Mid-1930’s bus brakes screech to a halt near the top of a half-filled grassy parking area next to a ramshackle baseball park.
Player near the back of the bus: For God sake, Buzz, do you always have to stop like you’re about to run off a cliff.
Manager, in the right front seat: Shut up and get out to the field, you damn punk.
Player quickly sprints down the aisle, clacking his metal cleats. As he passes by the manager, he punches the batboy, seated on the aisle by the manager, in the arm.
The boy, a big twelve-year old lad, grimaces, fighting to hold back tears. A second player punches him in passing before Alabama Pitts steps into the aisle blocking the rest of the team from the exit. He’s not tall, maybe 5’11,” but he is stocky, handsome, and bears a face, worn far beyond his thirty years.
AP: That’ll be enough, boys. Let me take the next punch, and we’ll see where that goes.
The players exit toward the field, followed slowly by Pitts and the batboy, carrying the bat bag.
AP: Hold your head up, kid. People in this world will always try to run you down.
BB: My daddy’s dead, but my momma taught me not to never cry.
Cut to home field, team arriving to practice.
Pitts approaches bat boy at the end of the dugout bench where he’s lining up the bats.
AP: I have something for you. You can wear it for all your sandlot games.
He tosses him a gray pin striped shirt and pair of pants, a perfectly good baseball uniform. The boy is overcome with excitement as he holds the uniform top up in front of him. Enclosed in a circle on the front are the letters MWL, the team name for the ball club at Sing Sing Prison.
Camera pans across farm landscape along the Georgia-Alabama line, finally stopping on a small white farmhouse.
Narrator: I can’t tell you my name. I don’t want my name out there, but as far as I know, I’m the only one he ever really talked to. I was the scorekeeper on the last team he played for over in Eastern Burke, and we had drinks after the games more than a few times. Ed Pitts was a mysterious man, and I don’t claim to know everything, and I don’t think anybody knows the whole story. In fact, I’m sure there were parts he would not have told. And there are parts he told me that I won’t tell for reasons you may never know. And I am not a man that’s for speculating much, but I can tell you two things. He was not a good man or a bad man, and there was a sense of doom that even when he was carousing or delightfully playing a game that he loved that he could not separate himself from.
Camera pans across rural landscape near the Georgia-Alabama line, settling on a gray plank farmhouse just before dusk. Shot closes to a dimly lit kitchen where a small dark haired woman stands, holding a dark-haired baby in a plain blanket. Her husband, wearing a cavalry man’s uniform is seated at a rough wooden table.
“Ed, I just don’t like calling a baby Junior. “ Her husband fixes her with a hard look and says nothing. He clearly thinks that she is disparaging his name. Now she’s looking at the window where the gloaming has settled its golden magic on the fields as far as she can see. “You were born on the Georgia side, and this one,” she says, nuzzling the baby, “ was born on the Alabama side of the line. I’ll call him Alabama Pitts.”
Camera pulls back to an overhead view of the farm country.
Narrator: “Even from the beginning there was tragedy and confusion in this boy’s life. His daddy died when he was a baby; then his mother married her sister’s brother-in-law. Eventually she had a daughter by Mr. Rudd, but their marriage did not last, some say because Ms. Rudd insisted on working. Regardless, they broke up and her in-laws got custody of the daughter. Some stories said that Ms. Rudd repeatedly tried to kidnap her daughter but then eventually moved to Illinois where Alabama grew up. Later in life, he would dote on his little sister who had been kept away from him but received a sound education and did well in life.
