The curve-ball formula in chapter five was devised by Igor Sikorsky and can be found in ‘The Hell It Doesn’t Curve,’ by Joseph F. Drury, Sr. (see Fireside Book of Baseball, Simon and Schuster, 1956, pp. 98–101).

The tape-recorded recollections of professional baseball players that are deposited in the Library of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and are quoted in Lawrence Ritters’ The Glory of Their Times (Macmillan, 1966) have been a source of inspiration to me while writing this book, and some of the most appealing locutions of these old-time players have been absorbed into the dialogue.

I also wish to thank Jack Redding, director of the Hall of Fame Library, and Peter Clark, curator of the Hall of Fame Museum, for their kindness to me during my visits to Cooperstown.

As it turned out, bracing sentiments such as these, passionately pronounced from a flag-draped platform in downtown Port Ruppert by notables ranging from Secretary of War Stimson and Governor Edison to the Mayor of Port Ruppert, Boss Stuvwxyz, did work to quash the outcry that the Mundy management and the U.S. government had feared from a citizenry renowned for its devotion to ‘the Rupe-its’ (as the team was called in the local patois). Why, feeling for the Mundys ran so high in that town, that according to Bob Hope, one young fellow called up by the Port Ruppert draft board had written ‘the Mundys’ where the questionnaire had asked his religion; as the comedian told the servicemen at the hundreds of Army bases he toured that year, there was another fellow back there, who when asked his occupation by the recruiting sergeant, replied with a straight face, ‘A Rupe-it roota and a plumma.’ The soldiers roared – as audiences would if a comic said no more than, ‘There was this baseball fan in Port Ruppert–’ but Hope had only to add, ‘Seriously now, the whole nation is really indebted to those people out there–’ for the soldiers and sailors to be up on their feet, whistling through their teeth in tribute to the East Coast metropolis whose fans and public officials had bid farewell to their beloved ball club in order to make the world safe for democracy.

As if the Mundys’ fans had anything to say about it, one way or another! As if Boss Stuvwxyz would object to consigning the ball club to Hell, so long as his pockets had been lined with gold!

Even more ominous was this: by sanctioning an arrangement wherein twenty-three major league teams played at least half of their games at home, while the Mundys alone played all one hundred and fifty-four games on the road, Organized Baseball had compromised the very principles of Fair Play in which the sport was grounded; they had consented to tamper with what was dearer even to General Oakhart than the survival of his league: the Rules and the Regulations.

Now every Massachusetts schoolchild who had ever gone off with his class to visit the General’s office at P. League headquarters in Tri-City knew about General Oakhart and his Rules and Regulations. During the school year, busloads of little children were regularly ushered through the hallways painted with murals twelve and fifteen feet high of the great Patriot League heroes of the past – Base Baal, Luke Gofannon, Mike Mazda, Smoky Woden – and into General Oakhart’s paneled office to hear him deliver his lecture on the national pastime. In order to bring home to the youngsters the central importance of the Rules and Regulations, he would draw their attention to the model of a baseball diamond on his desk, explaining to them that if the distance between the bases were to be shortened by as little as one inch, you might just as well change the name of the game, for by so doing you would have altered fundamentally the existing relationship between the diamond ‘as we have always known it’ and the physical effort and skill required to play the game upon a field of those dimensions. Into their solemn and awed little faces he would thrust his heavily decorated chest (for he dressed in a soldier’s uniform till the day he died) and he would say: ‘Now I am not telling you that somebody won’t come along tomorrow and try to change that distance on us. The streets are full of people with harebrained schemes, out to make a dollar, out to make confusion, out to make the world over because it doesn’t happen to suit their taste. I am only telling you that ninety feet is how far from one another the bases have been for a hundred years now, and as far as I am concerned, how far from one another they shall remain until the end of time. I happen to think that the great man whose picture you see hanging above my desk knew what he was doing when he invented the game of baseball. I happen to think that when it came to the geometry of the diamond, he was a genius on a par with Copernicus and Sir Isaac Newton, who I am sure you have read about in your schoolbooks. I happen to think that ninety feet was precisely the length necessary to make this game the hard, exciting, and suspenseful struggle that it is. And that is why I would impress upon your young minds a belief in following to the letter, the Rules and the Regulations, as they have been laid down by thoughtful and serious men before you or I were ever born, and as they have survived in baseball for a hundred years now, and in human life since the dawn of civilization. Boys and girls, take away the Rules and the Regulations, and you don’t have civilized life as we know and revere it. If I have any advice for you today, it’s this – don’t try to shorten the base paths in order to reach home plate faster and score. All you will have accomplished by that technique is to cheapen the value of a run. I hope you will ponder that on the bus ride back to school. Now, go on out and stroll around the corridors all you want. Those great paintings are there for your enjoyment. Good day, and good luck to you.’

