Dead Ball (3 page)

“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 yelled “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.

Harvey snorted. “A bunch of middle-age guys in fedoras who’ve tacitly agreed not to mention your private life? C’mon, they were kept men, paid by the ball clubs. There’s no comparison.”

“He did have some crazy fan sneak into the dugout during the streak and steal his favorite bat.”

“But they got it back.”

As they all watched the number-three batter in Baltimore’s lineup drop a banjo hit in short center for a single, Harvey’s cell phone began to warble the opening bars of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He’d changed the ringing option that afternoon from the funereal “Fuga.”

He pulled the phone out of his pants pocket and said, “Hello.”

“It’s me.” It was Mickey. “Just checking in to see how you’re doing.” Since his recent confinement to the sofa, she made a point of calling once a day to make sure he hadn’t harmed himself.

“I’m fine. Where are you?”

“I’m at your old stomping grounds. ESPN is doing the Jewels-Orioles game in Providence, which you’d know if you still followed the game.”

“I do follow the game,” Harvey said. “As it was played many years ago.” He stood to get a better look at the field. “Where are you exactly?”

“I told you. The Jewel Box.”

“I meant, where in the ballpark.” It was symbolic of their relationship these days that they should be in the same place and not even know it.

“Okay,” Mickey said, “I’m wedged in the first-base-line press enclosure, hoping to get two seconds with Moss Cooley after his at-bat.”

He saw her now, a splash of auburn hair among the gray paparazzi jockeying for position in the little pen next to the dugout. “I see you.”

“You see me? Where are you, Bliss?”

“Look over your left shoulder and about seventy feet up.”

“You’re here? Where?”

“Look up at Marshall Levy’s skybox. There’s a sad middle-aged man waggling the fingers of his right hand at you. That would be me.”

“This is too much. Wait—there you are!” Harvey could see the tiny oval of her face break into a smile. “
What
are you doing there?”

“Felix thinks he wants to hire me.”

“To do what?”

“Motivational coach.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

“Whyn’t you come down and see me?”

“Come up and visit us in the skybox.”

“Tell her she’s my guest,” Marshall said loudly, then dropped his voice to mutter, “Best-looking woman on TV. Better-looking than Hannah Storm. Or that woman on
The X-Files.
”

“Maybe later, if I can get away,” Mickey said. “Maybe after the game.”

“You know where the elevator to the skyboxes is?”

“I think I can find it.”

Harvey, Marshall Levy, and Felix Shalhoub watched as the Providence pitcher retired the Orioles without further damage, and the PA system sprayed the park with loud rock music as the Jewels trotted in for their first at-bat.

Providence Jewel second baseman Arturio Ferreiras roped a single to left to lead off the top of the first, then stole second.

“Way to go, Artie!” Marshall yelled, banging the arm of his chair. “God, I love this game!”

Center fielder Andy Cubberly came to the plate and waved at two high fastballs from Baltimore pitcher Jack Bustow.

“This guy can’t handle the high stuff,” Harvey observed.

Felix snorted. “Every housewife in Woonsocket knows he can’t handle the high stuff. Marshall,” he said, turning to his boss, “remind me to talk to Terry about dropping him down in the lineup until his mojo starts working again.”

“Leave the skipper alone,” Marshall said. “He knows what he’s doing. You know from personal experience, I don’t believe in a lot of front office interference.”

“What’re you talking about? You’re forgetting it was you who once let my ex-wife sit in the dugout.”

“I let you make your mistakes when you were at the helm,” Marshall said, not interested in Felix’s view of ancient history, however accurate.

Cubberly struck out on a change-up, and a tide of clapping and hooting signaled Moss Cooley’s slow progress toward the batter’s box.

I
N DIMAGGIO’S DAY, NOBODY
looked really good in a baseball uniform. This could not be said of Moss Cooley. Flannel had given way to form-fitting synthetics, chewing tobacco had given way to sunflower seeds and strength-and-fitness training, and Cooley was a testament to the virtues of this evolutionary process. His jersey with the big green “14” looked as if it had been spray-painted on his sculpted upper body. Felix was saying that for someone with a power hitter’s build—six-two, two hundred and five pounds, according to the program—Moss could hit extremely well to all fields.

“And he owes a lot of that to Campy,” Felix said, referring to the Jewels’ elderly batting instructor, whose ministrations sixteen years ago had helped Harvey hit .300 for the only time in his career. “He convinced Moss that he was essentially a contact hitter with power, not a power hitter. Campy convinced him to shorten his stroke, learn to hit inside out, give up ten or twelve home runs a year, hit for the average, be the table setter for Barney and Monkman. Pure genius on Campy’s part.”

Cooley paused just outside the batter’s box and rotated his head several times in each direction to loosen up his neck muscles. Baltimore’s Bustow stood patiently on the mound, perhaps contemplating his disadvantage as a lefty facing the game’s current best right-handed hitter. Ferreiras wandered a little off second, waiting for the fans to get a grip on themselves and Cooley to step in.

“One thing about Moss,” Felix was explaining, “is that he’ll surprise you sometimes and go after the first pitch. On the other hand, last week he had this great at-bat against the Indians. He fouled off a few iffy pitches, waited out the walk, and got a rally going. All this despite the fact he’d gone hitless in the game and would probably get only one more at-bat, which is what he got, and doubled off the scoreboard.”

“Let’s go, Cool!” Marshall shouted.

From the stretch Bustow delivered his first pitch, a waist-high slider on the outside corner that Cooley promptly drove to the opposite field in a low parabola. It dropped thirty feet inside the foul line and fifty feet in front of the right fielder. Ferreiras chugged around third to score. The crowd erupted. Cooley stood calmly on first base, peeling off his batting gloves with the decorum of a gentleman caller, and said something to the Orioles’ first baseman, who laughed. The Jumbotron went into unspeakable gyrations involving a likeness of Moss Cooley’s face and the phrase “46 straight!”