Marion Talton: From a crossroads to baseball's mecca

By Justin Hayes
Published in Sports on March 27, 2016 1:47 AM

• Print
• Email

He was a crossroads baseball hero, a supernova spun out of his daddy's depression-era tobacco leaves.

Marion Talton formed himself a player in the drape of a pillar oak, just a lunchtime call from scratch-made, fluffy cornbread. The family home, a single story affair clocked by the sun, was addressed at the junction of FDR's radio chorus and endless hours of New Deal hard work.

Nahunta.

If the provenance doesn't sound familiar, perhaps its base elements do.

The unincorporated population there is a God-fearing one, filled with salted earth folk who are fourth and fifth generation vine-fresh. Time isn't scaled differently for them, but it sure seems that way.

Because nothing is manufactured there. It's hand made.

*

Spring, 1949.

A cow pasture, ripe with dairy droppings, serves as the infield for a dreamy 10-year-old Talton. Purple dusk streaks are settling sharply.

Mom will call soon.

Making matters worse, two of his mates have been retired on strikes.

He steps into the box and gets an earful from Yogi. Hem-haw this, hem-haw that. His loose-change voice caroms off the plate and begs Rizzuto in from the six hole.

Ghost men are tethered to first, second and third.

Somewhere, Mel Allen's voice patrols an FM dial.

"Now batting, from Nahunta, North Carolina, Marion Talton," the voice says.

The boy eases into the box, a chiseled tobacco stick in his left palm. He kicks up a boot full of dust, eyeing right-center field all the while.

The dire outlook of the Nahunta nine rings in his head.

"Bases loaded, two out," the kid says.

He takes a breath and tosses a fragment of general rail mix in the air -- but contact will have to wait.

Dinner is getting cold, and besides, there are plenty of other stops to attend.

*

At Nahunta School, playing ball was easy.

The diamond rattled a doo-wop tune, complete with bags, unlike the moo paddies at Pike's Crossroads and Northwest School.

The backstop adopted wild throws, stopping them from diving into wire-grass caves.

There were bats, too.

At the farm, when Marion would splinter one, all hands panicked in unison before gathering to solder the rail charm back together with a set of carpet tacks.

And baseballs? Yes sir.

Even if a lazy changeup was reduced to a busted piñata, someone always seemed to have a replacement -- they no longer patched game balls with tar tape.

And those days -- long, roaming and sunburned -- were precursory. After graduation, in the summer of 1957, there was semi-pro ball -- in Pinkney, of all places.

The diamond was set up at the crossroads of a general store, which was shaped like a milk truck with a gun turret for an awning. The scene hosted players from all walks, and for Marion, served as an outdoor internship. Along with a stop at East Carolina University, it's where he made formal introduction with the rest of his life -- or rather, where it said hello to him.

*

Sanford, Florida. 1959.

"Where in the blankety-blank did you come up with that name (Marion)?" his teammates asked.

Make no mistake, spring training in the minors doesn't always qualify as a cupcake with sprinkles.

"My mama," Talton fired back. "Just like yours named you."

His new brothers, it seems -- a couple of rocket surgeons from the volunteer state -- were confounded by their rookie catcher's unique driver's license.

In fact, their distress ultimately led to the extension of a gentlemanly olive branch.

"Who signed you?" they pressed.

He hadn't been there a day.

He hadn't even unpacked.

Marion Talton, the finest hitter anyone in northeastern Wayne County ever saw, was suffering the wear instead of enjoying bona fide status.

"Murchison," he offered, "Tim Murchison."

The two looked at each other, and the answer was a clear case of rocket science.

"That's your name," they said. "We ain't calling you Marion."

And such was life for a while.

Along with rookies that looked just like him, Talton battled barbs and offspeed handiwork in every cow poke and stop sign in the contiguous 48 states.

There was rookie ball in the Giants fold.

Class C in Minnesota.

There were the good years, along the Pacific Coast Highway, where he racked up quality at-bats. There were also bad years, where he missed giving bottles and birthday presents.

And when he thought it couldn't get worse, there was a reassignment in Vancouver, British Columbia -- again.

Defeated -- and disillusioned -- he hitched home from spring training.

*

It was a simple question.

"You sure you've made the right decision?" his wife asked.

No one understood his need to keep fighting the good fight like Annette.

She was a walking pistol, no bigger than a steering pin but sharp like a tax pencil and a fan of all things sport. Especially baseball.

Her thoughts were her own, thank you kindly, and she had no reservations about letting them breathe in mixed company. It's one of the many things Marion loved about her.

He still does.

"I'll tell you now," Talton said, "without her, I wouldn't have made it (to the big leagues.)"