Back in the summer of 1920, having already lost out to Landis for the commissioner’s job, General Oakhart suffered a second stunning setback when the movement to make him Harding’s running-mate died in the smoke-filled rooms. No one (went the argument against him) wanted to be reminded of all the boys buried under crosses in France to whom General Oakhart had been ‘Father, Brother, and Buddy, too.’ Nor – he thought bitterly, when the Teapot Dome scandal broke in ’23, when one after another of Harding’s cronies was indicted, convicted, and jailed for the most vile sort of political corruption – nor did they want a man of integrity around, either. When Harding died (of shame and humiliation, one would hope) and Coolidge took the oath of office – Coolidge, that hack they had chosen instead of him! – the General came near to weeping for the nation’s loss of himself. But, alas, the American people didn’t seem to care any more than the politicians did for a man who lived by and for the Rules and Regulations.

Sure enough, when the call went out for General Oakhart, the country was suffering just such panic and despair as he had predicted years ago, if the ship of state were to be steered for long by unprincipled leaders. It was not, however, to the White House or even the State House that the General was summoned, but to Tri-City, Mass., to be President of a baseball league in trouble. With five of its eight teams in hock to the bank, and fear growing among the owners that the Depression had made their players susceptible to the gambling mob, the P. League proprietors had paid a visit to General Oakhart in his quarters at the War College, where he was director of Military Studies, and pleaded with him not to sit sulking in an ivory tower. It was Spenser Trust, the billionaire Tycoon owner, and nobody’s fool, who spoke the words that appeared to win the General’s heart: he reminded him that it was not just their floundering league that was casting about for a strong man to lead them back to greatness, but the nation as well. An outstanding Republican who rose to national prominence in ’33 might well find himself elected the thirty-third President of the United States in ’36.

Now as luck would have it – or so it seemed to the General at the outset – the very year he agreed to retire from the military to become President of the P. League, the nineteen-year-old Gil Gamesh came up to pitch for the Tycoons’ crosstown rival, the Tri-City Greenbacks, Gamesh, throwing six consecutive shutouts in his first six starts, was an immediate sensation, and with his ‘I can beat anybody’ motto, captured the country’s heart as no player had since the Babe began swatting them out the ball park in 1920. Only the previous year, in the middle of the most dismal summer of his life, the great Luke Gofannon had called it quits and retired to his farm in the Jersey flats, so that it had looked at the opening of the ’33 season as though the Patriot League would be without an Olympian of the Ruth-Cobb variety. Then, from nowhere – or, to be exact, from Babylonia, by way of his mother and father – came the youngster the General aptly labeled ‘the Talk of the World,’ and nothing Hubbell did over in the National League or Lefty Grove in the American was remotely comparable. The tall, slim, dark-haired left-hander was just what the doctor had ordered for a nation bewildered and frightened by a ruinous Depression – here was a kid who just would not lose, and he made no bones about it either. Nothing shy, nothing sweet, nothing humble about this young fellow. He could be ten runs on top in the bottom of the ninth, two men out, the bases empty, a count of 0 and 2 on the opposing team’s weakest hitter, and if the umpire gave him a bad call he would be down off that mound breathing fire. ‘You blind robber – it’s a strike!’ However, if and when the batter should dare to put up a beef on a call, Gamesh would laugh like mad and call out to the ump, ‘Come on now, you can’t tell anything by him – he never even seen it. He’d be the last guy in the world to know.’

