Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994

The Slump by Frank Snyder

It was a Sunday in Fort Smith, at the end of a double-header which I went 0 for 9 and struck out five times off this Dominican name of Rodriguez, that I decided to kill Jiggs Holloway.

Jiggs was the manager of the Joplin Jets of the Class A Tri-State League, the Tri-States being Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. Class A? Well, it’s one of the levels of the minor leagues. Triple-A is the highest, then Double-A, then A. Below that is the rookie leagues and the instructional leagues. Basically, Class A is where you send your young talent to get experience, so that eventually we will move up to the show, which is what we call the big leagues. This means that your basic minor league manager, when he is nurturing young talent, is supposed to be helpful. What my girlfriend Janice, who works at the Crisis Intervention thing they have back in Eufaula, calls “supportive.”

Well, Jiggs was not supportive. He was, if you will excuse the expression, about the foulest, meanest, evillest S.O.B. ever to spit tobacco juice on his cleats. He was short, dumpy, and bald, with little ferret eyes and pink lips in his doughy face and the kind of snaggly brown teeth you get when you dip snuff for about fifty years.

And he loved to ride me. When I got promoted to the Jets last year, after having done real good in the rookie league (.304 with five home runs), he started to get on me, calling me “Hayseed” and “Rube,” saying I was dumb. One game when I misjudged a fly ball, which anyone would have done the way it was hit and coming right out of the sun so you couldn’t see it, he tore into me like dogs on a possum, which I felt was an overreaction, if that’s the word.

Not a day went by that he didn’t say something to rag me. Even when I started good in the first few games this year, he was always on me about something, not paying attention, or being slow, or missing a sign, or not being in position.

It was bad enough when I was doing okay. But when the slump started, it was pure hell.

The slump? I don’t want to talk about it. Baseball is a streaky game. All ballplayers have slumps, even Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron had weeks and months when they could not hit a barn if they were standing inside it. Sometimes you go 9 for 15 with three home runs, sometimes you go 0 for 15. It tends to even out over a season. But the slump I went into at the beginning of May was the worst one I had ever been in. The worst I had ever seen anyone in, if you want to know the truth. On the twenty — ninth of April I went 2 for 4 with three r.b.i.’s at Cape Girardeau and was hitting.285, but after that, as my dad says, the wheels came off. From then to the middle of May I went 1 for 25, and Jiggs settled down to make my life miserable.

It’s a funny thing. When a ballplayer is in the groove, the ball looks as big as a basketball when it comes up to the plate, and the fielders fall down running after it when you’ve hit it. When you’re in a slump, the ball looks like a BB and the bat feels like it’s the wrong shape. When you swing, you miss. When you don’t miss, you hit it right at somebody.

It gets to you. You keep thinking about it, and pretty soon you can’t think of anything else. You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. Nobody in the clubhouse wants to talk to you because they’re afraid it’s contagious, like leprosy or cancer or something, and they don’t want to get too close to it. Reporters write about it, finding it funny, like that peabrain from Neosho who wrote that column which everyone thought was so humorous, which all I can say is if he’s so good why is he working for some rat bag paper in Neosho, Missouri?

It was the most awful time of my life. And every day of the slump, Jiggs was on me like flies on horse manure. Every game I’d come back to the dug-out after going 0 for 3, 0 for 4, he’d swear at me, using language I’d be ashamed to repeat. Saying I was stupid, shiftless, no-talent. Saying that I was a fairy, which anyone will tell you I am not, and you can ask Janice.

But swearing at me was better than when he decided to be sarcastic, making these snide comments that some of the guys would snigger at. Like, for example, he’d seen playgrounds with better swings. Or that if I wasn’t going to use the bat, maybe he could borrow it to use as a doorstop. Or that with my talent maybe I ought to drive a schoolbus, ’cause I sure as heck would never hit anybody.

I was never very quick with backtalk, not like Scooter Kirby who is this smart-aleck black guy from Detroit who Jiggs doesn’t mess with because he gets it back worse. Scooter used to try to get me to talk back to Jiggs, but I never could understand how he could think of stuff like that. So I mostly just had to take it.

