It was not cheers he heard when he scorched that fresh white ball toward the Tampa sun. Not cheers or oohs or aahs.

Silence. Silence so total that the only sound that could fill it was the echo of his bat against cowhide. Every head in Plant Field turned to watch that miraculous ball soar so fast and so far that it never had time to cast its shadow.

When it landed on the other side of the right field wall, five hundred feet from home plate, it bounced high off the racetrack and continued to roll.

After the game, one of the sports scribes would tell Babe and Coach Barrow that they’d taken measurements, and the final tally was 579 feet before it came to a full stop in the grass. Five hundred and seventy-nine. Damn near two football fields.

But in that moment, as it soared without shadow into a blue sky and a white sun and he dropped his bat and trotted slowly down the first base line, tracking it, willing it to go farther and faster than anything ever could or ever had or maybe ever would in so short a time, Babe saw the damnedest thing he’d ever seen in his life—his father sitting atop the ball. Riding it really, hands clenched to the seams, knees pressed to the leather, his father tumbling over and over in space with that ball. He howled, his father did. He clenched his face from the fear. Tears fell from his eyes, fat ones, and hot, Babe assumed. Until, like the ball, he disappeared from view.

Five hundred and seventy nine feet, they told Ruth.

Ruth smiled, picturing his father, not the ball. All gone now. Buried in the saw grass. Buried in Plant Field, Tampa.

Never coming back.

CHAPTER twenty-five

If Danny could say nothing else positive about the new commissioner, he could at least say the man was true to his word. When the molasses flood tore through the heart of his neighborhood, Danny was spending the week keeping the peace forty miles away at a box factory strike in Haverhill. Once the workers there were brought to heel, he moved on to ten days at a fishery strike in Charlestown. That whimpered to an end when the AFL refused to grant a charter because they didn’t deem the workers skilled labor. Danny was loaned out next to the Lawrence PD for a textile workers’ strike that had been going on for three months and could already claim two dead, including a labor organizer who’d been shot through the mouth as he left a barbershop.

Through these strikes and those that followed throughout the late winter and into early spring—at a clock factory in Waltham, among machinists in Roslindale, a mill in Framingham—Danny was spat at, screamed at, called a goon and a whore and a lackey and pus. He was scratched, punched, hit with eggs, hit with sticks, and once, in Framingham, caught a hurled brick with his shoulder. In Roslindale, the machinists got their raise but not their health benefits. In Everett, the shoe workers got half their raise, but no pension. The Framingham strike was crushed by the arrival of truckloads of new workers and the onslaught of police. After they’d made the final push and the scabs had gone through the gates, Danny looked around at the men they’d left in their wake, some still curled on the ground, others sitting up, a few raising ineffectual fists and pointless shouts. They faced a sudden new day with far less than they’d asked for and much less than they’d had. Time to go home to their families and figure out what to do next.