And the fans just ate it up: nineteen years old and he had the courage and confidence of a Walter Johnson, and the competitive spirit of the Georgia Peach himself. The stronger the batter the better Gil liked it. Rubbing the ball around in those enormous paws that hung down practically to his knees, he would glare defiantly at the man striding up to the plate (some of them stars when he was still in the cradle) and announce out loud his own personal opinion of the fellow’s abilities. ‘You couldn’t lick a stamp. You couldn’t beat a drum. Get your belly button in there, bud, you’re what I call duck soup.’ Then, sneering away, he would lean way back, kick that right leg up sky-high like a chorus girl, and that long left arm would start coming around by way of Biloxi – and next thing you knew it was strike one. He would burn them in just as beautiful and nonchalant as that, three in a row, and then exactly like a barber, call out, ‘Next!’ He did not waste a pitch, unless it was to throw a ball at a batter’s head, and he did not consider that a waste. He knew a hundred ways to humiliate the opposition, such as late in the game deliberately walking the other pitcher, then setting the ball down on the ground to wave him from first on to second. ‘Go on, go on, you ain’t gonna get there no other way, that’s for sure.’ With the surprised base runner safely ensconced at second, Gil would kick the ball up into his glove with the instep of his shoe – ‘Okay, just stand there on the bag, bud,’ he would tell the opposing pitcher, ‘and watch these fellas try and hit me. You might learn somethin’, though I doubt it.’

Gamesh was seen to shed a tear only once in his career: when his seventh major league start was rained out. Some reports had it that he even took the Lord’s name in vain, blaming Him of all people for the washout. Gil announced afterward that had he been able to work in his regular rotation that afternoon, he would have extended his shutout streak through those nine innings and on to the very end of the season. An outrageous claim, on the face of it, and yet there were those in the newsrooms, living rooms, and barrooms around this nation who believed him. As it was, even lacking his ‘fine edge,’ as he called it, he gave up only one run the next day, and never more than two in any game that year.

Around the league, at the start of that season, they would invariably begin to boo the headstrong nineteen-year-old when he stepped out of the Greenback dugout, but it did not appear to affect him any. ‘I never expect they are going to be very happy to see me heading out to the mound,’ he told reporters. ‘I wouldn’t be, if I was them.’ Yet once the game was over, it invariably required a police escort to get Gamesh back to the hotel, for the crowd that had hated him nine innings earlier for being so cocksure of himself, was now in the streets calling his name – adults screaming right along with kids – as though it was the Savior about to emerge from the visiting team clubhouse in a spiffy yellow linen suit and two-toned perforated shoes.

It surely seemed to the General that he could not have turned up in the league president’s box back of first at Greenback Stadium at a more felicitous moment. In 1933 just about everybody appeared to have become a Greenback fan, and the Patriot League pennant battle between the two Tri-City teams, the impeccably professional Tycoons, and the rough-and-tumble Greenbacks, made headlines East and West, and constituted just about the only news that didn’t make you want to slit your throat over the barren dinner table. Men out of work – and there were fifteen million of them across the land, men sick and tired of defeat and dying for a taste of victory, rich men who had become paupers overnight – would somehow scrape two bits together to come out and watch from the bleachers as a big unbeatable boy named Gil Gamesh did his stuff on the mound. And to the little kids of America, whose dads were on the dole, whose uncles were on the booze, and whose older brothers were on the bum, he was a living, breathing example of that hero of American heroes, the he-man, a combination of Lindbergh, Tarzan, and (with his long, girlish lashes and brilliantined black hair) Rudolph Valentino: brave, brutish, and a lady-killer, and in possession of a sidearm fastball that according to Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not’ could pass clear through a batter’s chest, come out his back, and still be traveling at ‘major league speed.’

