Dusen got his hundred and ninety-ninth that day. Oh, and the kid went three for four, including a home run, so it shouldn’t surprise you that even more people showed up with those signs for our second game against Cleveland.
By the third one, some enterprising fellow was selling them out on Titan Esplanade, big orange cardboard diamonds with black letters: ROAD CLOSED BY ORDER OF BLOCKADE BILLY. Some of the fans’d hold em up when Blockade Billy was at bat, and they’d all hold them up when the other team had a runner on third. By the time the Yankees came to town-this was going on to the end of April-the whole stadium would flush orange when the Bombers had a runner on third, which they did often in that series.
Because the Yankees kicked the living shit out of us and took over first place. It was no fault of the kid’s; he hit in every game and tagged out Bill Skowron between home and third when the lug got caught in a rundown. Skowron was a moose the size of Big Klew, and he tried to flatten the kid, but it was Skowron who went on his ass, the kid straddling him with a knee on either side. The photo of that one in the paper made it look like the end of a Big Time Wrestling match with Pretty Tony Baba for once finishing off Gorgeous George instead of the other way around. The crowd outdid themselves waving those ROAD CLOSED signs around. It didn’t seem to matter that the Titans had lost; the fans went home happy because they’d seen our skinny catcher knock Mighty Moose Skowron on his ass.
I seen the kid afterward, sitting naked on the bench outside the showers. He had a big bruise coming on the side of his chest, but he didn’t seem to mind it at all. He was no crybaby. The sonofabitch was too dumb to feel pain, some people said later; too dumb and crazy. But I’ve known plenty of dumb players in my time, and being dumb never stopped them from bitching over their booboos.
“How about all those signs, kid?” I asked, thinking I would cheer him up if he needed cheering.
“What signs?” he says, and I could see by the puzzled look on his face that he wasn’t joking a bit. That was Blockade Billy for you. He would have stood in front of a semi if the guy behind the wheel was driving down the third base line and trying to score on him, but otherwise he didn’t have a fucking clue.
We played a two-game series with Detroit before hitting the road again, and lost both. Danny Doo was on the mound for the second one, and he couldn’t blame the kid for the way it went; he was gone before the third inning was over. Sat in the dugout whining about the cold weather (it wasn’t cold), the way Harrington misplayed a fly ball out in right (Harrington would have needed rockets on his heels to get to that one before it dropped), and the bad calls he got from that sonofabitch Wenders behind the plate. On that last one he might have had a point. Hi Wenders didn’t like The Doo, never had, ran him in two ballgames the year before. But I didn’t see any bad calls that day, and I was standing less than ninety feet away.
The kid hit safe in both games, including a home run and a triple. Nor did Dusen hold the hot bat against him, which would have been his ordinary behavior; he was one of those guys who wanted fellows to understand there was one big star on the Titans, and it wasn’t them. But he liked the kid; really seemed to think the kid was his lucky charm. And the kid liked him. They went bar-hopping after the game, had about a thousand drinks and visited a whorehouse to celebrate The Doo’s first loss of the season, and showed up the next day for the trip to KC pale and shaky.
“The kid got laid last night,” Doo confided in me as we rode out to the airport in the team bus. “I think it was his first time. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I don’t think he remembers it.”