He drank some more rye. At twenty-three, he was finally becoming one of the more feared hitters in the league. In a year when home runs in the American League had totaled ninety-six, Ruth had accounted for eleven. Damn near 12 percent. Even if someone took into account the three-week slump he’d suffered in June, pitchers had started to treat him with respect. Opposing hitters, too, because Ruth had pitched the Sox to thirteen wins that season. He’d also started fifty-nine games in left and thirteen at first.

Couldn’t hit lefties, though. That was the knock on him. Even when every roster had been stripped to its shells by the players who’d enlisted in the war, Ruth had a weakness that opposing managers had begun to exploit.

Fuck ’em.

He said it to the wind and took another hit from his flask, a gift from Harry Frazee, the team owner. Ruth had left the team in July. Went to play for the Chester Shipyards team in Pennsylvania because Coach Barrow valued Ruth’s pitching arm far more than his bat, and Ruth was tired of pitching. You threw a strikeout, you got applause. You hit a home run, you got mass eruption. Problem was, the Chester Shipyards preferred his pitching, too. When Frazee threatened them with a lawsuit, Chester Shipyards shipped Ruth back.

Frazee had met the train and escorted Ruth to the backseat of his Rauch & Lang Electric Opera Coupe. It was maroon with black trim and Ruth was always amazed by how you could see your reflection in the steel no matter the weather or time of day. He asked Frazee what it cost, a buggy like this, and Frazee idly fondled the gray upholstery as his driver pulled onto Atlantic Avenue. “More than you, Mr. Ruth,” he said and handed Ruth the flask.

The inscription etched into the pewter read:

RUTH, G. H.

CHESTER, Penna

7/1/18—7/7/18

He fingered it now and took another swig, and the greasy odor of cows’ blood mixed with the metallic smell of factory towns and warm train tracks. I am Babe Ruth, he wanted to shout off the train. And when I’m not drunk and alone at the back of a caboose, I am someone to be reckoned with. A cog in the wheel, yes, and you bet I know it, but a diamond-crusted cog. The cog of cogs. Someday…

Ruth raised his flask and toasted Harry Frazee and all the Harry Frazees of the world with a string of lewd epithets and a bright smile. Then he took a swig and it went to his eyelids and tugged them downward.

“I’m going to sleep, you old whore,” Ruth whispered to the night, to the skyline, to the smell of butchered meat. To the dark midwestern fields that lay ahead. To every ashen mill town between here and Governor’s Square. To the smoky starless sky.

He stumbled into the stateroom he shared with Jones, Scott, and McInnis, and when he woke at six in the morning, still fully clothed, he was in Ohio. He ate breakfast in the dining car and drank two pots of coffee and watched the smoke pour from the stacks in the foundries and steel mills that squatted in the black hills. His head ached and he added a couple of drops from his flask to his coffee cup and his head didn’t ache anymore. He played canasta for a while with Everett Scott, and then the train made a long stop in Summer-ford, another mill town, and they stretched their legs in a field just beyond the station, and that’s when he first heard of a strike.