What cooled the General’s enthusiasm for the boy wonder was the feud that erupted in the second month of the season between young Gil and Mike Masterson, and that ended in tragedy on the last day of the season. The grand old man of umpiring had been assigned by General Oakhart to follow the Greenbacks around the country, after it became evident that Gamesh was just too much for the other officials in the circuit to handle. The boy could be rough when the call didn’t go his way, and games had been held up for five and ten minutes at a time while Gamesh told the ump in question just what he thought of his probity, eyesight, physiognomy, parentage, and place of national origin. Because of the rookie’s enormous popularity, because of the records he was breaking in game after game, because many in the crowd had laid out their last quarter to see Gamesh pitch (and because they were just plain intimidated), the umps tended to tolerate from Gamesh what would have been inexcusable in a more mature, or less spectacular, player. This of course was creating a most dangerous precedent vis-à-vis the Rules and the Regulations, and in order to prevent the situation from getting completely out of hand, General Oakhart turned to the finest judge of a fastball in the majors, in his estimate the toughest, fairest official who ever wore blue, the man whose booming voice had earned him the monicker ‘the Mouth.’

‘I have been umpiring in the Patriot League since Dewey took Manila,’ Mike the Mouth liked to tell them on the annual banquet circuit, after the World Series was over. ‘I have rendered more than a million and a half decisions in that time, and let me tell you, in all those years I have never called one wrong, at least not in my heart. In my apprentice days down in the minors I was bombarded with projectiles from the stands, I was threatened with switchblades by coaches, and once a misguided manager fired upon me with a gun. This three-inch scar here on my forehead was inflicted by the mask of a catcher who believed himself wronged by me, and on my shoulders and my back I bear sixty-four wounds inflicted during those ‘years of trial’ by bottles of soda pop. I have been mobbed by fans so perturbed that when I arrived in the dressing room I discovered all the buttons had been torn from my clothing, and rotten vegetables had been stuffed into my trousers and my shirt. But harassed and hounded as I have been, I am proud to say that I have never so much as changed the call on a close one out of fear of the consequences to my life, my limbs, or my loved ones.’

This last was an allusion to the kidnapping and murder of Mike the Mouth’s only child, back in 1898, his first year up with the P. League. The kidnappers had entered Mike’s Wisconsin home as he was about to leave for the ball park to umpire a game between the Reapers and the visiting Rustlers, who were battling that season for the flag. Placing a gun to his little girl’s blond curls, the intruders told the young umpire that if the Reapers lost that afternoon, Mary Jane would be back in her high chair for dinner, unharmed. If however the Reapers should win for any reason, then Masterson could hold himself responsible for his darling child’s fate … Well, that game, as everyone knows, went on and on and on, before the Reapers put together two walks and a scratch hit in the bottom of the seventeenth to break the 3–3 tie and win by a run. In subsequent weeks, pieces of little Mary Jane Masterson were found in every park in the Patriot League.

It did not take but one pitch, of course, for Mike the Mouth to become the lifelong enemy of Gil Gamesh. Huge crowd, sunny days, flags snapping in the breeze, Gil winds up, kicks, and here comes that long left arm, America, around by way of the tropical Equator.

‘That’s a ball,’ thundered Mike, throwing his own left arm into the air (as if anybody in the ball park needed a sign when the Mouth was back of the plate).

‘A ball?’ cried Gamesh, hurling his glove twenty-five feet in the air. ‘Why, I couldn’t put a strike more perfect across the plate! That was right in there, you blind robber!’

Mike raised one meaty hand to stop the game and stepped out in front of the plate with his whisk broom. He swept the dust away meticulously, allowing the youth as much time as he required to remember where he was and whom he was talking to. Then he turned to the mound and said – in tones exceeding courteous – ‘Young fellow, it looks like you’ll be in the league for quite a while. That sort of language will get you nothing. Why don’t you give it up?’ And he stepped back into position behind the catcher. ‘Play!’ he roared.

On the second pitch, Mike’s left arm shot up again. ‘That’s two.’ And Gamesh was rushing him.

‘You cheat! You crook! You thief! You overage, overstuffed–’

‘Son, don’t say any more.’

‘And what if I do, you pickpocket?’

‘I will give you the thumb right now, and we will get on with the game of baseball that these people have paid good money to come out here today to see.’

‘They didn’t come out to see no baseball game, you idiot – they come out to see me!’

‘I will run you out of here just the same.’

