“What the hell do I tell them?”
“Team meeting. Free ice cream. I don’t care. You just hold them for five minutes.”
I says to Lombardazzi, “No one tipped? No one? You mean no one heard the radio broadcasts and tried calling Pop Blakely to say how great it was that his kid was tearing up the bigs?”
“I imagine one or two might have tried,” Lombardazzi said. “Folks from Iowa do come to the big city from time to time, I’m told, and I imagine a few people visiting New York listen to the Titans or read about em in the paper-”
“I prefer the Yankees,” one of the bluesuits chimes in.
“If I want your opinion, I’ll rattle the bars in your cage,” Lombardazzi said. “Until then, shut up and die right.”
I looked at Joe, feeling sick. Getting a bad call and getting run off the field during my first managerial stint now seemed like the very least of my problems.
“Get him in here alone,” Joe said. “I don’t care how. The guys shouldn’t have to see this.” He thought it over and added: “And the kid shouldn’t have to see them seeing it. No matter what he did.”
If it matters-and I know it don’t-we lost that game two to one. All three runs were solo shots. Minnie Minoso hit the game-winner off of Ganzie in the top of the ninth. The kid made the final out. He whiffed in his first at-bat as a Titan; he whiffed in his last one. Baseball is also a game of balance.
But none of our guys cared about the game. When I got up there, they were gathered around The Doo, who was sitting on the bench and telling them he was fine, goddammit, just a little dizzy. But he didn’t look fine, and our old excuse for a doc looked pretty grave. He wanted Danny down at Newark General for X-rays.
“Fuck that,” Doo says, “I just need a couple of minutes. I’m all right, I tell you. Jesus, Bones, cut me a break.”
“Blakely,” I said. “Go on down to the locker room. Mr. DiPunno wants to see you.”
“Coach DiPunno wants to see me? In the locker room? Why?”
“Something about the Rookie of the Month award,” I said. It just popped into my head from nowhere. There was no such thing back then, but the kid didn’t know that.
The kid looks at Danny Doo, and the Doo flaps his hand at him. “Go on, get out of here, kid. You played a good game. Not your fault. You’re still lucky, and fuck anyone who says different.” Then he says: “All of you get out of here. Gimme some breathing-room.”
“Hold off on that,” I says. “Joe wants to see him alone. Give him a little one-to-one congratulations, I guess. Kid, don’t wait around. Just-” Just scat was how I meant to finish, but I didn’t have to. Blakely or Katsanis, he was already gone. And you know what happened after that.
If the kid had gone straight down the hall to the umpire’s room, he would have gotten collared, because the locker room was on the way. Instead, he cut through our box-room, where luggage was stored and where we also had a couple of massage tables and a whirlpool bath. We’ll never know for sure why he did that, but I think the kid knew something was wrong. Crazy or not, he must have known the roof was going to fall in on him eventually. In any case, he came out on the far side of the locker room, walked down to the ump’s room, and knocked on the door. By then the rig he probably learned how to make in The Ottershaw Christian Home was back on his second finger. One of the older boys probably showed him how, that’s what I think. Kid, if you want to stop getting beaten up all the time, make yourself one of these.
He never put it back in his locker after all, you see; just tucked it into his pocket. And he didn’t bother with the Band-Aid after the game, which tells me he knew he didn’t have anything to hide anymore.