Unless you were standing just sixty feet and a hair away from him and those amazing arms that could whip the bat around and send the ball back at you twice as fast as you threw it in. Take your head off and you’d find yourself thinking, “How’d that happen?” out in centerfield somewhere while your body was still standing on the mound.
“You ready, kid?” he called out.
Rue Thomas nodded.
The big man took a vicious cut, his bat a blur. “Then let’s go.”
The crowd loving it. How many? Four thousand, at least. Maybe five. More than had ever packed little Mansfield Grounds before, that was for sure. Yelling and screaming and making the old wooden grandstands shake. Sending a fleet of gulls flapping away towards the ocean in panic.
Everybody who could buy or beg or steal a ticket was here. Here for an event big enough to shut down Coney Island, to hush the clatter of the Cyclone and the Thunderbolt. All of the attractions silent, because what would be the use of opening till the game ended? Who would come to Coney Island today and not want to see the Babe, the Bambino, the Big Bam, Jidge.
Babe Ruth, the most famous man on earth, facing off against Rue Thomas, the seventeen-year-old Brooklyn girl with lightning in her left arm.
The Babe settled back into his coiled batting stance. He was still grinning, but Rue could see something different in those guileless eyes. They seemed to sharpen, and his face, his whole body, grew still, watchful, attentive. Focused.
On Rue, on her hand, on the ball itself.
This white sphere.
Rue was nine when she first found out.
Before that, she wasn’t much different from any other kid on East 21st Street, skinny and dirty-kneed, with a mass of dark ringlets that framed her face.
But though few noticed, her hands were different, bigger and stronger than most of the boys’. And her fingers were long and tapered, ideal for running up and down the keys of a piano, people told her, if her parents could have afforded one.
Still, she was just another neighborhood girl until the day Billy O’Reilly tried to steal her brother Nick’s bicycle.
Billy O’Reilly and his gang from up on Nostrand Avenue, coming through like a thunderstorm. Four of them, pushing poor little Tim Trotta into the bushes, throwing Cliff Jamison’s hat up onto a roof.
The usual. You just waited for it to pass, like you’d wait out the storm.
But then Billy grabbed Nick’s bike and took off. Nick had worked for a year delivering milk with Mr. Stephanides to buy that bike. Now, even if they saw it again, it would be wrecked. No one could bust something up like Billy could.
Nick and a couple of the others went running down the street, chasing, but it was hopeless. The littler kids just stood and watched, except for Rue.
Rue, standing in her front yard, looked down at the stone resting in her left hand. She’d picked it up without even realizing, and now she hefted it, enjoying its weight and cool smoothness against her palm.
Then she let fly, and an instant later Billy lay moaning on the street. The newly riderless bike made a gentle right turn and fell on its side.
There was a moment of dead silence as everyone stared at her. Then, shouting and cursing, Billy’s friends came running back.
Rue bent down and picked up another stone. “Watch,” she said in her wispy little-girl’s voice, a voice that was usually easy to ignore. But not now, not when the second stone whanged off a street sign, leaving a big dent. Not when she found a third one and raised her eyes to look at them again.
As his friends hoisted Billy up and half-carried him away, everyone else clustered around her. “Where’d you learn to do that?” Nick said. He was holding his bike like it was a gift from heaven.
Rue shrugged. A million hours spent throwing a ragged stitched-up ball against a white square painted on the garage wall, and no one had ever noticed.
Till now. The very next Saturday Nick brought her down to Marine Park, and an hour later she was pitching for the neighborhood baseball team.
Some people said the diamond was no place for a girl, especially a little one like Rue Thomas. But the minute they saw her fastball and drop curve and fadeaway, they shut right up.
Because they played for money, every Sunday morning in Marine Park. Money and neighborhood pride. And if it would help you win, no rule book said a chimpanzee, an alligator, a sewer rat, or a girl couldn’t play.
He showed up for the first time midway through Rue’s rookie season with the Comets, just a week after her sixteenth birthday. He was waiting outside the players’ door at Mansfield Grounds after a game, leaning against a scrawny locust tree like he had all the time in the world.
Thin, well-dressed, with a quick, toothy grin and silvery eyes. Smiling at her as she walked past, heading towards the El.
He fell into step beside her. “Buy you a soda?”
His voice gentler than she’d expected. But confident, like he was used to people doing what he wanted.
She kept walking.
“Or a — whaddaya call it? An egg cream?”
From out of town. She’d guessed from his look, and from his voice, too, though she hadn’t done enough traveling yet to figure out where. She stopped and looked him up and down, in his gray suit and well-brushed hat.
Forty years old, maybe more. And far from the first to try this. “Sorry,” she said. “Not interested.”
He laughed, showing those white teeth. “What you’re thinking, I’m not interested either,” he said. “I’m talking about business. Baseball business.”
Rue hesitated. It was 1931, and times were hard. Her parents had already moved twice, from the house on East 21st to an apartment over on Ocean Avenue, and then to another one in a worse neighborhood on Quentin Road. Sometimes they didn’t have enough to eat.
If someone wanted to talk business, you listened.
“I’ll buy you a burger,” the man said. “To go along with that soda.”
His name was Chase. He said he was from Chicago.
All she had to do, he told her, was lose every once in a while.
They sat in a booth way in the back of Benny’s, a place a few blocks towards the bad side of Coney Island. She’d never been there before, but the food tasted just fine.
She let him describe what he wanted, although she’d understood where he was headed in the first ten seconds. She knew how it worked, with ballplayers being paid to make an error here, strike out there, throw just a few bad pitches at important moments.
That kind of thing had been around as long as baseball. It’d gotten so bad that a whole World Series had been lost on purpose, Rue knew, back in 1919, when she was only four. After that they’d brought in this old man, a judge, to make sure baseball stayed on the up and up. The first thing he’d done was kick eight of the guilty players out of baseball forever.
Rue had pitched against one of them, Joe Jackson, a tired, hollow-eyed old guy, when a barnstorming team had stopped in Brooklyn the previous fall. He hadn’t been able to get around on her fastball.
She listened to Chase. Waited till she was nearly done with her Coke and hamburger before saying, “Sorry.”
He looked at her. “At least listen to what we’re offering.”
She shook her head.
Chase seemed unruffled. “Not every game, of course. Only every once in a while. Wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation.” He paused for a second. “Though it might be better for you in the long run, you weren’t quite so good.”
At the time, Rue was 9–1, with an earned-run average of under 2.00.
“You’re hot stuff,” he went on. “Some think it’s a joke, a setup. Others think you’re for real. Either way, there’s a ton of action whenever you pitch, all over the country.”