Outside, it was raining again, nostalgic fall evening, and Henry, as he stepped along under his umbrella, found it pleasant to muse about the origins. He'd always played a lot of games: baseball, basketball, different card games, war and finance games, horseracing, football, and so on, all on paper of course. Once, he'd got involved in a tabletop war-games club, played by mail, with mutual defense pacts, munition sales, secret agents, and even assassinations, but the inability of the other players to detach themselves from their narrow-minded historical preconceptions depressed Henry. Anything more complex than a normalized two-person zero-sum game was beyond them. Henry had invented for them a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players, which opened up the possibility of wars run by industrial giants with investments on several boards at once, the buying off of whole governments, the emergence of international communications and utilities barons, strikes and rebellions by the slumdwellers between "Go" and "Jail," revolutionary subversion and sabotage with sympathetic ties across the boards, the creation of international regulatory bodies by the established power cliques, and yet without losing any of the basic features of their own battle games, but it never caught on. He even introduced health, sex, religious, and character variables, but that made even less of a hit, though he did manage, before leaving the club, to get a couple pieces on his "Intermonop" game published in some of the club literature.
And so, finally, he'd found his way back to baseball. Nothing like it really. Not the actual game so much — to tell the truth, real baseball bored him — but rather the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual and team, offense and defense, strategy and luck, accident and pattern, power and intelligence. And no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history, so specific an ethic, and at the same time, strange as it seemed, so much ultimate mystery. He had started out by selecting eight teams from baseball's early days in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, and supplying them with rosters of twenty-one ballplayers each. Marshall Williams. Verne Mackenzie. Fancy Dan Casey. Barnaby North. How clearly he remembered the stars of that first year! He even recalled the precise results of those first games, how the Beaneaters won their first six games in a row and never gave up the lead, beating out the Keystones by five full games. If he tried hard enough, he could probably even remember the exact scores.
Of course, the abrupt beginning had its disadvantages. It was, in a sense, too arbitrary, too inexplicable. In spite of the almost excessive warmth he felt toward those first ballplayers, it always troubled him that their life histories were so unavailable to him: What had a great player already in his thirties been doing for the previous ten years? It was much better once a kind of continuity had been established, and when new players had taken over the league who had their whole careers still ahead of them. It was, in fact, when the last Year I player had retired that Henry felt the Association had come of age, and when, a couple years ago, the last veteran of Year I, old ex-Chancellor Barnaby North, had died, he had felt an odd sense of relief: the touch with the deep past was now purely "historic," its ambiguity only natural. Luckily, all the first-year records had been broken. And soon there would be no more living veterans born before Year I.
The rain tumbled like gentle applause on his umbrella. Under it he walked, skirting the puddles, dry in the deluge, as though glassed in under a peaked black dome. Hunched-up cars pushed through the streets like angry defeated ballplayers jockeying through crowds on their way to the showers. Henry waited at a corner for a red light. Offices emptied out, filling the streets. A policeman in a slicker stood stoically in the thick of the traffic, blowing his whistle and jerking his arms like a base coach urging a runner on. The light changed to green and Henry crossed over to his bus stop. Green. Slicker. Cop. Cop* per Greene. Might try it. Have to jot it down when he got home.
Everywhere he looked he saw names. His head was full of diem. Bus stop. Whistlestop. Whistlestop Busby, second base. Simple as that. Over a storefront across the street: Thornton's. He'd been looking for a name to go with Shadwell, and maybe that was it. Thornton Shadwell. Tim's boy. Pitcher like the old man? Probably. But a lefty. Will he play for the Stones? No. Unless the old man gets sacked this year. His Keystones were in a slump. Manager of the Year last year, in trouble this. Life was fast and brutal. More likely, Mel Trench's Excelsiors will grab young Shadwell up. Outstanding prospect.
Henry was always careful about names, for they were what gave the league its sense of fulfillment and failure, its emotion. The dice and charts and other paraphernalia were only the mechanics of the drama, not the drama itself. Names had to be chosen, therefore, that could bear the whole weight of perpetuity. Brock Rutherford was a name like that; Horace (n) Zifferblatt wasn't. Now, it was funny about names. All right, you bring a player up from the minors, call him A. Player A, like his contemporaries, has, being a Rookie, certain specific advantages and disadvantages with the dice. But it's exactly the same for all Rookies. You roll, Player A gets a hit or he doesn't, gets his man out or he doesn't. Sounds simple. But call Player A "Sycamore Flynn" or "Melbourne Trench" and something starts to happen. He shrinks or grows, stretches out or puts on muscle. Sprays singles to all fields or belts them over the wall. Throws mostly fast balls like Swanee Law or curves like Mickey Halifax. Choleric like Rag Rooney or slow and smooth like his old first-base rival Mose Stanford. Not easy to tell just how or why. Or take Old Fennimore McCaffree. He was "Old" the year he came up to play third base for the Knicks. And not just because he'd got an unlucky throw of the dice on the Rookie Age Chart and started in as a thirty-year-older, but because that was simply who he was: Old Fennimore. Scholar and statesman. Dark. Angular. Intense. Sinewy. Fast. Tough. Year XIX. Same Rookie year as Brock Rutherford. Fenn got overlooked in all the other excitement that year, but in XXI he stroked out a.371 to cop both the batting title and the year's Most Valuable Player Award. Determined man. But still Old Fenn. Now, just inquire of poor Woody Winthrop, who till then had been the perennial third-base All Star selection, and who, in fact, if Henry remembered rightly, had himself in that Year of the Rookie, Year XIX, won the MVP Award, if that was Player A he was getting eclipsed by. No, friends and voters, that was Old Fennimore. Shrewd, relentless, cool, reliable Fenn. When you scored against the Knickerbockers in those years, you even felt a chill just crossing third under Old Fenn's glare. Then, suddenly, he was not just old, he was too old. Great playing record, but too brief to be sure of making the Hall of Fame. And for Fenn there was no halfway house in history. A spectacular career as manager might be enough more to do the trick, he figured. So he talked Woody Winthrop, by then the champion Knickerbockers boss, into quitting his job to enter Association politics, while he himself, wily Old Fenn McCaffree, took over as manager of the team Woody had built. Something of a bastard, but he won ball games, and that was what counted in baseball. Twelve years, six championships. And so he did make it: Hall of Fame. And now he was even the UBA Chancellor. And whom did he succeed? Woody Winthrop. Looking back, it seemed all but necessary. Strange. But name a man and you make him what he is. Of course, he can develop. And in ways you don't expect. Or something can go wrong. Lot of nicknames invented as a result of Rookie-year surprises. But the basic stuff is already there. In the name. Or rather: in the naming.