Dead Ball

by R. D. Rosen

  For the first time in a while, Harvey remembered what it was like to stand three hundred feet from home plate and pick up the flight of a ball the instant it came off the bat, how it felt to be connected by a thread of pure desire to that sphere as it rose and cleared the background of the upper deck, arching against the summer night sky as he sprinted deep into right center, Harvey already knowing, with a certainty that was wholly lacking in his present life, that he would consume the ball in full stride a few feet from the warning track and feel the warmth of the fans’ applause on the back of his uniform jersey as he loped, full of humble triumph, back to the dugout.

  Harvey bit off the corner of a tortilla chip and chewed it thoughtfully. He had the sinking feeling he was about to push himself off the end of the plank, into his shark-infested future.

  IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT by the time Moss Cooley turned into the dapper development in western Cranston where he’d bought a seven-thousand-square-foot home over the winter after signing his new deal with the Providence Jewels. He was the only black man in Roger Williams Estates, a distinction that added a tincture of guilt to his love of the house and its amenities. The truth was, his neighbors left him alone, a courtesy for which he was grateful now that he had to spend two or three hours a day talking to reporters and evaluating endorsement offers. He had helped beat the Baltimore Orioles this evening by sending a hanging curve into the Providence bullpen, making him the sole owner of the second-longest hitting streak in major-league baseball history. Forty-five straight games.

  He looked at his hands on the steering wheel and tried to remember what they had been like when he was a scrawny kid hitting rocks into the clover field behind his house with a broom handle. Now his hands, and the thick wrists to which they were attached, had entered history. Sports Illustrated had compared them to Hank Aaron’s. He smiled at the absurdity of it all. He couldn’t wait to call his mama. She’d still be up waiting to hear from him. When he was ten and newly cut from his Little League team, she had paid a personal visit to Coach Lloyd and browbeat him into taking her little Maurice back. “My boy has greatness in him,” she told Lloyd, as she reported to her son years later. “He has greatness in him, and I won’t have that greatness sitting around the house all summer, moping and getting into what-all kind of trouble.”

  As he pulled into the driveway, past the parched lawn beyond the redemption of sprinklers, he wondered if he was in any kind of trouble now. The hate mail didn’t faze him, even the worst of it. You reached a certain prominence, and that was part of your job—providing a target for the ranting of unhappy people. As his mama liked to say, “Don’t you make other people’s unhappiness your business.” Just like there were some folks who had to get in the TV shot, mugging and waving like anyone gave a shit, there were a certain number of people in America who just had to write you a letter telling you what a black cocksucker you were.

  But the lawn jockey last night had thrown a scare into him. It was different, he thought as he pushed the button for the garage door and waited for it to complete its slow ascent. It had taken more than a 34-cent stamp and a trip to the mailbox to get it to him.

  He started to pull his Range Rover into the rightmost bay, next to the mint-condition 1979 Caddy he had bought for the simple reason that he could afford to and that it was the car he had wanted most when he was a child, watching Dr. Drexel cruise around the town of Starrett in his.

  Because he was lost in thought, and because he was admiring the Caddy, he was halfway into the garage before he saw it. He applied the brakes. Had he not, it would have hit the windshield.

  It had been tied to a piece of twine and hung from the garage ceiling. It dangled in midair, eyes bulging, swaying slightly now in the entering breeze.

  2

  IT WAS THE INSTANT you crossed the border from life’s chaos to baseball’s magnificent green order. It was the moment that baseball writers fell back on when fresher metaphors escaped them—and yet, there it was, it couldn’t be denied that the game’s divinity was somehow contained in it. You came up the sloped stadium ramp toward your seat, seeing only sky and perhaps a light tower or a fragment of scoreboard, and as you got closer, the field itself seemed to rise up to meet you. At the crest of the ramp, you stopped, startled by the vivid grass, the scope of the park, the immortal discipline of the diamond. And if it’s a night game and the summer sky is turning that bottomless, evening blue, you would be forgiven for thinking that God’s a fan.

