There is a story here. Perhaps just not the one you’re looking for.
Red disappeared for a bit before he started hitting all the homers. He claimed he ran into some aliens in the desert. I have to say, there were some things that were never satisfactorily explained.
GONE BY BERNIE HAFELI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 40
In 1955 Red Feldrum hit eighty-nine home runs for the Hobbs Sports in the Class D Longhorn League. I knew this because Nils said it was so. Nils was an investment Banker, who, given his druthers, would have been a major league umpire. In his spare moments he called balls and strikes at high school, college, and semi-pro games in the LA area. If I needed background or clarification on anything even remotely associated with baseball, I called Nils. Everybody knew Wally Pipp was the guy Lou Gehrig replaced when the Iron Horse started his consecutive game streak. But who had Wally Pipp replaced a few years earlier? Charlie Mullen. Nils knew that kind of occasionally useful esoterica, so when I got interested in minor league home run totals—it seemed like a fertile area for my next article given what steroids had done to major league marks—I talked to Nils.
“You need to go have waffles with Cal Stubbs,” Nils informed me.
“Waffles. Really?”
“Cal used to ump in the old southwest leagues. He can tell you all about Rocket Red Feldrum’s days as a fence buster.”
I decided to take Nils’s advice, camping out at the Denny’s on Lincoln where Cal regularly had his waffles. Nils said I’d know him by his hat. As I scanned the parking lot, I noticed a little guy in a baseball cap coming up the walk. He was old and had a hitch in his stride, as if he’d had a hip or knee replaced in the years before they perfected the procedure. A cigarette dangled from his lips, still smoking at seventy or however old he was. I guessed he’d still slather butter all over his waffles too, and drown them in maple syrup. At the row of newspaper racks he stopped next to the LA Times. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and just stood there, as if he’d been handcuffed for vagrancy, and watched the morning traffic flow by on Lincoln. The sun flattened his shadow against the white pavement, it reminded me of a body outlined at a crime scene.
A young woman in an olive business suit and sunglasses approached the Times machine, inserted her quarters, and lifted the window for a paper. Before it could slam shut, the man sprang forward, spry as a salamander, and grabbed his own copy of the late morning edition. The woman eyed him skeptically but the man paid no attention. Putting the paper under his arm, he seesawed for the front door, stopping to stub out his cigarette and place it in his shirt pocket before entering. Once he was inside I could finally make out, aided by the dirty glow of the fluorescent lights, what was stitched into the crown of his baseball cap: a large block R and a line drawing of a spaceship.
“Cal!”
He squinted in my direction. I waved my arm until he nodded. He waddled over and gingerly sat down. “Harry?”
We shook hands. His was small, brown, and deeply lined—a withered coconut.
“Nils said you might help me out,” I said.
“That’s my aim. But it comes with a price tag.”
“Waffles?”
“No, not any more. I’ll take a Healthy Slam Breakfast. Better for the old ticker. Oh, and two Dodger tickets against the Redbirds. Nils said you could swing that.”
“Consider it done.”
Cal motioned to the waitress, who came over to take our orders.
“Morning, Cal,” she said. “Dodgers won last night.”
“Yes they did, Rosalita. Robb Nen is human after all. By the way, you look lovely today. Even more lovely than usual, if that’s possible.” She rolled her eyes, pointed to the side of her head and twirled her index finger. “You are muy loco,” she said. “Too much sun. I look how I always look.”
The truth was she looked pretty good, pushing forty but still pretty. Her teeth were perfectly white. When she left for the kitchen, Cal sat back in the booth and watched. His eyes were pale blue, as if he had indeed absorbed too much sun during his years calling balls and strikes, and it had bleached away their color.
“So,” he said, “about those tickets.”
“The tickets are no problem. What I need in return is everything you can tell me about Red Feldrum, and his eighty-nine home runs.”
“Rocket Red Feldrum. The Sultan of Sweat.”
“That’s what you called him?”
“It was hot in the desert.”
“The desert air must have inflated the home run totals.”
“Oh, sure. And the ballparks were bandboxes. And the pitching, of course, was Class D pitching.”
“Still, eighty-nine home runs.”
“Amazing, I know. But not the most amazing thing about Red.”
Rosalita showed up with Cal’s breakfast. Immediately he sliced the omelet into bite-size wedges and baptized it with Tabasco. “Made with egg whites,” he told me.
“Muy healthy.”
He took a bite. “Red played one year in the southwest before he came to Hobbs,” Cal said as he chewed, “with Texarkana. Hit a grand total of thirteen home runs.” He slid a morsel of omelet around his plate to mop up more Tabasco, then he popped it in his mouth. “And with Hobbs he only had five home runs by the middle of May. Then he went on the tear to end all tears.”
“Did he change his stance or something? Talk to a hitting coach?”
“Possibly. I don’t recall. But I do recall an occurrence that definitely coincided with Red’s run. It was of a rather freakish nature.”
Half the time Cal chewed with his mouth open. His teeth were large and yellow and it was anybody’s guess if they were still his own. He watched me closely, as if deciding the best way to sell me something he knew I’d resist—like a burial plot, or dismemberment insurance.
“Do you believe in UFOs?” he asked.
“You mean like at Roswell?”
He took off his cap and pointed to the “R” on its crown; above it was the hovering spacecraft. “The Roswell Rockets. I called half their games. Them and the Hobbs Sports, Red’s team, those were my two main clubs.” He put the hat back on. “Anyway, Red disappeared for a bit before he started hitting all the homers.”
“Disappeared? Where’d he go?”
“He claimed he ran into some aliens in the desert.”