“I don’t know from baseball,” said Roger, “not a thing.”
Stengel bowed his head. “Really,” he said, in awe.
“No.”
“Then how did you … how did you. …”
“That?” Roger asked.
“Yes, Roger,” Stengel said politely, “that.”
“I could tell them what I do know.”
Stengel looked at Roger, who was illuminated in fading reddish-brown light. He was less than half Stengel’s size. He didn’t know the rules of baseball, much less the subtleties. By rights and the laws of physics he should not have been able, even had he connected with the ball, to have hit it beyond the diamond. A child of his size and underdevelopment would not be able to throw the ball from home to second, much less leap twenty feet in the air (as he had done in the White Sox game) and then get the ball off on a flat trajectory to burn into the catcher’s mitt at home plate before the thrower was back on the ground. “Yes,” said Stengel, “tell us what you do know.”
“Okay,” said Roger, “but I’m telling you, I don’t know anything.”
That was not quite true. He had begun to think about the game. For example, he liked very much that the ball was an object descending from heaven, and he thought of it, therefore, not as an object to be captured for the glory of the captor but as a gracious gift that brought with it in train a bit of the loveliness of the sky.
FOR THE SEMINAR, the Yankees went to their secret practice field at Lake Honkus, near Mohonk, in the Shawangunks. The Yankees had bought a secluded estate and set up a baseball field on what had been a cow pasture, where they could practice in secret their surprise plays and coded signals. The lodge where they stayed was filled with wrought iron, Indian blankets, and buffalo heads. In fact, in Roger’s room, he and a moose had a staring contest for at least an hour.
The next morning, Roger and the Yankees put away a huge breakfast, during which Roger discovered that the maple syrup the Yankees used on their pancakes was kosher, and made an interesting sauce for pickled herring. Then they went outside and sat on benches facing a portable blackboard. The weather was wonderfully cool and clear at Lake Honkus. Stengel brought Roger up to the front, stood him next to the blackboard, gave him a piece of chalk, and said, “Kid, we’re totally secure.”
Roger looked at the Yankees, who looked at him expectantly. What could he possibly say that would enable them to hit a ball out of the park or jump twenty feet in the air?
“From baseball I know nothing,” he began, “but what’s a lock?”
“What’s a lock?” Mantle echoed.
Roger nodded.
“You mean like a lock on a door,” Larsen asked, “or a lock in a canal?”
“Both,” said Roger.
“A door lock is a metal thing with a lot of really smart junk in it,” Berra said.
“Okay,” said Roger, “and the lock of a canal?”
“A chamber for raising and lowering boats, with water from the river or canal to run it.”
“Yes,” said Roger.
Time passed. The Yankees stared at Roger. More time passed. Then Roger said, “Both illustrate the mechanism of the world.”
The Yankees inched forward. No clinic had ever begun like this.
“God is perfect,” Roger said. “His creation is perfect. It doesn’t seem so to us—we who suffer and die, who must live with sadness and terror—because we can’t see it in its entirety. If we could, we would see that it is in perfect balance. The counterweight for which we long—to right wrongs and correct injustices—is sometimes far away from us in space, time, or both. But, taken as a whole, from far enough afield, all is in balance, all is just.
“Good. What does this have to do with baseball and locks? As set out in the teachings of Rabbi Pepper of Biloxi and Rabbi Goldfinch of Barnevelt, the modern-day disciples of Rabbi Yoel ben Isaac of Zamosc, and his grandson Rabbi Yoel ben Uri (whose last names I will not say), each a baal shem, and their descendants, et cetera, in God’s eyes, in fact, and in truth, all souls, absent the deficit of sin, are equal. For example, a wise and brilliant king has no higher rank in the view of the Almighty than a beggar who has not even the comprehension to speak his own name. At the final judgment, both souls can glow equally in the same circle of continuous light.”
The Yankees nodded slightly. They understood; they had all deeply loved those who were far from perfect.
