The first draft of the tale was pretty dull. Thank heaven, I was smart enough to look up Alfred Bester, one of the great talents of our age—especially when it comes to sparking up a story idea. Alfie’s mind works in leaps and bounds, and after an evening of swapping ideas and swilling booze, «Béisbol» just about wrote itself.
So thank you, Alfie. See you at the World Series. (Or maybe not. I’m a Red Sox fan, and I don’t think I could stand another crushing blow like the 1986 Series.)
Nixon sat scowling in the dugout, his dark chin down on the letters of his baseball uniform, his eyes glaring. It wasn’t us he was mad at; it was Castro.
Across the infield, the Cubans were passing out cigars in their dugout. Top of the ninth inning and they were ahead, 1-0. We had three more chances at their robot pitcher. So far, all the mechanical monster had done was strike out fourteen of us USA All-Stars and not allow a runner past first base.
Castro looked a lot older than I thought he’d be. His beard was all gray. But he was laughing and puffing on a big cigar as his team took the field and that damned robot rolled itself up to the mound.
Nixon jumped to his feet. He looked kind of funny in a baseball uniform, like, out of place.
«Men,» he said to us, «this is more than a game. I’m sure you know that.»
We all kind of muttered and mumbled and nodded our heads.
«If they win this series, they’ll take over all of the Caribbean. All of Central America. The United States will be humiliated.»
Yeah, maybe so, I thought. And you’ll be a bum again, instead of a hero. But he didn’t have to go up and try to bat against that Commie robot. From what we heard, they had built it in Czechoslovakia or someplace like that to throw hand grenades at tanks. Now it was throwing baseballs right past us, like a blur.
«We’ve got to win this game,» Nixon said, his voice trembling. «We’ve got to!»
It had seemed like a good idea. Use baseball to reestablish friendly relations with Cuba, just like they had used Ping-Pong to make friends with Red China. So the commissioner personally picked an All-Star team and Washington picked Nixon to manage us. It would be a pushover, we all thought. I mean, the Cubans like baseball, but they couldn’t come anywhere near matching us.
Well, pitching may be 80 percent of the game, but scouting is 200 percent more. We waltzed into Havana and found ourselves playing guys who were just about as good as we were. According to a CIA report, their guys were pumped up on steroids and accelerators and God knows what else. They’d never pass an Olympic Games saliva test, but nobody on our side had thought to include drug testing in the ground rules.
Oh, we won the first two games okay. But it wasn’t easy.
And then the Commies used their first secret weapon on us. Women. It was like our hotel was all of a sudden invaded by them. Tall show-girl types, short little señoritas, redheads, blondes, dark flashing eyes and luscious lips that smiled and laughed. And boobs. Never saw so many bouncing, jiggling, low-cut bosoms in my life.
What could we do? Our third baseman hurt his back swinging by his knees from the chandelier in his room with a broad in one arm and a bottle of champagne in the other. Two of our best pitchers were so hung over that they couldn’t see their catchers the next morning. And our center fielder, who usually batted cleanup, was found under his bed in a coma that lasted three days. But there was a big smile on his face the whole time.
By the time the Cubans had pulled ahead, three games to two, Nixon called a team meeting and put it to us but good.
«This has got to stop,» he said, pacing back and forth across the locker room, hands locked behind his stooped back, jowls quivering with anger.
«These women are trained Communist agents,» he warned us. «I’ve been getting intelligence reports from Washington. Castro has no intentions of establishing friendly relations with us …»
Somebody snickered at the words friendly relations, but quickly choked it off as Nixon whirled around, searching for the culprit like a schoolteacher dealing with a bunch of unruly kids.
«This isn’t funny! If the Commies win this series, they’ll go all through Latin America crowing about how weak the United States is. We’ll lose the whole Caribbean, Central America, the Panama Canal —everything!»
We promised to behave ourselves. Hell, he was worried about Latin America, but most of us had more important problems. I could just imagine my next salary negotiation: «Why, you couldn’t even beat a bunch of third-rate Cubans,» the general manager would tell my agent.
More than that, I could see my father’s face. He had spent many years teaching me how to play baseball. He had always told me that I could be a big leaguer. And he had always asked nothing more of me than that I gave my best out on the field. I wouldn’t be able to face him, knowing that we had lost to Castro because we had screwed around.
We went out there that afternoon and tore them apart, 11—2. That tied the series. The seventh and final game would decide it all.
That’s when they brought out their second secret weapon: Raoul the Robot, the mechanical monster, the Czechoslovak chucker, the machine that threw supersonic fastballs.
I thought Nixon would have apoplexy when the little robot rolled itself up to the pitcher’s mound to start the game. It looked sort of like a water cooler, a squat metal cylinder with a glass dome on top. It had two «arms»: curved metal chutes that wound around and around several times and then fired the ball at you. Fast. Very fast.
Nixon went screaming out onto the field before our leadoff batter got to the plate. Castro ambled out, grinning and puffing his cigar. The huge crowd—the Havana stadium was absolutely jammed—gave him the kind of roar that American fans reserve for pitchers who throw no-hitters in the seventh game of the World Series. He turned, doffed his cap just like any big leaguer would, and then joined the argument raging at the mound.
Nixon did us proud. He jumped up and down. He threw his cap on the dirt and kicked it. He turned red in the face. He raged and shouted at the umpires—two of them from the States, two from Cuba.
The crowd loved it. They started shouting «Ole!» every time he kicked up some dirt.
The umpires went through the rule book. There’s no rule that says all the players have to be human beings. So Raoul the Robot stayed on the mound.
He struck out the side in the first inning. Leading off the second inning, our cleanup hitter, well rested after his three-day coma, managed to pop a fly to center field. But the next two guys struck out.
And so it went. Raoul had three basic pitches: fast, faster, and fastest. No curve, no slider, no change-up. His fastballs were pretty straight, too. Not much of a hop or dip to them. They just blazed past you before you could get your bat around. And he could throw either right-handed or left-handed, depending on the batter.
He couldn’t catch the ball at all. After each pitch the catcher would toss the ball to the shortstop, who would come over to the mound and stick the ball in a round opening at the top of the robot’s glassed-in head. Then the machine would be ready to wind up and throw.
«Hit him in the head,» Nixon advised us. «Break that glass top and knock him the hell out of there.»
Easy to say. Through the first four innings we got exactly one man on base, a walk. Their catcher adjusted the little gizmo he had clipped to his chest protector, and the mechanical monster started throwing strikes again.
By the time the ninth inning came around, we had collected two hits, both of them bloop pop-ups that just happened to fall in between fielders. Raoul had struck out fourteen. Nixon was glaring pure hatred across the infield. Castro was laughing and passing out cigars in the Cubans’ dugout.