by Philip Roth
“But I ain’t got no children—or children’s children. I swear!”
“Roland Agni, if you make a deal to be traded you will have to make it with the enemies of the United States, as an enemy of the United States. However, if you care more for your country than for yourself, you will play ball not with the Communists, but with the Ruppert Mundys!”
“But you could win the pennant, Mrs. Trust—”
“And enslave mankind in the bargain? You must be mad!”
* * *
As usual in Tri-City, while the Tycoons battled to win the flag, across town the team once considered their rivals, if not in league standings then in the hearts of the local fans, made their annual attempt to climb out of the second division and finish in the money. It was a feat that the Greenbacks had not managed yet in the years since Gil Gamesh and the Whore House Gang had been driven from the league, not even when they won more games than they lost. Eager and accomplished as the players might be, invariably they began to falter in August, and by the season’s end the team was firmly ensconced in fifth or sixth. At first glance it seemed (to the moralists, that is) that the scandals that had destroyed the fiery Greenback teams of ’33 and ’34 had left behind “a legacy of shame” which inevitably eroded the confidence of newcomers to the club, just as it had poisoned the spirit of the veterans of those unfortunate years. Comparison had only to be made to what had befallen the Chicago White Sox of the American League, after it was discovered at the tail-end of the 1920 season that the pennant-winning 1919 team, the team of Shoeless Joe Jackson and Eddie Cicotte, had thrown the World Series to Cincinnati: as all the world knows, it was sixteen years before the demoralized White Sox finished in the first division again.
Popular as such explanations proved to be with the punitive masses, those inside the game suggested that what stood between these perfectly competent Greenback teams and a first division finish was really the odd family who were now the Greenback owners. In actuality, none of the rookies who joined the club after the ’34 season ever appeared at the outset to be intimidated by the team’s scandalous past; the youngsters were mostly country kids, and when a Greenback scout appeared in the midst of the Depression with a fistful of bills and a big league contract, they grinned for the camera, and right out there in the pasture, beside their overalled dads, signed on the dotted line. How were they to know, those eager innocent kids and their impoverished dirt farmer dads, that when the rookie got up north to Tri-City to meet the owner, he would turn out to be a Jew, an oily, overweight, excitable little Jew, whose words came thick and fast from his mouth, in sentences the likes of which none of them had ever heard before. Down on the farm a pig was a pig and a cow was a cow—whoever heard of a Jew with the same name as an island in New York harbor? A real Goldberg—only called Ellis!
“De immigration took one look at de real name,” explained the Greenback owner to the farmboy who sat before him, his cardboard suitcase in his lap and tears of disappointment in his eyes, “and dat vas dat. Vee vuz Ellis.”
“But…” the rookie stammered.
“But vat? Speak up. Dun’ be shy.”
“Well, sir … well, I don’t think … well, that you is what my daddy and me had in mind.”
“I ain’t vat my daddy and me had in mind needer, Slugger. But dis is de land of opportunities.”
“But—what kind of opportunity,” the boy blurted out, “is playin’ big league ball for a Jew!”
Ellis shrugged; sarcastically he said, “A vunz in a lifetime. Okay? Now, vipe de tears and go put on de uniform. Let’s take a look on you, all dressed up.”
Reluctantly, the boy changed out of his threadbare church suit and his frayed white shirt into a fresh Greenback home uniform. “Nice,” Ellis said, smiling, “very nice.”
“Ain’t the seat kind a’ baggy?”
“The seat I can take in.”
“And the waist—”
“De vaist I can fix, please. I’m talkin’ general appearance. Sarah,” he called, “come look at de new second-base-man.”
A roundish woman, her hair up in a bun and wearing an apron, came into the office, bucket and mop in hand.
“Vat do you t’ink?” he asked his wife.
She nodded her head, approvingly. “It’s him.”
“Toin aroun’,” said Ellis, “show her from de beck.”
The rookie turned.
“It’s him,” said Mrs. Ellis. “Even the number is him.”
“But—but how about down here, M’am,” asked the rookie, “in the seat here—?”
“Dun’ vurry vit de seat,” said Ellis. “De important t’ing is de shoulder. If it fits in de shoulder, it fits.”
The rookie squirmed inside the suit, miserable as he could be.