By the beginning of June, that day we were in Fort Smith, I was a wreck. I’d slept maybe an hour the night before, and not at all the night before that. I was 3 for 57.

It was two out in the bottom of the ninth, we were down 6–1, nobody was on, and I was up. I had struck out four times already off that Dominican, and he got me swinging again on three pitches.

I walked back to the dugout, kicking the bat. Jiggs was standing there with a couple of the guys, grinning with those brown teeth. “That was quite a cut you took at that last pitch, Johnson,” he said. “What was that, a slider?”

“It was a curveball,” I said.

“Looked just a little bit low,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” It had bounced about two feet in front of the plate, if you want to be exact.

“You had quite a cut, though. If it had of been a couple of feet closer, you might of actually nicked it! Ha, ha.”

“Ha, ha,” said Joey Scapetto, who is this second baseman who last time I checked nobody was confusing with Rogers Hornsby, but he’s all the time sucking up to Jiggs.

“I could feel the wind all the way over here,” said Jiggs.

“Damn near took my cap off,” said Joey.

“Ha, ha,” said Jiggs. “That’s a good one, Joey.” He spat, the brown liquid dribbling down his jowl, and squinted up at me. “You know, Johnson, I been in professional baseball thirty-seven years. I seen some of the greats. I played with the Yankees, the Goddamned 1961 New York Yankees, the best team to ever have played the game. Now every day I come to the ballpark expecting to see the worst play I’ve ever seen in thirty-seven years, and I got to say you never disappoint me.” He shook his head. “Man my age got to be thankful for the entertainment when he got to put up with ballplayers like you.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. After a minute he said, “Get the hell out of here before I puke.”

I trudged back to the clubhouse. Of course nobody said anything to me while they undressed. I was sitting there, still in my uniform, staring at the floor and seeing in my mind this Rodriguez throwing BB’s at me, thinking that I was now 3 for 66 and might never get a hit again, when Jiggs came strolling in. He stopped in front of me, puffing a little from the exertion of walking all the way from the dugout, which was maybe twenty yards away. Everybody looked over at Jiggs, and it got quiet.

“You know, Johnson,” he said, “I suppose you are wondering why I left you in that last at-bat, when we were down 6–1 and you were the last out? And when that Dominican had already struck you out four times?”

I didn’t say anything.

He looked around and grinned, his little eyes almost disappearing. “I left you in because the official Tri-State League record for being struck out in one game is five times. I wanted to give you the chance for the record, which I am happy to say you now share. I figured it was going to be the only batting record you’d ever get.”

He laughed, and some of the other guys snickered a little, too, although I could tell some of them were embarrassed. Joey Scapetto laughed like he was Ed McMahon and it was the funniest thing Johnny Carson ever said.

“The only record you’d ever get,” Jiggs said again, enjoying the joke. “When you are back flipping burgers in Hooterville, or wherever you are from, you can remember that.”

A red mist seemed to settle on me as I heard some of the guys laughing. At that moment, I knew I was going to kill him.

It is not so easy to kill somebody as it would seem to be from watching TV. I wanted to kill Jiggs, but I didn’t want to get caught. I stayed up most of the night thinking about it, thinking about guns, and knives, and heavy objects, and drowning, and hanging, but none of them seemed any good. But on the bus to Grand Island the next day, Monday, it hit me.

Tuesday was a night game, so that morning I put on sunglasses, left the Best Western, and went downtown. It took a while for me to find what I was looking for, but I finally found it in this dingy little hardware and farm supplies place, where this old guy in a feed cap was sitting behind the counter. It was this old box sort of faded on one side and covered with dust. “Rat Poison,” it said. “Contains Strychnine.” Then I found a 7-Eleven out on the highway where there was this Iranian clerk, which I did not know they had Iranians in Nebraska, and bought a can of the kind of snuff that Jiggs used. The clerk never looked up.

Back at the hotel, I opened the snuff can and dumped a quarter of it out, filling it up with the rat poison and shaking it up to mix it. The tobacco was dark brown and the rat poison was dark gray and you could hardly tell the difference. I poured the rest of the rat poison down the toilet and then stuffed the box in the dumpster behind the Best Western.

