Michael reads it again and inspects the five-finger turkey. Little hand. The kid probably couldn’t get his hand around a regulation bat, much less swing the thing. What would Joe DiMaggio do? Michael doesn’t think Joe would have started a manhunt for some pipsqueak. So Michael balls up the page again and tosses it with the rest of the trash.

The visitors left Michael’s bats where they were, in a worn-looking canvas bag in the far corner of the garage, and at the end of that first long day, Michael begs off dinner plans with Audrey and the Walshes, grabs the bag, and heads to the stadium. He’s driven halfway to the old complex when he remembers it will be empty, or gone—it is getting turned into a parking garage for the adjacent mall. This spring, the Lions are playing at some brand-new complex, Salt Stick or Salt Lick or something; Michael can’t quite remember its name. He doesn’t have the keys yet—last week Woody Botter, the GM, sent out a long-winded e-mail about the procedure for getting a new set—so he’ll have to track down a maintenance guy or security to open up the cage. He’s got his credentials on him, always does. Hopefully somebody will be around, but not too many somebodies—he doesn’t want to pretend everything is la-di-da tonight.

Michael isn’t quite sure where he’s going, but knows the complex is near the new casino on the east side, all of it built on Indian land. Talking Stick Casino is not a place he’s been, but it’s tall and gaudy and flashing spotlights into the night sky, and so he points the car toward its beacon. He has to loop around the sports complex twice to find the way in, an unlit boulevard that splits two parking lots, one still waiting for its stripes. The landscapers have dropped off the plants for the median but transplanted only a few; the rest loiter in black plastic tubs. For a flash he thinks about taking a couple of the smaller cacti to restart his own battered collection—Audrey loves her succulents—but he shakes the idea from his mind. He is not a thief.

The new stadium is a hulking shadow lit by the occasional exit sign. Through the gates he can see a broad concourse, the spotless counters of vendors who have yet to move in. There’s no good view of left field—but he tries to imagine it as he circles the stadium. Big, small? Of all the corners of the field, left is the most malleable, the easiest to shorten or stretch per the site plan. It annoys Michael that while the infield and its dimensions are sacred—the ninety-foot base path; the sixty feet, six inches from the rubber to home; the ninety-five feet between the mound and the grass line—his domain can be doubled or halved, depending on street grids and how many seats some owner is trying to fit. Look at the Green Monster—only 310 to the wall—while the deep part of the old Yankee Stadium was 457. (Another reason Michael admired Joe: in 1937 he hit forty-six home runs in that stadium, even with its farther-than-far left-center wall.) The Lions’ Culver City home, a nondescript, moderately nostalgic stadium built in the nineties, has a gigantic left, which is part of why they invested in Goodyear. That man has strong legs and an arm like a rocket launcher.