“Go ahead, sving. Take a cut—be sure you got room. I don’t vant it should pinch in de shoulder.”
The rookie pretended to swing. “It don’t,” he admitted.
“Good! Vundaful! She’ll pin de seat and de vaist, and you’ll pick up Vensday.”
“Wednesday? What about tomorrow?”
“Please, she already got t’ree rookies came in yesterday. Vensday! Now, how about a nice pair of spikes?”
Dear Paw [the letters went, more or less] we bin trikt. The owner here is a ju. He lives over the skorbord in rite so he can keep his i on the busnez. To look at him cud make you cry like it did me just from lookin. A reel Nu York ju like you heer about down home. It just aint rite Paw. It aint big leeg like I expeck atal. But worse of all is the sun. Another ju. A 7 yr old boy who is a Gene Yuss. Izik. He duz not even go to skule he is that much of a Gene Yuss. His i cue is 424 same exack as Wee Willie Keeler hit in ’97. Only it aint base hits but brains. Paw he trys to manig the team. A seven yr old. It just aint what we had in mind is it Paw. What shud I do now. Yor sun Slugger.
Isaac. There (according to those in the know) was precisely what had stood between the Greenbacks and the first division all these years. In the end most of the players could swallow being fathered and mothered by the Ellises—but that crazy little genius kid of theirs, this Isaac, with his charts, his tables, his graphs, his calculations, his formulae—with his ideas! According to him, every way they had of playing baseball in the majors before he came along was absolutely wrong. The sacrifice bunt is wrong. The intentional pass is wrong. With less than two outs the hit-and-run is preferable to hitting away, regardless of who is at the plate. “Oh yeah?” the players would say, “and just how’d you figure that one out, Izzy?” Whereupon the seven-year-old would extract his clip-on fountain pen from his shirt pocket, and set out to show them how on his pad of yellow paper.
“First off, you must understand that the hit-and-run is the antithesis of the sacrifice bunt, a maneuver utterly without value, which by my calculations results in a loss of seventy-two runs over the season. I calculate this loss by the following formula,” and here he wrote on the paper which he held up for them to see—
1Ys = 5.4376 CRy + .2742 = .4735
“On the other hand,” said Isaac, “compare the total runs scored by hitting away versus the hit-and-run, which of course is your remaining alternative with a man on base. As you can see from the graph—” Shuffling through his briefcase, he came up with a chart, prepared on the cardboard from a laundered shirt, a maze of intersecting lines, each carefully labeled in block letters, “CRy performance,” “Ys probability,” “probable total DG attempts,” etc.—“as you can see, wherein the broken line represents hitting away—”
“Uh-huh,” said the ballplayers, winking at one another, “oh, sure, clear as day—you’re a real smart little tyke, Izzy—” they said, signaling with an index finger to the temple that actually in their estimation the child was a little touched in the head.
“If then,” concluded Isaac, “the hit-and-run were employed at four times the ordinary frequency of the sacrifice bunt, we could anticipate another sixty-five to seventy-five runs per year for the Greenbacks. Now you ask, what are the cons
equences in the standings of these sixty-five to seventy-five runs per year for the Greenbacks? Let us look at Table 11, which I have here, keeping in mind as we do that of course the fundamental equation for winning a baseball game is 1 Y = (Rw) (Pb/Pd).”
But by now most of his audience would have drifted away, some to the batting cage, others off to sprint and shag flies in the outfield, and so Isaac would pack his briefcase, and with his pad under his arm, wander down to the bullpen to give the day’s lesson to the utility catchers and relief pitchers. He removed a cardboard from his briefcase and attempted to pass it among them. It read—
“Aww, what the hell is that, Izzy?” they said, handing it right back.
“A formula I’ve prepared to tell how much a ball will curve. Don’t you think that is something you ought to be familiar with?”
“Well, we is already, kid—so go on out of here.”
“All right, if that is the case, what does d stand for?”
“Doggie. Now get out. Scat.”
“d equals displacement from a straight line.”
“Oh sure it does, everybody knows that.”
“Or should,” said Isaac, “if they pretend to any knowledge whatsoever of the game. How about ‘L?”
Silence. Weary silence.
