He clapped Harry on the shoulder and repeated his estimation: “Somehow it’ll all be fine. You’ll see.”

Harry Hooper looked at his shoulder. He looked off into the field. He looked back at Ruth. Ruth smiled.

“Go be a good Babe,” Harry Hooper said, “and leave the talk to the men.”

Harry Hooper turned his back on him. He wore a straw boater, tilted back slightly from his forehead. Ruth hated boaters; his face was too round for them, too fleshy. They made him look like a child playing dress-up. He imagined taking Harry’s boater off his head and flinging it onto the roof of the train.

Harry walked off into the field, leading Stuffy McInnis by the elbow, his chin tilted down.

Babe picked up a rock and eyed the back of Harry Hooper’s seersucker jacket, imagined a catcher’s mitt there, imagined the sound of it, a sharp rock against a sharp spine. He heard another sharp sound replace the one in his head, though, a distant crack similar to the crack of a log snapping in the fireplace. He looked east to where the field ended at a small stand of trees. He could hear the train hissing softly behind him and stray voices from the players and the rustle of the field. Two engineers walked behind him, talking about a busted flange, how it was going to take two hours, maybe three, to fix, and Ruth thought, Two hours in this shithole? and then he heard it again—a dry distant crack, and he knew that on the other side of those trees someone was playing baseball.

He crossed the field alone and unnoticed and he heard the sounds of the ball game grow closer—the singsong catcalls, the rough scuff of feet chasing down a ball in the grass, the wet-slap thump of a ball sent to its death in an outfielder’s glove. He went through the trees and removed his coat in the heat, and when he stepped out of the grove they were changing sides, men running in toward a patch of dirt along the first base line while another group ran out from a patch by third.

Colored men.

He stood where he was and nodded at the center fielder trotting out to take his spot a few yards from him, and the center fielder gave him a curt nod back and then appeared to scan the trees to see if they planned on giving birth to any more white men today. Then he turned his back to Babe and bent at the waist and placed his hand and glove on his knees. He was a big buck, as broad-shouldered as the Babe, though not as heavy in the middle, or (Babe had to admit) in the ass.

The pitcher didn’t waste any time. He barely had a windup, just long goddamn arms, and he swung the right one like he was unleashing a rock from a slingshot meant to travel an ocean, and Babe could tell even from here that the ball crossed the plate on fire. The batter took a nice clean cut and still missed it by half a foot.