I knew from TV they always check on poison sales when somebody is poisoned, so I figured I would put them off the trail by waiting until we left Nebraska before I used it. I decided I would do it Friday when we were in St. Joseph, Missouri.

I went 0 for 3 that night, then 0 for 2 on Wednesday, Jiggs making some real clever remarks to me, which I didn’t seem to mind so much when I thought about the can of snuff. He benched me Thursday night because the Islanders were pitching this kid Sanders who Jiggs knew I had hit real good in the past and might have got a hit off of.

On the bus that night Jiggs was talking for about the millionth time about the 1961 New York Yankees. I had looked it up, and I knew he had played only five games with those Yankees, after the September call-up, and had then gone to Syracuse the next year and got cut and then played four years in the Kansas City organization, hitting.212 for the Athletics in 1964. But he talked like he was best friends with Mantle and Maris and Berra and all those guys, hinting that old Whitey Ford wouldn’t even get on the mound without he had Jiggs Holloway at shortstop.

Friday was a night game in St. Joe. Jiggs’s uniform was too tight for him to keep things in the pockets, and everybody knew he always set his snuff can down next to his seat in the dugout. It was while he was watching the Saints take batting practice that I switched cans. It was easy.

Just before the National Anthem, I saw him take a huge pinch and stuff it into his cheek.

The game was awful. I was so jittery that I misplayed a pop fly in the top of the first that went for a double, then I almost missed the cutoff man. When I came back to the dugout, Jiggs said something to me that I could barely hear. He was not looking good. In the second I was called out on strikes, hardly seeing the ball because I kept looking back at the dug-out. Jiggs did not say anything about it, though. He was looking queasy. In the fourth I made a bad throw that almost cost us a run, and in the fifth I got fooled real bad on a change-up and hit into a double play to kill a rally. In the seventh I looked in from the field and his seat was empty. I don’t remember much after that.

Jiggs wasn’t in the clubhouse when the game was over. Somebody said he was sick, but nobody knew anything. We took the bus back to the hotel.

In my room it suddenly came over me what I had done. I was brought up right, and I suppose I should have felt remorse or something, but actually I felt free, better than I had in a month, like somebody had lifted a semi that had been parked on top of me. I wanted to be alone, but I figured it was important to act natural and I wanted to find out about Jiggs, so I went down to the hotel bar with some of the guys.

I don’t know what it was that night, but one beer and I was high. Two and I was floating on air. Laughing, giggling, even. The other guys were looking at me strange.

I was thinking I had to calm down when there was a sound behind me and a voice said, “Jeez, Johnson, you stunk worse than day-old turds today.”

Now, I don’t know if you ever watch those slasher movies on cable TV, the ones where the blonde thinks she’s finished off the maniac killer when he suddenly pops up with a chainsaw. But it was like that.

It was Jiggs Holloway.

He looked a little unsteady and his face was the color of bathroom putty, but he was definitely alive.

“Hey, Jiggs,” said someone. “You okay?”

“Guess so,” he said. “I thought I was going to puke to death for a while there.”

“You go to a doctor?”

“Nah. I feel okay now.”

“Maybe it was something you ate,” said Joey Scapetto.

“Maybe,” said Jiggs. “Or maybe it was having to watch Johnson here screw up so bad out in the field. It would of made any real baseball man puke to see that.” Joey and a couple others laughed.

“I bet you could use a drink,” said Joey.

“I bet you are right, Joey,” said Jiggs.

Everything sort of blurred after that. Later in my room I tried to figure out what went wrong. Maybe I hadn’t used enough rat poison. Or maybe he didn’t swallow enough because he kept spitting the tobacco juice. Or maybe he was just too evil to die. I didn’t know. It had scared me pretty bad.