“Okay,” said Roger. “So here is the question that Yoel ben Isaac put forth and Yoel ben Uri answered. If these souls occupy the same level at the end, equally beloved of God, and if God’s creation is perfect, how can an imbalance exist in their lives on earth? How can one suffer all the miseries of this life, and the other know all the glories, if in the end every account is to be reconciled and they come to the same reward? In a perfect universe, how can such a shortfall exist? How can God allow it?”
Not even the entire Yankee lineup could answer this question, though they strained to do so. Roger again challenged them. “Tell me, how can God allow it? Do you know?” He surveyed them. They didn’t. “I’ll tell you, then. It’s simple. He doesn’t. What is equal in the end is equal also in the beginning and in the middle. There is no deficit even on this earth, even in the smallest picture, the tightest section of view. But how can this be? The king and the beggar live vastly different lives. Ah! That’s what you think. That’s what may be apparent. But it isn’t true. Why? Because,” he said to the Yankees, their eyes unblinking, “the mechanism of creation is like a lock.”
The Yankees waited. How was it like a lock, both kinds?
“Both kinds. The metal lock has a cylinder that, for the door to open, must turn. This cylinder has a row of holes drilled in it, in which rest pins. In the barrel inside of which the cylinder turns and is encased, is a line of holes spaced exactly like their counterparts in the cylinder, with its own set of pins. In the locked position, the pins from the barrel fall into the holes in the cylinder and prevent it from turning, because they cross and block the interface. When the key is put in, it raises the pins exactly to the points—at a different level in each hole—where the barrel pins are above the line and the cylinder pins are below it. If all the pins were raised indiscriminately, sometimes the cylinder pins would block the interface, and sometimes the barrel pins would. If they were not raised at all, the barrel pins would block the interface and, thus, the rotation. To allow the turning, each pin must be raised according to what it requires. Some are raised more, some less, which is why the key is jagged. In the end, its unevenness makes a perfect equality that allows the lock to open.
“And a lock that lifts or lowers a boat is a mechanism that gets its power from the urge of all water to find its own level. Only that way can things flow, rivers run, and the world function—when the disparate forces of the universe are conjoined, and rest easy in an equality of perfection. Every force that exists is held in balance by a counterpart with which it must be united, and with which it is united, even if the connection be not apparent to us.
“Like the pins in a lock, the beggar and the king are lifted by God variously and invisibly, but equally, even in this world, so that the perfection will not be broken, for, by definition, the perfection cannot be broken. They ride unseen waves and are held aloft by unseen supports. Were they not so lifted, the world would not work.
“Only those who have suffered can know the strength of the compensation they acquire. The emissary that comes to them is all-embracing, and though some may deny or mock this, it is many times more real than the world itself, for next to this working of perfection the world itself seems only a tinsel of the imagination. God compensates even in this world. He must. He does. And the reception of His compensation, like a quantity of physics, is the certain though insubstantial thing we call holiness. Those who would deny it would do so simply from lack of having received it. Perhaps the king, gifted in other ways, has no knowledge of holiness, while for the beggar with no gifts, it is overflowing. You may won
der what this has to do with baseball.”
They nodded.
“It seems clear to me,” he said, as a breeze brought resinous air from a thick pine forest that bordered the practice field as evenly as a crewcut. “I have been able to do what I did because my arm was guided, my strength supplied, my speed achieved, by the ever-present will of God for balance and perfection. Perhaps a Phoenician ship listed too much to port, thousands of years ago; or it was too cloudy, for too long, over a glacier in the Himalaya; or a woman’s heart was broken for a day by her suitor in Montana. I don’t know. I do know that it is important to know that such balances exist, and that, if I didn’t know it, I wouldn’t have the heart to continue.”
“Can we hook into this stuff?” Berra asked.
“Not if all you want to do is win games,” Roger answered.
“But wait a minute,” Berra demanded. “Let’s say someone cheated in Chinese checkers a thousand years ago in Peru. If I could hook into that, I could run twenty feet back to the plate even though Zelinka is just an inch from it, and put him out, right?”
“No,” said Roger. “It doesn’t necessarily work that way, and God is not fond of games.”