‘Try it!’ laughed Gil, waving toward the stands where the Greenback fans were already on their feet, whooping like a tribe of Red Indians for Mike the Mouth’s scalp. And how could it be otherwise? The rookie had a record of fourteen wins and no losses, and it was not yet July. ‘Go ahead and try it,’ said Gil. ‘They’d mob you, Masterson. They’d pull you apart.’

‘I would as soon be killed on a baseball field,’ replied Mike the Mouth (who in the end got his wish), ‘as anywhere else. Now why don’t you go out there and pitch. That’s what they pay you to do.’

Smiling, Gil said, ‘and why don’t you go shit in your shoes.’

Mike looked as though his best friend had died; sadly he shook his head. ‘No, son, no, that won’t do, not in the Big Time.’ And up went the right thumb, an appendage about the size and shape of a nice pickle. Up it went and up it stayed, though for a moment it looked as though Gamesh, whose mouth had fallen open, was considering biting it off – it wasn’t but an inch from his teeth.

‘Leave the field, son. And leave it now.’

‘Oh sure,’ chuckled Gil, recovering his composure, ‘oh sure, leave the field in the middle of pitchin’ to the first batter,’ and he started back out to the mound, loping nonchalantly like a big boy in an open meadow, while the crowd roared their love right into his face. ‘Oh sure,’ he said, laughing like mad.

‘Son, either you go,’ Mike called after him, ‘or I forfeit this game to the other side.’

‘And ruin my perfect record?’ he asked, his hands on his hips in disbelief. ‘Oh sure,’ he laughed. Then he got back to business: sanding down the ball in his big calloused palms, he called to the batsman on whom he had a two ball count, ‘Okay, get in there, bud, and let’s see if you can get that gun off your shoulder.’

But the batter had hardly done as Gil had told him to when he was lifted out of the box by Mike the Mouth. Seventy-one years old, and a lifetime of being banged around, and still he just picked him up and set him aside like a paperweight. Then, with his own feet dug in, one on either side of home plate, he made his startling announcement to the sixty thousand fans in Greenback Stadium – the voice of Enrico Caruso could not have carried any more clearly to the corners of the outfield bleachers.

‘Because Greenback pitcher Gilbert Gamesh has failed to obey the order of the umpire-in-chief that he remove himself from the field of play, this game is deemed forfeited by a score of 9 to 0 to the opposing team, under rule 4.15 of the Official Baseball Rules that govern the playing of baseball games by the professional teams of the Patriot League of Professional Baseball Clubs.’

And jaw raised, arms folded, and legs astride home plate – according to Smitty’s column the next day, very like that Colossus at Rhodes – Mike the Mouth remained planted where he was, even as wave upon wave of wild men washed over the fences and onto the field.

And Gil Gamesh, his lips white with froth and his eagle eyes spinning in his skull, stood a mere sixty feet and six inches away, holding a lethal weapon in his hand.

‘You “done” it, young man,’ said General Oakhart, while in a double-breasted blue suit the same deep shade as his umpire togs, Mike the Mouth Masterson silently filled a chair by the trophy cabinet.

‘Youse!’

‘You.’

‘Youse!’

‘You.’

‘Stop saying “you” when I say “youse” – it was youse, and the whole country knows it too! You and that thief! Sittin’ there free as a bird, when he oughtta be in Sing Sing!’

Now the General’s decorations flashed into view as he raised himself from behind the desk. Wearing the ribbons and stars of a courageous lifetime, he was impressive as a ship’s figurehead – and of course he was still a powerfully built man, with a chest on him that might have been hooped around like a barrel. Indeed, the three men gathered together in the room looked as though they could have held their own against a team of horses, if they’d had to draw a brewery truck through the streets of Tri-City. No wonder that the day before, the mob that had pressed right up to his chin had fallen back from Mike the Mouth as he stood astride home plate like the Eighth Wonder of the World. Of course, ever since the murder of his child, not even the biggest numskull had dared to throw so much as a peanut shell at him from the stands; but neither did his bulk encourage a man to tread upon his toes.