  When Harvey came up the ramp of the jam-packed Jewel Box, né Rankle Park, he was stung by a sadness that this beautiful game had gone on without him. Baseball was an archetype, an institution through whose turnstiles he had come to play his small historical role before being ejected back into the world. And now he was back as just another fan. Or rather, a motivational coach, whatever the hell that was.

  As he looked for an usher to give him directions to the owner’s box, he took in the new, improved home of the American League East’s Providence Jewels. The charming irregularities that highly paid design and architectural firms had created from scratch with the new generation of retro ballparks in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Houston, Pro-Gem Palace had achieved as the result of a long organic process. When the expansion Jewels had first moved in sixteen years ago, Rankle Park was a former minor-league park, a steel, brick, and concrete affair down by India Point on the Providence River. It looked like the deformed offspring of a World War II battleship and a nineteenth-century mental hospital. In the years since, owner Marshall Levy had made improvements, culminating in a $30 million facelift. Levy had added new seats, a big scoreboard with all the trimmings, and a grassy knoll beyond the left-center-field fence where fans could put out blankets and picnic. No amount of refurbishing, however, could conceal the fact that the stadium was a hodgepodge. But it conformed to the current vogue for asymmetry, and The Jewel Box was included in any discussion of baseball’s architectural treasures.

  Harvey was watching the Jewels warm up on the field below when an usher wearing a hunter green jacket with silver epaulettes asked to see his ticket. When Harvey showed him his pass to the owner’s box, the man said, “Well, well—give my regards to the boss,” and pointed a bony forefinger back up the ramp toward a private elevator.

  When he arrived at owner Marshall Levy’s skybox high above the field, both Levy and general manager Felix Shalhoub rose from their upholstered chairs to greet him. Levy, with his big features, even tan, and good head of hair, didn’t look like a man in his seventies. His Pro-Gem Inc., the last surviving big costume jewelry manufacturer in Rhode Island, had expanded into picture frames and automotive dashboard trim, and his success had helped him patiently nurse the Jewels to good fiscal health after the rough, noncompetitive years. Personally and professionally, he knew how to survive in style.

  “Gosh, you look good,” Marshall said, pumping Harvey’s hand.

  “And look at you,” Harvey said.

  “Professor, you can’t be more than a couple pounds over your playing weight,” Felix said with equal charity, embracing him in a bear hug. Felix had lost weight, and although well into his sixties by now, looked healthier in his Italian sport coat and salt-and-pepper crew cut than when he’d managed Harvey. While Felix had been an indifferent, at times pathetic manager, executive life seemed to agree with him. The bumbling was gone, replaced by something approximating dignity. He laughed heartily, advertising capped teeth. “Why, I’ll bet I could put you in center field right now. And I’ve half a mind to do just that. Andy Cubberly can’t buy a hit. It’s like Moss has stolen all his luck the last few weeks.”

  Cubberly. The name meant nothing to Harvey. Just another name clogging the box scores he only glanced at. “If it’s all right with you,” he said, “I’d just as soon sit up here and enjoy the view.”

  Owner Marshall Levy chortled. “Well, you can see what we’ve done with the old sandlot, Professor.”

  “Amazing. A true baseball palace
.”

  “We exceed every requirement of the Americans with Disabilities Act. You can take your wheelchair everywhere in this place. How about the new unies?”

  “Outstanding.”

  “We’ve got alternative ones for both home and road. We put in twenty-four fully equipped hospitality suites. We’re completely up to speed, and we’re pulling people in from all over Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, southern Massachusetts. We’ve become a real regional draw, Harvey, and with the sixth lowest payroll in the league. Not bad for one of these old mill cities. Heck, we got Brown and RISD kids walking over from College Hill to get away from their books.” Marshall could sound more like a brochure than any man Harvey knew.

  Harvey helped himself to a boiled shrimp from the little buffet. “Can’t hurt that Cooley’s closing in on DiMaggio.”

  “Can’t hurt?” Felix said. “It’s the goddamn Second Coming. I’ve got a good feeling about this streak.”