“Even baseball?”
“Even baseball.”
“Why?”
“Games can become, because of their closed set of rules, an independent universe, a distraction from the seeking of perfection. If they are taken as a universe in themselves, what a meager universe that is. This offends God, who worked for six whole days to make the universe we have. Can you imagine what would come of the work of an omnipotent being for six whole days? What is the infinity of detail, the infinity of extent, the infinity of connectedness, and the infinity of surprise, times six?”
“It doesn’t apply to baseball?” Stengel asked, not quite sure of exactly what it was.
“If your object is merely to play baseball, it doesn’t.”
“What’s your object, then, Roger?” Mantle asked.
“Because of the imperfection I have seen, I live for the hope of restoration. That’s all I live for, even if it be a sin.”
“What imperfection?” Stengel asked.
Roger’s expression was incomprehensible to the Yankees as anything but some sort of nervous ailment, because boys his age who are not afflicted with a crippling disease do not show on their faces the pain of old men. “I was born during the war,” he said, to answer the question, “in a place called Majdanek. I knew nothing else. The physical privation of this place, the terror of the selections and the frequent killing of people around me, seemed natural. Until I was three, I existed in the aura of my parents’ love. I don’t know what they did to keep us alive, but I know that whatever it was it was done for me. I stop abruptly when I begin to imagine what they must have suffered, especially my mother. For this I pray with love and gratitude, every day. I wish it were they who had lived and I who had died, although that would have taken from them what they wanted most.
“Just before the liberation, when I was three, we were marched out and made to stand at the edge of a pit. In the pit were thousands of bodies. Bulldozers had compressed and shaped them. They were as white as snow, and beneath them was a lake of blood. Even among the crushed forms and severed limbs, some people remained alive, though not for long.
“My mother and father told me that they loved me. They tried to shield me with their bodies. When the firing began, the force of the machine-gun bullets caught them and the other adults and they were hurled into the pit as if a wind had blown them away. The firing had been over the heads of the children, who stood on the rim untouched and unable to move. The guns were not lowered, because bullets were scarce.
“A soldier came by and picked me up by both ankles. My head hit the ground, and then he swung me around like an ice skater swinging his partner. I remember the blood rushing to my head, and the world blurring into blue and white. Even as I was twirled, the soldiers were laughing. After I was released, for a moment, I flew. Undoubtedly, I passed over my mother and father, and though I thought I was going to fly forever, I fell into the center of the pit, face-to-face with a dead woman upon whom I had fallen, whose mouth was open.
“I thought I was dead, too, until the bulldozers drove over us. The sound of bones breaking was like the sound of burning kindling. Many times, the bulldozer drove right over me, but though I was too frightened to move, I found myself each time between the treads. Then I was caught in a wave of tumbling bodies that, pushed by the blade, washed up at the edge. The bulldozer no longer came near me. I lay quietly as it worked, and then slept.
“After nightfall, I was awakened as I was wetted with gasoline. Choking on it, I climbed over the rim and walked into the darkness. I thought that this was death and that I was dead, but when I looked back and saw the huge blaze of the fire in which my mother and father were burning, I knew that I was still alive. I knew the difference. I wanted to die, I wanted very much to die, but, not knowing how, I lived.
“That is the imperfection I have seen,” he said, “and all I want from the world is some indication or sign that, forward in time, or where time does not exist, there is a justice and a beauty that will leap back to lift the ones I love from the kind of grave they were given.”
THE POOR ORIOLES. They had no idea what was going to happen to them when the Yankees took the field in Roger’s third game. Though they knew to be concerned with Roger himself, they had closely studied the first two of his games and saw hope in the fact that in these the other Yankees had been only marginally better. If they could isolate Roger, the rest of the Yankees would still be the Yankees Brooklyn had beaten in the Series the year before. Their rivals in the Bronx, they thought, still lacked focus.