Annette was a dyed-in-the-wool ballplayer's wife, familiar with sacrifice. She often drove the country, propping up her husband's dream, running on fumes with two children in the back seat of her town car. Glamorous, it was not.

At times, especially in Tacoma, she felt that players' wives invited her places just to make fun of her. The way she spoke, her Nahunta drawl on prominent display, usually garnered pet looks and curt smiles.

And while leaving that behind would have been nice, having her husband back home without his bat really didn't seem like a good idea.

She insisted he keep his day job.

But Marion, who by then had his fill of spring training, lonely one-star road trips and greasy sack lunches, decided to quit chasing the next clubhouse.

At last, he was okay with that.

*

Life without ball, tough at first, became easier. Days rolled like fence wire into weeks. The prospect of regular work loomed.

And baseball, despite its stamp on his life, wasn't screaming at him any more -- until the day it did.

"I got a call from John McNamara," Talton recalled. "And (he) asked if I would be willing to step down a notch (to Double-AA Mobile)."

Just like that, he was back.

Just like that, he was a member of a Kansas City system that led the league in being different, from its orange baseballs to a donkey -- Charlie-O -- that had its own drinking goblet and personalized rendering of "Happy Birthday."

His life, however -- and that of his family -- would look similar. More games. More travel. More birthdays missed and God forbid, where would he be when his son wanted to have his first catch?

The call was everything he'd tried to leave behind, and there was no way to face it but to tell Annette. She would understand, like always.

Days later, like always, he left home.

And roughly a month into his new minor league odyssey, he was hauled in front of McNamara. They would ask for his playbook, certainly. Then his laundry. Hopefully, there would be class fare back to Wayne County. It was the least they could do.

After all, he'd changed his given name for this life.

"I thought, this is gonna end before it ever got started," he said.

But the road he was taking wasn't going back to anything familiar.

It was to Baltimore.

Marion Talton was finally a big leaguer.

*

August 20, 1966. Yankee Stadium.

"Now, pinch-hitting for Vern Handrahan ... Tim Talton."

It was Mel Allen again, the emcee of America, voicing Marion's time-gap from rocks to pearly rawhide, from Pike's Cemetery Road to the Bronx.

There, in the on-deck circle once drawn around Ruth, Gherig, Mantle and Maris, stood a nervous, rail-thin tobacco stick from Nahunta.

He tapped his cleats, making sure he was still attached to mother earth.

"(And) Nahunta came back," Talton said of the memory, "and then I thought, this is where the main man (Ruth) stood."

Trailing 8-4, he sauntered into the box.

Yankee great Mel Stottlemeyer gazed at the rookie, who worked in the dirt, trying in vain to get comfortable.

But it wasn't just Talton he was facing.

It was the likeness of a great many people, most of which never left Wayne County. It was Gene Summerlin, the baseball lifer who introduced Talton to the general store at Pinkney. It was the coaching staff at East Carolina, who chose not to renew his scholarship after a dismal freshman campaign.

It was Annette, as always, seated six rows behind the Kansas City dugout, dressed to the nines in southern charm.

He doesn't clearly recall the pitch, maybe a fastball, but knows what he did with it. So too did the 10,488 in attendance that day.

Just like at Nahunta School, when he routinely blasted offerings over the gym his daddy helped build, he turned on the pitch and mailed it over the right -field fence.

As a matter of record, it was Talton's first major league home run, and one of only three he would hit in his career.

But with that swing, he hand-delivered Nahunta to mecca.

*

Marion Talton loathes sitting idle.

Most days, he works on his property, grinding out chores that aren't urgent. The riding mower's faded yellow seat cushion is form fitting, evidence of its use.

"I can't just go sit," he says. "Do you're not going to last very long."

The old left-hander harbors no secrets. He wants you to realize that a good life is always on the vine, dangling. Worth the fight.

It's worth it like his stretch with the Giants, or starts behind the plate in freezing-cold Sasquatch country, or the time he was rebranded by two rubes from a Mayberry spinoff.

Or worth it fighting like Annette did, all those years by his side, until she got sick.

"She was a true companion, a true friend," he said, his eyes a touch weak.

"My backbone," he says softly.

And for all his time in the dugouts of the world, perhaps that's when Marion Talton became the best version of himself, caring for her through a malady of illness neither fair nor fathomable.

A heart attack. A stroke. Neuropathy in her legs that robbed her of the go-getting, southern belle spirit so many held in loving regard.

His dearest passed away last year, when the raging battles became too much to bear. Talton admits the days since haven't always been easy.

But on a road his family treasures, near the crossroads he helped put on the map, he'll always have the life they built together.