“‘L equals the circulation of the air generated by friction when the ball is spinning,” said Isaac. “And P equals the density of the air, of course—normal at .002–.378. V equals the speed of the ball, t equals the time for delivery. And g equals the acceleration of gravity—32.2 feet per second per second. C equals—well, you tell me. What does C equal?”
“Cat,” they said, as though the joke were on him.
“Wrong. C equals the circumference of the ball—9 inches. And W? What about W?”
“W is for Watch Your Little Ass, sonny,” whispered a rookie, in disgust.
“No, W equals the ball’s weight, which is .3125 pound. 7230 relates other values of pounds, inches, feet, seconds, and so forth, to arrive at an answer in feet.”
“Yeah? And so what! What of it!”
“Only that I know whereof I speak, gentlemen. You must believe me. If only you would cease being slaves to the tired, conventional, and wholly speculative strategies of the game as it has been mistakenly played these fifty years, and would apply the conclusions I have reached by the mathematical analysis of the official statistics, you could add three hundred runs to the team’s total production, thus lifting the Tri-City Greenbacks from fifth to first. Your conclusions are based on nothing but traditional misconceptions; mine are developed from the two fundamental theorems of the laws of chance, proposed by Pascal in the seventeenth century. Now, if you will agree to be patient, I am willing to try once again—”
“Well, we ain’t! Get lost, Quiz Kid! This is a game for men, not boys!”
“If I may, it is ‘a game’ for neither. It is an applied science and should be approached as such.”
“F off, Isaac! F-U-C-K off, if you know what that equals!”
As the seasons passed, and Isaac developed into even more of a genius than he had been when he first came to the Greenbacks at the age of seven, relations with his father’s team became increasingly bitter; having confirmed his theories over the years by subjecting the entire canon of baseball records to statistical analysis, he found he no longer had the patience to explain ad infinitum to these nincompoops why they were playing the game all wrong. The antagonism he had had to face in his first years in the majors had hardened him considerably, and by the age of ten the charming pedantry and professional thoroughness of the seven-year-old (who had deemed it necessary to convince as much by his eloquence as by the facts and the figures) had given way to a strident and demanding manner that did not serve to endear him to players two and three times his own age. For this tone he now regularly took toward the Greenback regulars, he more than once had been rewarded with a wad of tobacco juice. “I’ll worry about why, you idiot—just do as I say! You wouldn’t understand why if I told you—which I have anyway, a thousand times. Just no more sacrifice bunts! Because what you are sacrificing is sixty-two runs a year! When he says bunt, I want the hit-and-run! Do you understand that? Do not bunt under any circumstances. Hit-and—” And just about then came the tobacco juice, a neat stream, or a dripping wad, expertly placed right down through his open mouth, putting that voice box of his out of commission, at least for a time.
“Isaac,” said his father, “I’m payink a high-class baseball manager fifteen t’ousand dollars a year, dat he should tell dem to bunt, dat behind his back, you should tell dem hit-and-run?”
“But I am a mathematical genius!”
“And he is a baseball genius!”
“He is a baseball ignoramus. They all are!”
“And so who should be de manager, Isaac—you? At de ripe age of ten!”
“Age has nothing to do with it! We are talking about conclusions I have reached through the scientific method!”
“Enough vit dat method! You ain’ gung to manage a major leek team at age ten—and dat’s dat!”
“But if I did, we would be in first place within a month!”
“And day vud t’row me from de leek so fast you vud’n know vat hit you! Isaac, day ain’ lookin’ already for some-t’ink day could tell me goodbye and good riddintz? Huh? Day ain’ sorry enough day let a Jew in to begin vit, now I got to give dem new ammunition to t’row me out on my ear? Listen to me, Isaac: I didn’t buy no baseball team juss for my own healt’—I bought it for yours! So you could grow up in peace an American boy! So ven came time to give it to de Jews again, day couldn’t come around to my door! Isaac, dis is a business vere you could grow up safe and sound! Jewish geniuses, go look how long is de average life span in a pogrom! But own a big leek team, my son, and you ain’ got for to vurry never again!”
“But what good is a big league team if the big league team plays the game all wrong!”
“In your eyes all wrong. But not to de big leekers! Isaac, please, if de goyim say bunt, let dem bunt!”
