The Great American Novel (39 page)

“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—

1
Ys
= 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 consequences 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.