‘Gamesh,’ said the General, swelling with righteousness, ‘no umpire in the history of this league has ever been found guilty of a single act of dishonesty or corruption. Or even charged with one. Remember that!’

‘But – my perfect record! He ruined it – forever! Now I’ll go down in the history books as someone who once lost! and I didn’t! I couldn’t! I can’t!’

‘And why can’t you, may I ask?’

‘Because I’m Gil Gamesh! I’m an immortal!’

‘I don’t care if you are Jesus Christ!’ barked the General. ‘There are Rules and Regulations in this world and you will follow them just like anybody else!’

‘And who made the rules?’ sneered Gamesh. ‘You? Or Scarface over there?’

‘Neither of us, young man. But we are here to see that they are carried out.’

‘And suppose I say the hell with you!’

‘Then you will be what is known as an outlaw.’

‘And? So? Jesse James was an outlaw. And he’s world-famous.’

‘True. But he did not pitch in the major leagues.’

‘He didn’t want to,’ sneered the young star.

‘But you do,’ replied General Oakhart, and, bewildered, Gamesh collapsed into a chair. It wasn’t just what he wanted to, it was all he wanted to do. It was what he was made to do.

‘But,’ he whimpered, ‘my perfect record.’

‘The umpire, in case it hasn’t occurred to you, has a record too. A record,’ the General informed him, ‘that must remain untainted by charges of favoritism or falsification. Otherwise there would not even be major league baseball contests in which young men like yourself could excel.’

‘But there ain’t no young men like myself,’ Gamesh whined. ‘There’s me, and that’s it.’

‘Gil …’ It was Mike the Mouth speaking. Off the playing field he had a voice like a songbird’s, so gentle and mellifluous that it could soothe a baby to sleep. And alas, it had, years and years ago … ‘Son, listen to me. I don’t expect that you are going to love me. I don’t expect that anybody in a ball park is going to care if I live or die. Why should they? I’m not the star. You are. The fans don’t go out to the ball park to see the Rules and the Regulations upheld, they go out to see the home team win. The whole world loves a winner, you know that better than anybody, but when it comes to an umpire, there’s not a soul in the ball park who’s for him. He hasn’t got a fan in the place. What’s more, he cannot sit down, he cannot go to the bathroom, he cannot get a drink of water, unless he visits the dugout, and that is something that any umpire worth his salt does not ever want to do. He cannot have anything to do with the players. He cannot fool with them or kid with them, even though he may be a man who in his heart likes a little horseplay and a joke from time to time. If he so much as sees a ballplayer coming down the street, he will cross over or turn around and walk the other way, so it will not look to passersby that anything is up between them. In strange towns, when the visiting players all buddy up in a hotel lobby and go out together for a meal in a friendly restaurant, he finds a room in a boarding house and eats his evening pork chop in a diner all alone. Oh, it’s a lonesome thing, being an umpire. There are men who won’t talk to you for the rest of your life. Some will even stoop to vengeance. But that is not your lookout, my boy. Nobody is twisting Masterson’s arm, saying, “Mike, it’s a dog’s life, but you are stuck with it.” No, it’s just this, Gil: somebody in this world has got to run the game. Otherwise, you see, it wouldn’t be baseball, it would be chaos. We would be right back where we were in the Ice Ages.’

‘The Ice Ages?’ said Gil, reflectively.

‘Exactly,’ replied Mike the Mouth.

‘Back when they was livin’ in caves? Back when they carried clubs and ate raw flesh and didn’t wear no clothes?’

‘Correct!’ said General Oakhart. ‘Well,’ cried Gil, ‘maybe we’d be better off!’ And kicking aside the newspapers with which he’d strewn the General’s carpet, he made his exit. Whatever it was he said to the General’s elderly spinster secretary out in the anteroom – instead of just saying ‘Good day’ – caused her to keel over unconscious.

‘Change in the line-up, Mike. That big apple knocker out there on the mound is batting ninth now on my card.’

To which Mike Masterson, master of scruple and decorum, replied, ‘Name?’

‘Boy named Gamesh,’ he shouted, to make himself heard above the pandemonium rising from the stands.