“But the hit-and-run—”
“Svallow de hit-and-run! Forget de hit-and-run! It ain’ de vay day do here!”
“But the way they do it here is wrong!”
“But here is vere it comes from!”
“But I can prove they’re wrong SCIENTIFICALLY!”
“You’re such a genius, do me a favor, prove day’re right!”
“But that’s not what geniuses do!”
“I dun care about de oder geniuses! I only care about you! Dis is big leek baseball, Isaac—vat vuz here for a t’ousand years already! Leaf vell enough alone!” And here he related to Isaac yet again the long, miserable story of anti-Semitism; he told him of murder and pillage and rape, of peasants and Cossacks and crusaders and kings, all of whom had oppressed the Jewish people down through the ages. Only in America, he said, could a Jew rise to such heights! Only in America could a Jew ever hope to become the owner of a major league baseball team!
“That’s because they only have baseball in America,” said Isaac, scowling with disgust.
“Oh yeah? Vat about Japan, viseguy?” snapped Ellis. “Day dun’ got baseball dere? You t’ink a Jew could own a baseball team in Japan so easy? Isaac—listen to me, for a Jewish pois’n dis is de greatest country vat ever vas, in de history of de voild!”
“Sure it is, ‘Dad’,” said the contemptuous son, “as long as he plays the game their way.”
Thus the seasons passed, the Greenbacks regularly finishing fifth and sixth in the Patriot League, and the genius son no less contemptuous of his father’s old-country fearfulness than of the Greenbacks, who were bound by ignorance and superstition and habit to self-defeating taboos. Before Isaac’s tirades and tongue-lashings, even the staunchest players eventually came to lose faith in the instructions they received from the bench, and by midseason most of them would wind up playing entirely on their own, heeding neither the conventional tactics of that season’s manager, nor the
unorthodox strategies of “the little kike” as the little tyke was now called; or, what was even worse, rather than following their own natural instincts, independent of seasoned manager or child prodigy, they would try to reason their way out of the dilemma, with the result that time and again, in the midst of straining to think the problem through, they would go down looking at a fat one. Finally, it was not the increase in Greenback strike-outs, but a sense of all the bewilderment that lay back of them, that caused the Greenback fans to become increasingly uneasy in the stands, and to emerge from the stadium at the end of nine innings as exhausted as if they had spent the preceding two hours watching a tightrope walker working without benefit of a net. So exhausting did it become to watch their team’s strained performance, that even those Greenback fans whose interest had survived the expulsion of Gamesh and who had made their peace with the idea of a true-blue Yid as owner, eventually preferred to stay at home and wash the car on their day off, rather than going out to Greenback Stadium to see a perfectly competent ball club struggling in vain against eighteen men—the nine on the opposing team and the nine on their own.
6
THE TEMPTATION OF ROLAND AGNI
(continued)
6
The arrival of Agni at Greenback Stadium; what befalls him amongst the Jews he there meets with, containing several dialogues between a Jew and a Negro that cause Roland to consider taking his life. Newspaper coverage of his suicide imagined by the rookie sensation. Isaac Ellis makes another appearance; a conversation on “the Breakfast of Champions,” wherein the desperate hero of this great history learns the difference between the Wheaties that are made in Minneapolis by General Mills and those that are manufactured in an underground laboratory by a Jewish genius, and something too about Appearance and Reality. Roland succumbs. Concerning winning and losing. A short account of the Mundy miracle, with assorted statistics. The bewilderment of Roland; his fears and hallucinations. In which the character of Mister Fairsmith appears, with an explanation as to why he disappeared from the scene so early in the book. A long digression on baseball and barbarism, with a very full description of Mister Fairsmith’s adventures in Africa; his success there with our national pastime, his disappointment, his bravery, and his narrow escape from the savages who blaspheme all he holds sacred and dear. His faith in a Supreme Being is tested by the Mundys. A disputation between a devout and the manager on whether Our Lord loves baseball. The Mundy winning streak settles the issue. A heartwarming scene on a train to Tri-City. The disastrous conclusion of the foregoing adventure, in which Nickname’s attempt to stretch a double into a triple with the Mundys thirty-one runs behind the Tycoons in the ninth constitutes the coup de grâce. Isaac and Agni have it out. Mister Fairsmith is laid to rest.