"Low and outside." One crackly report muddled with all the others. Woody heard it because it came in over his own right shoulder.
"Where did he get it?"
"Down the slot."
"Feed it in."
"Check."
Watching his own hand-picked successor in office, Woody realized that he himself had probably been the last of his kind. He'd thought of himself as a rebel, but in reality he'd only brought the old ways to consummation. Under McCaffree, politics, the Chancellorship, even the game had changed. Fenn fooled you. He looked old-fashioned, but he had an abiding passion for innovation. He was the most relentless activist ever to take office, yet he never seemed to move a muscle. He was coldly calculating, yet supremely loyal to old comrades, and what else was it but sentiment that was making him, against all logic and advice, support his son-in-law as the next chief of the party? "You mean," Woody ventured, "Rooney oughta be giving Law a little more rest between games."
"No, I mean he shouldn't be using his best pitcher against inconsequential teams like the Bridegrooms."
"Well, Fenn, it don't matter much who you beat, what Rooney wants is to win ball games—"
Fennimore McCaffree pivoted slightly, almost imperceptibly, to glower witheringly upon the only surviving ex-Chancellor of the UBA, and said acidly: "Well, goddamn it, Mr. Winthrop, I know he wants to win ball games, that's just the point!" Then he turned back to his TV sets, where the Cels had a rally going in the ninth: a long belt up against the screen in right, scoring two runs, and that was the game, Cels 4, Keystones 3. Poor old Tim.
"I'm sorry, Fenn. I don't get you."
McCaffree sighed impatiently. "What if, Woody, we have passed, without knowing it, from a situation of sequential compounding into one of basic and finite yes-or-no survival, causing a shift of what you might call the equilibrium point, such that the old strategies, like winning ball games, sensible and proper within the old stochastic or recursive sets, are, under the new circumstances, insane!"
"Hmmm," said Woody Winthrop. Only word he was sure of was the last one. Above the television sets, electronic score boards, hooked directly to those of the separate ball parks, recorded the surface data of the games, blinking their messages in a slow burn, left to right. Partridge was throwing gopher balls and his Pastimer teammates were fielding like a bunch of bush-leaguers, turning what was supposed to be the game of the day, if not of the year — Knicks vs.the Patsies, with both teams once again tied for the league lead, Jock Casey pitching against Sam Partridge — into a circus. The Patsies' infield, supposed to be the UBA's greatest, had made four errors so far, and the Knicks were winning, 5-to-1, with another rally going in the eighth. The Pioneers had just lost to the Bean-eaters, 8-to-4. Young Thornton Shadwell's third loss; Tim's boy just wasn't going to make it. Woody didn't know exactly why, but he felt things were not going well in the Association. Ever since that boy's death. Like the soul had gone out of it or something, as if Sycamore Flynn's Knicks had stolen it somehow and wouldn't give it back, or couldn't, and the whole balance of things had got thrown off. Feeling antiquated and stupid and disconnected, Woody sighed and said: "I don't know, Fenn. Maybe you're probably right."
But Fenn was talking to somebody on one of the squawk boxes and wasn't listening to Woody. In adjoining rooms, machinery, looking like big eyeless monsters conjured up from the depths, hummed and clicked, sucking up the information being fed to them from scorekeepers, scouts, official monitors, and even a set of special camera devices that Mc-Caffree had invented to time runners, spy out jittery fielders, register variations between what the catchers called for and what the pitchers really threw, million different things. Made Woodrow Winthrop's old head spin. "You see, given this shift and the fact that it seems to be out of our hands, some built-in flaw or gap which doesn't allow us to cope with it directly," Fenn continued, apparently speaking to Woody again, though still studying the TV sets, "it would almost be better for the whole league if the players were all incompetent and irrational."
"Is that so?" said Woody.
"Mmm. The way things are going, we're apt to get a payoff nobody wants." Young Chauncey O'Shea was at the plate for the Knicks with runners on base. Fenn asked for a close-up of O'Shea, then leaned forward to study his batting stance, grip on the handle. Whenever Fenn did something like that, it made Woody wince, and he winced now, feeling instinctively sorry for O'Shea under that kind of scrutiny, though in fact he didn't even know the boy, only knew he was the one calling the pitches when young Rutherford got killed, and so had no reason certainly to feel any special warmth for the man. But Woody suffered the intrusion of all this machinery, this detailed information gathering, the dossiers, the intense pattern studies and close-ups, the projections, the cumulative files which Fenn called CUMS — in Woody's day that was a dirty word — didn't like it at all, found it suffocating and unfriendly, thought there were too many people playing a functional part without asking themselves what they were doing there. And now Fenn was even using the same methods to gauge and manipulate the political picture. Of course, even if people did start asking themselves about the roles they played, that wouldn't necessarily change things. And as Fenn always said: people'll get used to it in a few years and wonder how they ever got along without. "Besides, people are narcissistic: they like being studied and stared at." And you certainly had to hand it to Old Fenn, he never missed a trick. Agents operating inside the other two parties and at least one on every ball club, filing the data that Long Lew Lydell and the computers tabulated. He wondered what the payoff Fennimore was talking about could be, but he didn't worry too much about it, since he figured it couldn't concern him, and above all, he didn't want to risk getting put down again.
O'Shea doubled, scoring two runs. Fenn leaned back. Casey knocked the Patsies off, one-two-three, in the ninth, giving the Knicks a lopsided 7-to-1 win. "And there's not a goddamn thing I can do about it," Fennimore McCaffree said softly. Glumly, the seventh and eighth Chancellors of the Universal Baseball Association watched the League Standings Board suffer its daily transmutation.
Disappointing. It was. Henry glanced back at the board, then left, pulling the door to. Down the black stairs he went, across the pale threshold and into the street, trying to forget about it, get his mind on a good meal. Surely he needed one, and moreover, Lou was right, he had to restore some order to his life, especially now. He'd just played sixty straight games, the most he'd ever done at a stretch: his kidneys ached, his neck hurt, and his eyes were so tired he could hardly see, yes, he needed this break, relax the mind, indulge the lower spheres, find some stability for himself, if he couldn't find it for the Association. But try as he could, he couldn't shake it off; discontent, like a dark improper bird hatched in his own injured breast, attended Henry Waugh on his Saturday night walk to Mitch's Bar and Grill.
He'd risen after dark last evening and had done nothing since but play the game. Normally, it took him about six weeks to play out a season, not counting the week or two it took to accomplish all the midwinter blue-season summarizing, analyzing, and record-keeping, but in these twenty-four hours he'd driven himself through fifteen days of play, sixty games, nearly a quarter of the season. To accomplish it, he'd had to hold his log entries to a minimum and finally leave off keeping statistics altogether, planning to catch up at the end of the season, if he still wanted to. For all Fenn McCaffree's pretense at efficiency, the truth was the books just were not being kept, and no one knew exactly anymore what was happening. The only exception was the pitching records, he had to keep up with those in order to know what Jock Casey was doing, for Casey had become, through his own peculiar intransigence, the key to the whole mess — cooler than ever, winning games, even dusting batters on occasion, now owning the fourth or fifth best ERA in the Association. And his Knick teammates were still hanging onto the league lead, while the Pioneers, losing eleven of their last fifteen games, had dropped out of the picture. Yes, the Spirit's E-R-A wasn't worth much, to be sure.