‘Spell it.’

‘Awww come on now, Michael.’

‘Spell it.’

‘G-a-m-e-s-h.’

‘First name?’

‘Gil. G as in Gorgeous. I as in Illustrious. L as in Larger-than-life.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mike the Mouth, and donning his mask, called, ‘Play!’

(‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was “Play!”’ Thus began the tribute to Mike Masterson, written the day the season ended in tragedy, in the column called ‘One Man’s Opinion.’)

The first Aceldama batsman stepped in. Without even taking the time to insult him, to mock him, to tease and to taunt him, without so much as half a snarl or the crooked smile, Gamesh pitched the ball, which was what they paid him to do.

‘Strike-ah-one!’ roared Mike.

The catcher returned the ball to Gamesh, and again, impersonal as a machine and noiseless as a snake, Gamesh did his chorus girl kick, and in no time at all the second pitch passed through what might have been a tunnel drilled for it by the first.

‘Strike-ah-two!’

On the third pitch, the batter (who appeared to have no more idea where the ball might be than some fellow who wasn’t even at the ball park) swung and wound up on his face in the dust. ‘Musta dropped,’ he told the worms.

‘Strike-ah-three – you’re-out!’

‘Next!’ Gamesh called, and the second man in a Butcher uniform stepped up.

‘Strike-ah-one!’

‘Strike-ah-two!’

‘Strike-ah-three – you’re out!’

So life went – cruelly, but swiftly – for the Aceldama hitters for eight full innings. ‘Next!’ called Gamesh, and gave each the fastest shave and haircut on record. Then with a man out on strikes in the top of the ninth, and 0 and 2 on the hitter – and the fans so delirious that after each Aceldama batter left the chair, they gave off an otherworldly, practically celestial sound, as though together they constituted a human harp that had just been plucked – Gamesh threw the ball too low. Or so said the umpire behind the plate, who supposedly was in a position to know.

‘That’s one!’

Yes, Gil Gamesh was alleged by Mike the Mouth Masterson to have thrown a ball – after seventy-seven consecutive strikes.

‘Well,’ sighed the Old Philosopher, down in the Greenback dugout, ‘here comes the end of the world.’ He pulled out his pocket watch, seemingly taking some comfort in its precision. ‘Yep, at 2:59 P.M. on Wednesday, June 16, 1933. Right on time.’

Out on the diamond, Gil Gamesh was fifteen feet forward from the rubber, still in the ape-like crouch with which he completed his big sidearm motion. In their seats the fans surged upwards as though in anticipation of Gil’s bounding into the air and landing in one enormous leap on Mike the Mouth’s blue back. Instead, he straightened up like a man – a million years of primate evolution passing instantaneously before their eyes – and there was that smile, that famous crooked smile. ‘Okay,’ he called down to his catcher, Pineapple Tawhaki, ‘throw it here.’

‘But – holy aloha!’ cried Pineapple, who hailed from Honolulu, ‘he call ball, Gilly!’

Gamesh spat high and far and watched the tobacco juice raise the white dust on the first-base foul line. He could hit anything with anything, that boy. ‘Was a ball.’

‘Was?’ Pineapple cried.

‘Yep. Low by the hair off a little girl’s slit, but low.’ And spat again, this time raising chalk along third. ‘Done it on purpose, Pineapple. Done it deliberate.’

‘Holy aloha!’ the mystified catcher groaned – and fired the ball back to Gil. ‘How-why-ee?’

‘So’s to make sure,’ said Gil, his voice rising to a piercing pitch, ‘so’s to make sure the old geezer standin’ behind you hadn’t fell asleep at the switch! JUST TO KEEP THE OLD SON OF A BITCH HONEST!’

‘One and two,’ Mike roared. ‘Play!’

‘JUST SO AS TO MAKE CLEAR ALL THE REST WAS EARNED!’

‘BECAUSE I DON’T WANT NOTHIN’ FOR NOTHIN’ FROM YOUSE! I DON’T NEED IT! I’M GIL GAMESH! I’M AN IMMORTAL, WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!’

‘PLAY BAWWWWWWWWWW!’

