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But most of all, baseball 1971 is Vida Blue. He is the kid they used to call Junior. Vida Rochelle Blue Jr., to be exact. Vida Blue Sr. was a laborer in the local iron foundry. The Blue kids, Junior and his four younger sisters and a brother, lived at the end of Mary Street, an unpaved stretch in the black section of Mansfield, La. The Blue home was a bright, eight-room frame house, but Junior was rarely there. He was always across the street in a vacant lot playing ball. Recalls Blue: "Just being around home in the summertime, being black and not having anything to do, you'd just get up and eat and play ball, then come back and eat and go play ball some more. That's how it was." By the time he entered all-black DeSoto High School, "I was almost a fully developed athlete."
No one was more convinced of that than DeSoto High Principal Lee Jacobs. The school had no baseball team at the time, but when Jacobs first saw Vida smoking them in on the sandlot, he decided to organize one "to exploit the potential of Blue." A diamond was laid out in a corner of the football field. There were no fences to hit the ball over, and the light poles for the football field cut through the outfield. It didn't matter. Once, when Blue was pitching in a game, DeSoto High Baseball Coach Clyde Washington recalls that he caught his Centerfielder leaning against one of the light poles. "I told him to straighten up," says Washington. "He said, 'Why, Coach? The ball's not coming out here.' That's how much confidence they had in Vida's pitching. He was overpowering."
Too overpowering, in fact. In one seven-inning game, he pitched a no-hitter, struck out 21 men—and lost. "Vida's problem was somebody to catch him," explains Washington. "There were a lot of passed balls and dropped third strikes." Blue's old battery mate, Elijah Williams, remembers that he had to "cut off the fingers of a winter glove and wear that inside my mitt, but my hand still swole up after every game." Adds Washington: "We bought the best catcher's mitts and gave him sponges. Still his hand would swell up. He couldn't catch again for three days."
Bullets with Both Hands
Blue's teammates had less trouble catching his missiles on the football field. As a lefthanded quarterback and captain of the team in his senior year, Blue threw a remarkable 35 touchdowns in 14 games. "It was nothing for him to throw 50 or 60 yards," says Football Coach Clarence Baldwin. "And he'd throw bullets, not arching passes. On short passes, he'd knock the receivers right down. I heard boys ask him not to throw so hard. There would be defenders on both sides of a man, and Vida would still put the ball right in the receiver's belly. In a pinch, he would throw with his right hand. When I first saw him do that, I decided to change my whole offense to suit his style."