Ruth popped an unlit cigar in his mouth and loosened his tie. “Picked up a thing or two in my travels, Mr….?”

“Laurence, suh. Luther Laurence.” Luther still giving him that stone face.

Ruth put an arm around him. Arm the size of Luther’s bed. “What position you play, Luther?”

“Center field, suh.”

“Well, boy, you don’t have to worry about nothing then but tilting your head.”

“Tilting my head, suh?”

“And watching my ball fly right over it.”

Luther couldn’t help himself; the grin blew across his face.

“And stop calling me ‘suh,’ would you, Luther? We’re baseball players here.”

Oh, it was something the first time Sticky Joe whiffed him! Three strikes, all right down the pipe like thread following the needle, the fat man never once touching cowhide.

He laughed after the last one, pointed his bat at Sticky Joe and gave him a big nod. “But I’m learning you, boy. Learning you like I’m awake in school.”

No one wanted to let him pitch, so he subbed for a player each inning in the rest of the field. Nobody minded sitting for an inning. Babe Ruth—Lord’s sake. Might not want no sad little signature, but the stories would buy some drinks for a long time.

One inning he played left and Luther was over in center and Reggie Polk, who was pitching for their side, was taking his sweet time between pitches like he was apt to do, and Ruth said, “So what do you do, Luther, when you’re not playing ball?”

Luther told him a bit about his job in a munitions factory outside of Columbus, how war was a terrible thing but it sure could help a man’s pocket, and Ruth said, “That’s the truth,” though it sounded to Luther like he said it just to say it, not because he really understood, and then he asked Luther what had happened to his face.

“Cactus, Mr. Ruth.”

They heard the crack of the bat and Ruth chased down a soft-fade fly ball, moving like a ballerina on his stumpy little tiptoes and throwing the ball back into second.

“Lotta cactus in Ohio? Hadn’t heard that.”

Luther smiled. “Actually, Mr. Ruth sir, they be called ‘cacti’ when you talking ’bout more’n one. And, sho’, there’s great fields of them all over the state. Bushels and bushels of cacti.”

“And you, what, fell into one of these fields?”

“Yes, suh. Fell hard, too.”

“Looks like you fell from an airplane.”

Luther shook his head real slow. “Zeppelin, Mr. Ruth.”

They both had a long soft laugh over that, Luther still chuckling when he raised his glove and stole Rube Gray’s shot right out of the sky.

The next inning, some white men straggled out of the trees, and they recognized a few of them right off—Stuffy McInnis, no lie; Everett Scott, Lord; and then a couple of Cubs, dear Jesus—Flack, Mann, a third guy no one knew by face, could have played for either team. They worked their way along right field, and pretty soon they were standing behind the rickety old bench along the first base line, wearing suits and ties and hats in the heat, smoking cigars, occasionally shouting to someone named “Gidge,” confusing the hell out of Luther until he realized that’s what they called Ruth. Next time Luther looked, he saw they’d been joined by three more—Whiteman of the Sox and Hollocher, the Cubs shortstop, and some skinny boy with a red face and a chin that stuck out like an extra flap of skin who no one recognized, and Luther didn’t like that number—eight of them plus Ruth comprising a full team.