Babe.

Babe.

Babe…

In Detroit three days later, Babe took an 0—2 pitch, down and away, and hit the longest home run in Detroit history. The papers, always a step or two behind the fans, finally noticed. The American League single-season home run record, set in 1902, by Socks Seybold, was sixteen. Babe, heading into the third week of that stupendous July, had already smacked fourteen. And he was heading home to Boston, to sweet, sweet Fenway. Sorry, Socks, I hope you’ve done something else for people to remember you by, because I’m just going to snatch up that little ol’ record of yours, wrap my cigar in it, and set a torch to it.

He hit his fifteenth in the first game back home, against the Yanks, plopped it high in the upper deck of the right-field bleachers, watched the fans up in those cheap seats fight for it like it was food or a job as he trotted down the first base line and he noticed how full the seats were across the entire park. Double, easily, what they’d had for the World Series last year. They were in third place right now, third and sliding toward the basement. No one had any illusions about a pennant this year, so about the only thing to keep the fans coming to the ballpark was Ruth and his dingers.

And, boy, did they come. Even when they lost to Detroit a few days later, no one seemed to care because Babe hit his sixteenth long ball of the year. Sixteen. Poor Socks Seybold now had company on the podium. The streetcar and el operators had walked off the job that week (Babe thinking, for the second time that year, that the whole fucking world was walking off the job), but the stands filled anyway the next day when Babe went for magic number seventeen against those wonderfully generous Tigers.

He could feel it from inside the dugout. Ossie Vitt was up and Scott was on deck, but Babe was batting third, and the whole park knew it. He risked a glance out of the dugout as he wiped down his bat with a rag, saw half the eyes in the stadium flicking his way, hoping for a glimpse of a god, and he ducked back in again as his whole body went cold. Ice cream cold. The kind of cold he imagined you only felt just after you’d died but before they put you in the coffin, when some part of you thought you still breathed. It took him a second to realize what he’d seen. What could have done this to him. What ripped the confidence from his limbs and his soul so completely that, as he watched Ossie Vitt ground out to short and went to take his place in the on-deck circle, he feared he might never get another hit the rest of the season.

Luther.

Babe risked another sideways glance from the on-deck circle, his eyes flitting along the row just past the dugout. The front row. The money row. No way any colored man would be sitting in those seats. Never happened before, no reason to think it would happen now. A strange optical illusion then, a trick of the mind, maybe some of the pressure getting to Babe, pressure he hadn’t acknowledged until now. Silly, really, when you thought what—