But when the Yankees returned to the Bronx from Lake Honkus they did have focus, albeit of an unusual sort. They appeared to be bent on a certain kind of vengeance that was entirely alien to and had never been seen in baseball. True, baseball had its fierce moments, and sometimes teams were arrogantly knit together into bands of primitive warriors who pressed their case in a way that knocked the wind out of their fans. When the outfielder Whitey Koski was deliberately struck in the head, or so it seemed, by the pitcher Chick Perkasky, so concentrated and angry were Koski’s teammates that they burned up the rest of the game. With home run after home run, and fielded balls thrown back with the force of cannon fire, they astonished the spectators, of whom they had become totally unaware.
When Doug Little and Kevin Small, two Giants, were attacked by drunks hurling coconuts during an exhibition game in Sarasota, the Giants came alight with heavy hitting and flame-thrower pitching. For two weeks they beat every team they played, and then, when their anger dissipated, they returned to their losing streak. Such things were expected of teams whose players had been struck by fastballs or kneed when sliding, but why the Yankees? The Yankees were in the midst of the most spectacular rise baseball had ever seen. Why would they be angry? Why would they be grim? No one had suffered indignity or abuse. If anything, they could be expected to be sheepish and self-conscious about their inexplicable good fortune and the fact that now they all had Cadillacs.
This is, anyway, what the Orioles had been counting on. Nonetheless, the Orioles saw out on the green lawn the faces not of baseball players but of soldiers. When he didn’t smile, Berra looked even more like a turtle, and he refused to be engaging. The Oriole batters felt pure concentration emanating from him as he crouched at the limit of their peripheral vision. Mantle looked no longer like a farm boy but rather like the ruthless head of a giant steel corporation. The boyishness in his eyes had disappeared and been replaced by a metallic coldness. Larsen didn’t bother to touch the brim of his hat or adjust anything before his pitches, each of which seemed designed to break Berra’s wrists. All the Yankees—except Roger, who remained mild (because the world into which they had just entered, and in which they would stay for only a short time, was his forever)—had an intense impatience that changed their timing to s
omething such as no one had seen. Baseball is like a clock, in that its wheels turn at different speeds and all its moves require waiting. Eventually, everything pops at once: the detents lift, springs decompress, arms rise, and hammers strike twelve times, even if only twice a day. Most of the time, however, is spent waiting for one wheel to align with another. So it is with baseball and its glorious pauses, which cannot be rushed and which even the announcers mimic with genius. Were the empty spaces to be compressed or done away with, the game would die.
Driven by emotion, the Yankees played a game with few spaces, little hesitation, and no rest. To describe just a small part of the Orioles’ nightmare, which took place within the span of a hot-dog transaction, Larsen pitched without a warm-up, firing the ball across the plate at a hundred miles an hour. The batter swung late, and before he was finished with his swing Berra had thrown the ball back to Larsen as fast as a pitch. Immediately after the ball ploughed into Larsen’s glove, he pitched it, and the batter, who had barely taken up position, swung again. This was repeated, and, within twenty-three seconds of the first pitch, the batter was out and gone.
When the next Oriole hit a fly to third, Rocky Babis, a new guy covering the base, harvested it and instantaneously rammed it across the diamond to first, where the Oriole Brutus Evans was tagged before he got back to base, making three outs. At the instant Evans was tagged, the Yankees sprinted in, and the next Yankee up stood impatiently at the plate before the Orioles were even out of their dugout, which, not surprisingly, gave the Orioles an incurable case of the heebie-jeebies.
The Daily News now referred to the Yankees as “the Invincible Engine.” Although Larsen was not pitching perfect games, his pitching was astoundingly quick and deadly. As a team, New York had become the model of a grim and efficient army that fights an unspeakable enemy and is reconciled and devoted to its tasks. Roger’s last three games and quite a few afterward were played not as games but as tributes. The Yankees no longer cared about their standing in the league or their chances for the Pennant or in the Series. They did not care about their salaries and bonuses. They did not care that children ran up to them in the streets and women watched glowingly as they passed. They did not even care about winning: winning, for them, became joyless. They wanted only to play to perfection and to rush it on, as symbol and sign, to speak directly to God, and to face like men the fact of evil and sorrow in the world.