  A greet cheer arose from the stands, and Harvey turned and looked through the skybox Plexiglas to see the Jewels taking the field in their brilliant white uniforms trimmed in the team’s color scheme—hunter green and orange. He watched the center fielder jog out to his old hunting grounds—Harvey could barely make out the “Cubberly” on the back of the jersey—and begin trading long easy throws with Moss Cooley in left. Harvey’s stomach tingled with the memory of that pregame excitement; funny how the physical memory had been stored, perfectly preserved, inside him. From the facing of the left-field upper deck hung a sign that read, “HEY, MOSS! 46 WOULD DO THE TRIX!” The press enclosures next to each dugout were teeming, like refugee lifeboats, with photographers. From the skybox, Harvey could see a slice of glittering Narragansett Bay over the center-field bleachers. A fat Fuji blimp plowed the evening sky. It seemed like the whole world had descended on Providence, Rhode Island.

  “Wouldn’t it be super if he actually did it?” Marshall asked.

  “Obviously you don’t believe in jinxes,” Harvey said.

  “You mean that business of not talking about it? I don’t believe in jinxes, Harvey. I believe in preparation. Chance favors a prepared mind, and a prepared bat.”

  “Just don’t get your hopes up,” Harvey said.

  “Why not?” Marshall asked.

  “This guy Ed Purcell, Nobel laureate in physics,” Harvey said, selecting a cherrystone on the half shell, “he studied all streaks and slumps in major-league baseball history and concluded that DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak was the only sequence that is so many standard deviations above the expected that, according to him, it should never have happened in the first place. He called it an ‘assault on probability.’ How many players have even hit in as many as thirty-seven straight games in the recorded history of baseball? I’ll tell you. Eight. Nine with Cooley now.”

  Marshall eyed him suspiciously. “You just know that?”

  “There’s not a savvy baseball student alive who doesn’t think the streak is the single greatest athletic accomplishment ever,” Harvey went on. “Twenty years ago Tversky—at Stanford—proved that hot streaks—whether you’re a player or a team—are an illusion. The probability, that is, of getting a hit in your next game is not in the least increased by your success getting hits in previous games, no matter how many straight previous games. Statistically speaking, there is no such thing as momentum. Every streak is essentially a random fluctuation of the statistical norm. Every game, every at-bat, you’re starting over with the same allies—your skill and your luck. Okay, now, DiMaggio had the benefit of a break or two during his streak. I think there were a couple games in which his only hit was a cheapie. Plus he got a few sweet calls from the official scorer. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that the three hits he got in game four of the streak were all suspect. And a dubious call in his favor saved his ass once in Chicago. Nonetheless, DiMaggio’s streak was made possible by some sort of divine intervention or cosmic oversight. Plain skill, enhanced by luck, can’t begin to explain it.

  “Look,” Harvey said, gesturing with a johnnycake, “just think about it. A hitting streak flies in the face of baseball’s basic irrationality. Unlike home runs. Home runs are rational. If you hit the ball far enough and fair enough, it’s a home run—and even that is subject to the variables of different ballparks. But getting base hits is not the inevitable outcome of either force or distance. You know, you can hit it a ton to deep center for a four-hundred-foot out, or nick it for an excuse-me single that rolls thirty feet up the line.”

  “But you’ve got to have consistency of contact,” Marshall suggested.

  “Absolutely,” Harvey agreed. “You start there. But a lot of players have that. Low strikeout average, high-percentage hitters, always getting wood on the ball. How come more of them haven’t hit in even thirty straight games? There’s just too much damn luck involved. Too many variables. The location of the pitch, the positioning of the defense, outfield distances, the degree of bat-on-ball contact, the length of the grass, the wind, the barometric pressure. Injuries. Over the long haul—over a season—sure, Tony Gwynn’s going to bat three hundred, but get a hit in thirty, let alone fifty-six straight games? You need more than talent on your side. More than the umpire and the official scorer. You need God.”

  “Always the Professor,” Felix said. “Always thinking.”

