“His name isn’t Blakely,” Lombardazzi says. “It’s Eugene Katsanis.”
“Katz-whatsis? Where’s Blakely, then?”
“William Blakely’s dead. Has been for a month. His parents, too.”
I gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”
So he told me the stuff I’m sure you already know, Mr. King, but maybe I can fill in a few blanks. The Blakelys lived in Clarence, Iowa, a wide patch of not much an hour’s drive from Davenport. Made it convenient for Ma and Pa, because they could go to most of their son’s minor league games. Blakely had a successful farm; an eight hundred acre job. One of their hired men wasn’t much more than a boy. His name was Gene Katsanis, an orphan who’d grown up in The Ottershaw Christian Home for Boys. He was no farmer, and not quite right in the head, but he was a hell of a baseball player.
Katsanis and Blakely played against each other on a couple of church teams, and together on the local Babe Ruth team, which won the state tournament all three years the two of them played together, and once went as far as the national semis. Blakely went to high school and starred on that team, too, but Katsanis wasn’t school material. Slopping-the-hogs material and ballplaying material is what he was, although he was never supposed to be as good as Billy Blakely. Nobody so much as considered such a thing. Until it happened, that is.
Blakely’s father hired him because the kid worked cheap, sure, but mostly because he had enough natural talent to keep Billy sharp. For twenty-five dollars a week, the kid got a fielder and a batting-practice pitcher. The old man got a cow-milker and a shit-shoveler. Not a bad deal, at least for them.
Whatever you’ve found in your research probably favors the Blakely family, am I right? Because they had been around those parts for four generations, because they were rich farmers, and because Katsanis wasn’t nothing but a state kid who started life in a liquor carton on a church step and had several screws loose upstairs. And why was that? Because he was born dumb or because he got the crap beaten out of him three and four times a week in that home before he got old enough and big enough to defend himself? I know a lot of the beatings came because he had a habit of talking to himself-that came out in the newspapers later on.
Katsanis and Billy practiced just as hard once Billy got into the Titans’ farm-system-during the off-season, you know, probably throwing and hitting in the barn once the snow got too deep outside-but Katsanis got kicked off the local town team, and wasn’t allowed to go to the Cornholers’ workouts during Billy’s second season with them. During his first one, Katsanis had been allowed to participate in some of the workouts, even in some intersquad games, if they were a man shy. It was all pretty informal and loosey-goosey back then, not like now when the insurance companies shit a brick if a major leaguer so much as grabs a bat without wearing a helmet.
What I think happened-feel free to correct me if you know better-is that the kid, whatever other problems he might have had, continued to grow and mature as a ballplayer. Blakely didn’t. You see that all the time. Two kids who both look like Babe Fuckin’ Ruth in high school. Same height, same weight, same speed, same twenty-twenty peepers. But one of them is able to play at the next level…and the next…and the next…while the other one starts to fall behind. This much I did hear later: Billy Blakely didn’t start out as a catcher. He got switched from center field when the kid who was catching broke his arm. And that kind of switch isn’t a real good sign. It’s like the coach is sending a message: “You’ll do…but only until someone better shows up.”
I think Blakely got jealous, I think his old man got jealous, and I think maybe Mom did, too. Maybe especially Mom, because sports moms can be the worst. I think maybe they pulled a few strings to keep Katsanis from playing locally, and from showing up for the Davenport Cocksuckers’ workouts. They could have done it, because they were a wealthy, long-established Iowa family and Gene Katsanis was a nobody who grew up in an orphan home. A Christian orphan home that was probably hell on earth.