He was so swift and so strong that ordinary words could not describe him. Instead people got this faraway look, and for a while you thought it was the awestruck expression of rapture, but it was sadder than that, a look that grasped at what might have been. He was the original bonus baby, the fundamental phenom. But things kept happening, and he never got his look. His first week in Florida, playing against the Red Sox, he went deep on a well-hit line drive.
People say they never saw an outfielder cover so much ground so quickly.
Back to the ball, he looked over his shoulder and lost it. Asked in the hospital what threw him off, he said he lost the ball in the white of the moon. Hobbled until July, he took the field for the second game of a double header against Cleveland, and just before he could make a diving shoestring catch to his left, he stepped into a gopher hole and snapped his shin like a piece of barnwood, and spent the remainder of that season in Ashtabula, clipping hedges by his mother's house on Lake Erie. In the late innings of an exhibition game in Montreal the following spring, when Flessum was trying desperately to get noticed, he rapped a grounder to third base and headed for first. What he did not know was that the catcher had grabbed a stray thread from his uniform, which rapidly unraveled as he raced down the baseline.