  Harvey felt a rush of shame. The truth was that, once roused by Felix’s call the previous afternoon, he had phoned his brother Norm, renowned baseball nerd and now chairman of Northwestern’s English Department, to discuss Cooley’s hitting streak. As usual, Norm was off and running. Purcell, Tversky, deviations from the statistical norm—all the erudition was his older brother’s. Too late now to give credit where it was due. “I’ll bet you a thousand bucks right now Cooley doesn’t even get to fifty,” Harvey’s only sibling had concluded. “DiMaggio’s streak was a once-in-an-eon event, just like your relationship with Mickey. What is it now—fifteen years, and you’re still not married? Talk about streaks.”

  “Can I have something to drink?” Harvey said. If streaks and slumps were illusions, what explained the fact that he was having the psychological equivalent of a fifty-six-game batting slump? He felt many standard deviations below the expected for days spent in a really bad mood.

  “What’ll it be?” Felix asked, just as the PA announcer asked everyone to rise for the national anthem.

  “Beer’s fine.” Harvey saw Felix turn and mumble something to a black steward in a white shirt and tie lurking in the doorway of the skybox.

  When the anthem had been sung, the drinks came, and the three men settled into the nubbly chairs facing the field. Marshall Levy was drinking Scotch on the rocks, and Felix was sucking Canada Dry ginger ale from the bottle.

  “Where’s your beer?” Harvey asked him.

  “I’ve been in recovery for almost twelve years, Professor.”

  “I didn’t know. Congratulations.” Harvey flashed on Felix pounding down the Genesee Cream Ales in his little clubhouse office loss after loss.

  “First I ended my relationship with my wife, then my relationship with booze.”

  “Good for you,” Harvey said, referring to both the booze and the former Frances Shalhoub.

  The PA announcer announced Baltimore’s lead-off hitter, a lithe little lefty, and Marshall said, “Speaking of Joe DiMaggio, you know his brother Dom was called ‘Little Professor’? I guess ’cause of the glasses.”

  “Must be a hundred ballplayers had the nickname, Marshall. All you have to do is look like you can read and write.”

  Felix belched. “If I’m not mistaken, you actually used to read whole books.”

  “Still do, Felix. Bad habits die hard. As you know.”

  At the crack of the bat, Harvey looked up to see a liner off the lead-off hitter’s bat slice down the left-field line, where Moss Cooley, moving well for a big man, made a nice backhanded running catch. The Jumbotron reacted to Cooley’s catch with a prerecorded voice that y
elled “Priceless!” and a blinking, expanding and contracting message that read, “Y’ALL BE COOL!”

  “Yes!” shouted Marshall, pumping his fist. “I love the fact we’ve got Cool for four more years. The Beast of the East! The Big Green Machine!”

  “That’s a very hyperactive scoreboard you got there, Marshall.”

  “Worth every penny!”

  How strange, Harvey thought, that in this dark corner of New England there had arisen the possibility of baseball greatness and posterity in the sculpted form of Maurice “Moss” Cooley, of Starrett, Alabama, a newly re-signed, twenty-seven-year-old left fielder whose highest batting average in three years with the Jewels had been .314 and who until now had never hit safely in more than twelve consecutive games. His forty-five-game streak—this extremely rare union of skill and prolonged good fortune—had separated him from the ranks of baseball’s mere mortals. Moss Cooley had given baseball fans everywhere a new reason for living. This was baseball at its best, gathering up all the loose ends of human aspiration, the bits of excitement that life had sloughed off, all the misplaced enthusiasm in millions of American lives, and shaping it into one huge, hard, shiny hope.

  The next Oriole grounded out to second.

  “Moss is getting quieter the longer this goes on,” Felix said.

  “He’s probably just trying to protect himself from the media,” Harvey suggested while watching the Providence starting pitcher, someone named Clark Pevere, landscape the rubber with the toe of his right shoe.

  “Well, hell yes, there’s that,” Felix said. “It’s like being followed around by a pack of annoying little dogs. That’s what Moss calls ’em: the Chihuahuas. They’ve been nipping at his ankles since the streak hit twenty-five.”

  Harvey nodded. “The media makes everything harder. Makes it harder to operate in your own sphere.”

  “DiMaggio had the media,” Felix said.