I waited through the weekend, not playing Saturday and then going 0 for 3 Sunday with a walk, which Jiggs made a great deal over, saying that now that he had seen me on base he expected hell to freeze over any day. On Monday as usual we were on the bus, this time headed for Council Bluffs for a three-game series with the Bisons, that is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

By Tuesday I had recovered from the shock, and I had thought of a new plan. I got the idea from a rerun of Starsky & Hutch. It would be an accident. That morning I put on the dark glasses and took a bus to the airport in Omaha, which is across the river from Council Bluffs. I went to the car rental counter, which I was surprised how much they charge to rent even little cars. I rented this little Ford Escort for about thirty dollars a day plus about fifty dollars more for taxes and insurance.

I drove the car out into the country where I found some mud and drove through it back and forth a few times, and then smeared mud over the license plates, so you couldn’t see the numbers.

The plan was simple. There’s a bar across the street from the ballpark owned by an old guy named Sorenson who knew Jiggs from when they both played at Omaha in the American Association. Whenever we were in Council Bluffs, Jiggs would have a beer or two at Sorenson’s bar before walking over to the park. I figured I would have the car ready, and when Jiggs crossed the street I would run him down. It would be a hit-and-run accident, but nobody would be able to I.D. the car because of the mud. The motel in Council Bluffs where the Jets stayed is only two blocks from the park, so I would just park the car on a side street, walk back to the motel, then join the last stragglers walking to the park. I could return the car the next day. Nobody would ever connect me with it.

So a little after four I was sitting in the Escort, a block down from the bar, wearing dark glasses and a University of Iowa hat, when the door of the bar opened and Jiggs came out.

I switched on the engine. My palms were sweating on the steering wheel, but my mind was very cool. As he walked toward the street, I gunned the engine, and the little car jumped forward as fast as it could, which was faster than I supposed it could. Jiggs was looking the other way as he stepped off the curb. I had him dead in my sights.

Suddenly a baseball rolled out into the street, and a little kid, not more than ten or so and wearing a Bisons T-shirt, ran out after it. I swerved the wheel to the left as hard as I could and stomped on the brakes. The car skidded, shot across the line, and headed for the opposite curb. There was a group of old geezers standing there jabbering; they looked up and froze. I yanked the wheel back right. The car fishtailed like an Olympic skier, back wheels banging off the curb, and plowed straight into the passenger side of an oncoming Mercedes sedan. There was a terrible crash. I remember hitting this big pillow where the airbag exploded.

Next thing I knew guys came running up to the car. Jiggs was one of the first ones there. “Jeez,” he said. “It’s Johnson! You okay, boy?”

It was a good question. But everything seemed to be working. “Guess so,” I said.

A portly man in a suit appeared in the window. “What on God’s earth were you doing?” he yelled. “Look what you’ve done to my car!” I looked over at the Mercedes, which didn’t look so good. “Do you know who I am?” he yelled. “I am Myron W. Stevens!” And he proceeded to explain that he was a partner in a big Omaha law firm, and that he knew everyone who was worth knowing on both sides of the Missouri River and in Washington, too, and that he would personally see that he took every dime I had in the world and that I never drove a motor vehicle again as long as I lived. He was very eloquent about it, if that’s the word I want.

Jiggs was laughing. “Jeez, Johnson,” he said. “You finally hit something — and it turns out to be a lawyer’s Mercedes!”

They took me in for observation to the hospital, which there was nothing wrong with me, but I didn’t play that night. Next day Jiggs put me in, saying I was on a hot streak, and I went 0 for 3 before he pulled me for a pinch-hitter in the eighth.

The incident with the car had shaken me up, but if anything I hated Jiggs more than ever. I didn’t even think about the slump any more; all I could think about was killing him. Thursday night he put me in as a pinch-runner for the catcher, and I was thinking so much about him that I missed the hit-and-run sign and ran into a double play.

That night after the game we rode the bus back to Joplin for the start of a home stand, the Jets hosting Salina, Grand Island, and Sioux City.

I didn’t play at all against the Tornadoes over the weekend, which we scored thirty runs in three games as Salina has the worst pitching in the league. I barely watched the games, thinking all the time about guns and knives and ropes and blunt objects and not seeing any way to do it that I wouldn’t get caught. On Tuesday Jiggs decided to have me start, but it was against this phenom from Grand Island name of Crawford who was 9–0 with a 0.80 e.r.a., and we were shut out, me going 0 for 4 with two strikeouts. They called him up to Double-A next day.

