Six years back, major league baseball had had its first strike. The Detroit Tigers refused to play until Ban Johnson lifted a suspension on Ty Cobb for beating a fan in the stands. The fan was a cripple, had stumps for arms, no hands to defend himself, but Cobb had beaten him long after he was on the ground, applying his cleats to the poor bastard’s face and ribs. Still, Cobb’s teammates took his side and went on strike in support of a guy none of them even liked. Hell, everyone hated Cobb, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that the fan had called Cobb a “half-nigger,” and there wasn’t much worse you could call a white man except maybe “nigger lover” or just plain “nigger.”

Ruth had still been in reform school when he heard about it, but he understood the position of the other Tigers, no problem. You could jaw with a colored, even laugh and joke with one, maybe tip the ones you laughed with most a little something extra around Christmas. But this was still a white man’s society, a place built on concepts of family and an honest day’s work. (And what were these coloreds doing out in some field in the middle of a workday, playing a game when their loved ones were probably home going hungry?) When all was said and done, it was always best to stick with your own kind, the people you had to live with and eat with and work with for the rest of your life.

Ruth kept his gaze on the bag. He didn’t want to know where Luther was, risk looking up into that crowd of black faces and accidentally catching his eye.

“He was safe,” Ruth said.

The coloreds went nuts. They shouted and pointed at the bag and screamed, “Bullshit!” and that went on for some time, and then, as if they’d all heard a dog whistle none of the white men could hear, they stopped. Their bodies slackened, their shoulders lowered, they stared right through Ruth, as if they could see out the back of his head and Sticky Joe Beam said, “Awright, awright. That’s how we’re playing, then that’s how we’re playing.”

“That’s how we’re playing,” McInnis said.

“Yes, suh,” Sticky Joe said. “That’s clear now.”

And they all walked back and took their positions.

Babe sat on the bench and drank and felt soiled and found himself wanting to twist Ebby Wilson’s head off his neck, throw it on a stack with Flack’s beside it. Didn’t make no sense—he’d done the right thing by his team—but he felt it all the same.

The more he drank, the worse he felt, and by the eighth inning, he considered what would happen if he used his next at bat to tank. He’d switched places with Whiteman by this point, was playing first. Luther Laurence waited on deck as Tyrell Hawke stood in the box, and Luther looked across at him like he was just another white man now, giving him those nothing-eyes you saw in porters and shine boys and bell boys, and Babe felt a shriveling inside of himself.