone wrong. There was nothing to do, the doctors told Fred
and Jerry, nothing at all except to say goodbyes.
Only Fred and Jerry were not quite ready to say goodbye. For 48 straight hours,
Fred and Jerry worked Kim's body, moved her legs, massaged her arms, worked
her and worked her, furiously, frantically, hopelessly. Even now, Fred does
not know what kept them going for so long; they simply kept nudging each other
awake and taking turns at trying to keep their daughter alive. And at the end
of 48 hours, something in Kim Patek's body stabilized. She lived for a while
longer.
"You know what I remember?" Fred says. "I remember she was suffering
so much that a while later that she looked up at me and said, ‘Dad, I
wish I had died that night.' "
***
Another memory. It's 1966. Fred Patek gets off a plane in Daytona Beach, Fla.
The Pirates trained in Fort Myers then, about three hours away, but he remembers
the plane landing on an army airstrip in Daytona, right across the street from
the speedway. He remembers Jim O'Toole, the Pirates baseball guy, waiting there,
looking up at Patek, then back at his scouting report, then back at Patek, then
back at his scouting report.
Patek, of course, was maybe 5 feet 5 and weighed maybe 130 pounds.
There was a time for small players in baseball, a rich history of little characters
like Rabbit Maranville and Sparky Adams and Topsy Hartsel and Wee Willie Keeler,
who was just a little shorter than 5-5 and was famous for saying "Hit 'em
where they ain't," and then doing just that.
The time for little players, though, had been many decades before. Patek had
never even considered that anyone would give him a chance to play in the big
leagues. He joined the Army out of high school. He played some baseball for
fun. He was fast, he could throw and, more than anything, he played fearlessly.
Bob Zuk, the Pittsburgh Pirates' famed scout, saw him play and decided the Pirates
had to sign him. They drafted Patek in the 22nd round.
When Patek walked off the plane, O'Toole looked hard at the report.
It listed Freddie Patek at 5-8, 170.
"Zuk," O'Toole grumbled. "He did it to us again."
***
"I remember the day my father died," Patek says. He remembers staring
at the clock. It was 7 p.m. when the doctors turned off the respirator machines
for his father. Joe Patek would not have wanted to live on those machines. After
that, Joe's breathing grew more and more labored, and Fred Patek kept looking
at the clock.
He wondered then when the suffering would end. There was Kim's accident. Jerry's
mother was sick. Now that stood around his dying father. He always believed
that God never gives anyone more than he or she can handle, but he could not
handle any more. He had nothing left. He looked at the clock and thought about
Joe, about little things like the way they would argue about the Yankees and
Dodgers when he was young or the pride he felt when he told his Dad he was going
to the major leagues.
At 7:22 p.m., Joe Patek coughed. And he died. Fred had already cried so much
he had no tears left.
***
Another memory. It's 1947. Fred Patek is 3. He is swinging a little bat while
standing in his grandmother's driveway. He remembers this so clearly he can
feel the gravel shift beneath his shoes. His uncle throws him a pitch —
and hits young Fred in the face. Freddie starts crying. His uncle laughs at
him.
"I can remember this like it was yesterday," Fred says. "I knew
that nobody was ever going to do anything on a baseball diamond to make me cry
again."
Oh sure, all through his baseball life he heard the taunts. The insults. "Get
that midget off the field!" Happened at least once every single day of
his 14-year major-league career. When he first made it to the big leagues —
that was June 3, 1968 — the Pirates did not even have a uniform small
enough for him. He went out on the field wearing a jersey with short sleeves
that reached to his wrists. When he would show up at the ballpark on the road
without any teammates, clubhouse guards would not let him in. Opposing pitchers,
seeing a small man dig into the batter's box, threw at him often.
He loved it. All of it. His first manager, Danny Murtaugh, had told him right
off: "Kid, you're so small, they will always look for a reason to cut you.
So, you can't give them any reason. You've got to run faster, work harder, get
to the park earlier and stay later than anybody else." And he did. He made
three All-Star Teams. He led the National League in triples once and the American
League in stolen bases. He routinely reached more ground balls than any shortstop
of his era.
He also received thousands of letters from children who were small. He was their
hero.
And he punished pitchers who threw at him. Boston's Jim Lonborg was a good friend,
they often went out to dinner after games, but it seemed like every time the
Royals and Red Sox faced each other, Lonborg would plunk him. "Freddie
just wasn't quite quick enough to get out of the way," says Lonborg, now
a dentist in New England.
Once, Lonborg hit Patek in the back. "Intimidation was part of my game,"
Lonborg says. Patek then stole second and went to third on a bad throw by the
catcher. As he stood on third, Patek dusted himself off and yelled at Lonborg,
"Hey Jim, you were too stupid to hit me in the legs."
"What always impressed me about Freddie was how he could stand up there
and not be afraid of anybody or any event," Lonborg says. "He was
a true competitor. He really was fearless."
***
"I think about baseball all the time," Patek says. "I don't know.
I guess for a while there, when I was going through everything I was going through
with Kim and my father and everybody, I did not have time to think much about
baseball."
Patek thinks about the day he hit three home runs in a game. That was in Fenway
Park in 1981. He remembers that his first hit that day was a double —
it just barely missed going over the Green Monster in left. Then he hit three
home runs in a row. The fans at that game stood and cheered.
He remembers the hottest Sundays in Kansas City, when former Royals groundskeeper
George Toma would put a thermometer on the field and measure the heat at 130
degrees. He sometimes wore these custom-made ice insets in his spikes to keep
his feet cold. Of course, by the second or third inning the ice had melted into
water, and when he would go into the hole for a ground ball, it would sometimes
burst in his shoe.
He remembers one day in Minnesota when he made three errors on consecutive plays.
After the third, he walked up to Royals starter Paul Splittorff, gave him the
ball, and said, "You have to be the dumbest pitcher alive. Don't you know
you to have pitch around me today?"
"Freddie was one of those guys who was very sensitive to everybody's emotions,"
his former teammate Al Fitzmorris says. "When others were happy, Freddie
was the happiest guy out there. When other people hurt, Freddie hurt. If I pitched
my heart out and lost, it did not matter how well Freddie played. He would hurt
for me."
Another memory hits. It is Oct. 9, 1977. The Royals trail the Yankees by a run
in the final game of the American League Championship Series. Frank White is
on first. And Fred Patek hits a hard ground ball to third — he could not
have hit it any harder. The Yankees third baseman Graig Nettles fields it cleanly.
"I remember thinking, ‘It doesn't matter if you break both of your
legs running, you have to beat out this double play.' "
He did not beat it out. The Yankees won. And Patek remembers staying out on
the field for a while and watching the Kansas City fans walk to the exits. He
remembers going into the dugout and just sitting there for a long time. There's
a famous photo of the moment. Fred Patek looks in agony.
"I was thinking that we should have won," he says. "I remember
feeling bad for all those people in Kansas City who cared about us. I remember
thinking that we might never get another chance."