I was like some kind of zombie during the next few games. I didn’t play much, this guy Mendoza who was taking my place hitting pretty decent and Jiggs letting him play, which was okay because Mendoza was a pretty good guy.

The next Friday night after we had lost to Sioux City, I was back at my room at the Shangri-La Motor Lodge, which is where most of us Jets live when we’re at home in Joplin. I couldn’t sleep and I turned on this movie on cable about a crazy kid who kills his parents, not the one with the kid in it from Home Alone, a different one. And then it hit me.

The perfect solution.

Saturday was a day game, twelve thirty start. Jiggs had Mendoza in for me again, he went 3 for 6 with a home run, which Wizniak their left fielder ought to have caught except he didn’t time his jump right. It was a long game, almost three hours, the Sioux finally winning 10-7.

Back in the clubhouse most of the guys showered quick and headed out. By about four thirty there were only a few guys still around. And Jiggs Holloway had climbed into the whirlpool.

Our whirlpool in Joplin was a big galvanized metal tub that a man could sit upright in. It was for the players. But after a tough day of sitting on his butt and spitting tobacco juice, Jiggs liked to relax by sitting in the whirlpool and reading those True Detective magazines you see on the shelf at 7-Eleven stuck between Monster Trucks Today and Real Inside Wrestling. He was humming along to the big old AM-FM radio, which was tuned to this country and western station from Neosho. I went into the whirlpool room. Jiggs was alone, his nose stuck in the magazine. I saw him spit into the water.

He looked up as I walked in. “Hey, Johnson,” he said, “how you doing?”

“Fine,” I said. I walked over to the radio.

“You got your bus ticket back to Hooterville yet? Way Mendoza is playing, you going to have a very short career. Ha, ha.”

“It is Eufaula,” I said, very slowly. “Eufaula, Alabama. That is were I am from. Not Hooterville.”

“Ha,” he said. “Same thing. You going to be back where you belong, performing unnatural acts with livestock and flipping burgers at the Dairy Queen.”

I picked up the radio and looked straight at him. I suppose he saw something in my eyes, for he started to look a little nervous.

“Jiggs Holloway,” I said, very slowly, “you have made my life miserable ever since I came to this club.”

“It’s not me who has not got a hit for two months,” he said. “That is what is miserable.”

“I done nothing to you, but you have rode me every chance you got.”

“I was only ragging you. You dumb-ass hicks can’t take a joke.”

“Maybe not. But I am going to kill you anyway.”

He saw the radio in my hand and he looked down at the water which was around his chest. “Oh my God,” he said and he jumped up, the fastest I ever saw Jiggs move, but it was too late. I flung the radio into the water. There was a great splash.

Nothing happened.

For a minute the room seemed to swim. Then Jiggs was just standing there in the water. The radio made this burbling sound and sank. Then I saw what happened. When I threw the radio, the plug came out.

Jiggs started to laugh. “Oh my, Johnson,” he said, “that was a good one, that was. You really had me there for a minute.”

He laughed and laughed. A crimson fog seemed to come down over my eyes.

“I did not think you had it in you,” he said. “You will have to pay for the radio, but it was worth it. It was a real good joke. I’ll have to tell the boys.”

Everything was dark and red. Over next to the wall I saw a couple of bats the equipment manager had not put away. I grabbed one and charged at him.

It was like everything was in slow motion. His head seemed to hang in front of me, eyes like raisins in a half-baked biscuit; it looked like a curveball that hadn’t broke, hanging right out over the middle of the plate.

I swung the bat with all my might.

He screamed.

That’s about all I remember. A second later a couple of guys ran in; they grabbed me and took the bat away, although I don’t think I resisted much. The last thing I remember seeing was Jiggs standing naked there in the tub, water still dripping off him. I heard him start to laugh.

“Missed me!” he was saying. “The stupid son of a bitch missed me! Went right over my head!” I never have seen anyone laugh that hard. “Missed me!”

It was the worst slump I have ever been in.