Major league baseball had previously dictated that the home team provide the balls for every game, but it was never stated what condition those balls had to be in. As long as they possessed no divots of marked depth, those balls could, and were, played until they passed over a wall or someone tore the cover off.
White balls, then, were something Ruth had seen on opening day in the first few innings, but by the end of the first game, that ball was usually brown. By the end of a three-game series, that ball could disappear in the fur of a squirrel.
But those gray balls had almost killed two guys last year. Honus Sukalowski had taken one to the temple and never talked right again. Bobby Kestler had also taken one to the bean and hadn’t swung a bat since. Whit Owens, the pitcher who’d hit Sukalowski, had left the game altogether out of guilt. That was three guys gone in one year, and during the war year to boot.
Standing in left, Ruth watched the third out of the game arc toward him like a Roman candle, a victim of its own brilliance. He was whistling when he caught it. As he jogged back in toward the dugout, God’s fingertips found his chest.
It’s a new game.
You can say that twice.
It’s your game now, Babe. All yours.
I know. Did you see how white it is? It’s so … white.
A blind man could hit it, Babe.
I know. A blind kid. A blind girl kid.
It’s not Cobb’s game anymore, Babe. It’s a slugger’s game.
Slugger. That’s a swell word, boss. Always been fond of it, myself.
Change the game, Babe. Change the game and free yourself.
From what?
You know.
Babe didn’t, but he kind of did, so he said, “Okay.”
“Who you talking to?” Stuffy McInnis asked as he reached the dugout.
“God.”
Stuffy spit some tobacco into the dirt. “Tell Him I want Mary Pickford at the Belleview Hotel.”
Babe picked up his bat. “See what I can do.”
“Tuesday night.”
Babe wiped down his bat. “Well, it is an off day.”
Stuffy nodded. “Say around six.”
Babe walked toward the batter’s box.
“Gidge.”
Babe looked back at him. “Call me ‘Babe,’ okay?”
“Sure, sure. Tell God to tell Mary to bring a friend.”
Babe walked into the batter’s box.
“And beer!” Stuffy called.
Columbia George Smith was on the mound for the Giants, and his first pitch was low and inside and Babe suppressed a giggle as it passed over the toe of his left foot. Jesus, you could count the stitches! Lew McCarty threw the ball back to his pitcher and Columbia George threw a curveball next that hissed past Babe’s thighs for a strike. Babe had been watching for that pitch because it meant Columbia George was stair climbing. The next pitch would be belt high and a hair inside, and Babe would have to swing but miss if he wanted Columbia George to throw the high heat. So he swung, and even trying to miss, he foul-tipped the ball over McCarty’s head. Babe stepped out of the box for a moment, and Xavier Long took the ball from McCarty and examined it. He wiped at it with his hand and then his sleeve and he found something there he didn’t like because he placed it in the pouch over his groin and came back out with a brand-spanking new ball. He handed it to McCarty, and McCarty rifled it back to Columbia George.
What a country!
Babe stepped back into the box. He tried to keep the glee from his eyes. Columbia George went into his windup, and, yup, his face corked into that telltale grimace it got whenever he brought the fire, and Babe gave it all a sleepy smile.
It was not cheers he heard when he scorched that fresh white ball toward the Tampa sun. Not cheers or oohs or aahs.
Silence. Silence so total that the only sound that could fill it was the echo of his bat against cowhide. Every head in Plant Field turned to watch that miraculous ball soar so fast and so far that it never had time to cast its shadow.
When it landed on the other side of the right field wall, five hundred feet from home plate, it bounced high off the racetrack and continued to roll.
After the game, one of the sports scribes would tell Babe and Coach Barrow that they’d taken measurements, and the final tally was 579 feet before it came to a full stop in the grass. Five hundred and seventy-nine. Damn near two football fields.
But in that moment, as it soared without shadow into a blue sky and a white sun and he dropped his bat and trotted slowly down the first base line, tracking it, willing it to go farther and faster than anything ever could or ever had or maybe ever would in so short a time, Babe saw the damnedest thing he’d ever seen in his life — his father sitting atop the ball. Riding it really, hands clenched to the seams, knees pressed to the leather, his father tumbling over and over in space with that ball. He howled, his father did. He clenched his face from the fear. Tears fell from his eyes, fat ones, and hot, Babe assumed. Until, like the ball, he disappeared from view.
Five hundred and seventy nine feet, they told Ruth.
Ruth smiled, picturing his father, not the ball. All gone now. Buried in the saw grass. Buried in Plant Field, Tampa.
Never coming back.
Chapter twenty-five
If Danny could say nothing else positive about the new commissioner, he could at least say the man was true to his word. When the molasses flood tore through the heart of his neighborhood, Danny was spending the week keeping the peace forty miles away at a box factory strike in Haverhill. Once the workers there were brought to heel, he moved on to ten days at a fishery strike in Charlestown. That whimpered to an end when the AFL refused to grant a charter because they didn’t deem the workers skilled labor. Danny was loaned out next to the Lawrence PD for a textile workers’ strike that had been going on for three months and could already claim two dead, including a labor organizer who’d been shot through the mouth as he left a barbershop.
Through these strikes and those that followed throughout the late winter and into early spring — at a clock factory in Waltham, among machinists in Roslindale, a mill in Framingham — Danny was spat at, screamed at, called a goon and a whore and a lackey and pus. He was scratched, punched, hit with eggs, hit with sticks, and once, in Framingham, caught a hurled brick with his shoulder. In Roslindale, the machinists got their raise but not their health benefits. In Everett, the shoe workers got half their raise, but no pension. The Framingham strike was crushed by the arrival of truckloads of new workers and the onslaught of police. After they’d made the final push and the scabs had gone through the gates, Danny looked around at the men they’d left in their wake, some still curled on the ground, others sitting up, a few raising ineffectual fists and pointless shouts. They faced a sudden new day with far less than they’d asked for and much less than they’d had. Time to go home to their families and figure out what to do next.
He came upon a Framingham cop he’d never met before kicking a striker who offered no resistance. The cop wasn’t putting much into the kicks anymore, and the striker probably wasn’t even conscious. Danny put his hand on the guy’s shoulder and the guy raised his nightstick before he recognized the uniform.
“What?”
“You’ve made your point,” Danny said. “Enough.”
“Ain’t no enough,” the cop said and walked away.
Danny rode back to Boston in a bus with the other city cops. The sky hung low and gray. Scraps of frozen snow gripped the scalp of the earth like crabs.
“Meeting tonight, Dan?” Kenny Trescott asked him.
Danny had almost forgotten. Now that Mark Denton was rarely available to attend a BSC meeting, Danny had become the de facto head of the union. But it wasn’t really a union anymore. It was, true to its original roots and its given name, a social club.