Had he ever been more heroic? More gloriously contemptuous of the powers-that-be? Not to those fans of his he hadn’t. They loved him even more for that bad pitch, deliberately thrown a fraction of a fraction of an inch too low, than for the seventy-seven dazzling strikes that had preceded it. The wickedly accurate pitching machine wasn’t a machine at all – no, he was a human being, made of piss and vinegar, like other human beings. The arm of a god, but the disposition of the Common Man: petty, grudging, vengeful, gloating, selfish, narrow, and mean. How could they not adore him?

His next pitch was smacked three hundred and sixty-five feet off the wall in left-center field for a double.

Much as he hated to move his rheumatism to and fro like this, the Old Philosopher figured it was in the interest of the United States of America, of which he had been a lifelong citizen, for him to trek out to the mound and offer his condolences to the boy.

‘Those things happen, lad; settle down.’

‘That robber! That thief! That pickpocket!’

‘Mike Masterson didn’t hit it off you – you just dished up a fat pitch. It could happen to anyone.’

‘But not to me! It was on account of my rhythm bein’ broke! On account of my fine edge bein’ off!’

‘That wasn’t his doin’ either, boy. Throwin’ that low one was your own smart idea. See this fella comin’ up? He can strong-back that pelota right outta here. I want for you to put him on.’

‘No!’

‘Now do like I tell you, Gil. Put him on. It’ll calm you down, for one, and set up the d.p. for two. Let’s get out of this inning the smart way.’

But when the Old Philosopher departed the mound, and Pineapple stepped to the side of the plate to give Gamesh a target for the intentional pass, the rookie sensation growled, ‘Get back where you belong, you Hawaiian hick.’

‘But,’ warned the burly catcher, running halfway to the mound, ‘he say put him on, Gilly!’

‘Don’t you worry, Oahu, I’ll put him on all right.’

‘How?’

Gil grinned.

The first pitch was a fastball aimed right at the batter’s mandible. In the stands, a woman screamed – ‘He’s a goner!’ but down went the Aceldama player just in the nick of time.

‘That’s one!’ roared Mike.

The second pitch was a second fastball aimed at the occipital. ‘My God,’ screamed the woman, ‘it killed him!’ But miracle of miracles, the batter in the dust was seen to move.

‘That’s two!’ roared Mike, and calling time, came around to do some tidying up around home plate. And to chat awhile. ‘Ball get away from you?’ he asked Gamesh, while sweeping away with his broom.

Gamesh spat high in the air back over his shoulder, a wad that landed smack in the middle of second base, right between the feet of the Aceldama runner standing up on the bag.

‘Nope.’

‘Then, if you don’t mind my asking, how do you explain nearly taking this man’s head off two times in a row?’

‘Ain’t you never heard of the intentional pass?’

‘Oh no. Oh no, not that way, son,’ said Mike the Mouth. ‘Not in the Big Time, I’m afraid.’

‘Play!’ screeched Gamesh, mocking the umpire’s foghorn, and motioned him back behind the plate where he belonged. ‘Ump, Masterson, that’s what they pay you to do.’

‘Now listen to me Gil,’ said Mike. ‘If you want to put this man on intentionally, then pitch out to him, in the time-honored manner. But don’t make him go down again. We’re not barbarians in this league. We’re men, trying to get along.’

‘Speak for yourself, Mouth. I’m me.’

The crowd shrieked as at a horror movie when the third pitch left Gil’s hand, earmarked for the zygomatic arch. And Mike the Mouth, even before making his call, rushed to kneel beside the man spread across the plate, to touch his wrist and see if he was still alive. Barely, barely.

‘That’s three!’ Mike roared to the stands. And to Gamesh – ‘And that’s it!’

‘What’s it?’ howled Gamesh. ‘He ducked, didn’t he? He got out of the way, didn’t he? You can’t give me the thumb – I didn’t even nick him!’

‘Thanks to his own superhuman effort. His pulse is just about beating. It’s a wonder he isn’t lying there dead.’

‘Well,’ answered Gamesh, with a grin, ‘that’s his lookout.’

‘No, son, no, it is mine.’