Like I said, I didn't go home the winter of 1939. It had always been a struggle at home, the tension, my father and mother never really together, my brother always in some kind of scrape. While I was trying to help my mother, she was giving everything to my brother, and I was mad at that. I tried to give my mother everything she wanted, but I could never give her all I really wanted to give her, because she would have given it to my brother. If it was a refrigerator or a washing machine, he'd hock it. My mother never had a vacation in her life. Never. She didn't want to spend the money. Or she'd go and buy old clothes or old furniture or something that someone was peddling, and it would pile up out back.

I remember when Eddie Collins, the Boston general manager, came to the house those few times before I had a chance to make it presentable. There were holes in the chairs white mice had made years before. One Christmas we had had a new rug in our house. We also got a little secondhand Lionel train that year, and the transformers on it got hot and the tar melted on the rug. The rug with the spot on it was still there. I mean, it was never a happy place for me, and in 1939 my mother and father separated and there was more grief, so I just stayed away. And do you know what Harold Kaese wrote the first time I did something to displease him? "Well, what do you expect from a guy who won't even go see his mother in the off season."

Before this, I was willing to believe a writer was my friend until he proved otherwise. Now my guard's up all the time always watching for critical stuff. If I saw something, I'd read it twenty times, and I'd bum without knowing how to fight it. How could I fight it? Part of it, of course, was that I'd slipped a little bit in 1940. My batting average was actually higher, up to .344, and I led the league in runs scored, but everybody was expecting me to hit home runs and I only hit twenty-three, and only seven of those were in Fenway Park. I was moody a lot. I'd go in spells. Jimmy Foxx was always in my corner, but he called me a "spoiled boy" that year, and I guess I acted like one. If I got mad and didn't run out a ground ball, Cronin would chew me out, which was right, and I'd be sorry and full of remorse, so the next couple times I'd sprint like mad to first base even when I was a sure out. That was also the year I got booed for making an error and then for striking out, and the unfairness of it hit me. I vowed that day I'd never tip my hat again.

I guess the only real fun I had that season was when Cronin let me pitch a couple innings in Detroit. The Tigers were on their way to the pennant, they had Greenberg and York and Gehringer and Higgins, a hell of a lineup, and they were beating our brains out, about 11-1 in the seventh inning. I was always saying what a loss it was to baseball, my not following up on my pitching career, and when we got so far behind and Cronin said "Who the hell we got to pitch?" I heard myself saying, "Me. I'll pitch."

"You want to pitch?"

"Sure."

"OK. Pitch."

I pitched the last two innings. My greatest claim to fame was striking out Rudy York with two men on. I gave him a real good sidearm curve, it broke about a foot, right over the plate, and he took it. I guess he didn't know what to expect, whether I would throw it over the backstop or what. To this day York claims I quick-pitched him. I didn't, but he always says, "You quick-pitched me."

The Tigers scored one run in the two innings, my two-inning big league pitching career.

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