The
Rookie

I don’t really remember how we first thought of the Rookie. I think it may have been right after I saw Luke, who had just turned three, playing with a soccer ball in the Luxembourg Gardens. It wasn’t just the kicking that scared me but a kind of nonchalant bend-of-the-body European thing he did as he rose to meet the ball with his head. Next, he would be wearing those terrible shorts and bouncing the ball from foot to foot, improving his “skills.” He had been born in New York, but he had no memory of it. Paris is the only home he knows. (Or, as he explained to a friend, in the third person he occasionally favors, like Bo Jackson or General de Gaulle, “He was born in New York, but then he moved to Paris and had a happy life.”)

“You want to have a catch?” I said, and he looked at me blankly.

That night at bedtime I said, “Hey, I’ll tell you about the Rookie.” It was eight o’clock, but it was bright outside. Paris is a northern city, on a latitude with Newfoundland, as New York is a Mediterranean one, on a latitude with Naples, and so the light here in the hours between seven and nine at night is like the light in the hours between five and seven in New York. The sun is still out, but the sounds have become less purposeful—you hear smaller noises, high heels on the pavement—and though it is a pleasant time to lie in bed, it is not an easy time for a small boy to go to sleep.

I had been drawing storytelling duty for a while and had made increasingly frantic efforts to find a hit. A story about a little boy who turned into a fish in Venice hadn’t gone anywhere, and a remake of The Hobbit had done no box office at all. This story, though, rolled out easily. Every dad has one good bedtime story buried in him, and desperation will bring it out.

The Rookie (I said) was a small boy in Anywhere, U.S.A., in the spring of 1908. Out walking with his mom one day, he discovered that he had an uncanny gift for throwing stones at things. He picked one up and threw it so hard that it knocked a robin off its perch a mile away, and then, after his mama chided him, he threw another one, just as far but so softly that it snuggled into the nest beside the bird without breaking an egg. His parents, a little sadly but with a sense of obligation, immediately sent him off on the train to New York, to try out for the New York Giants and their great manager, John J. McGraw. All he took with him was a suitcase that his mother had packed for him, filled with things, including his bottle, that she thought might be useful in case of an emergency. (At that point the contents of the suitcase were unparticularized, but they eventually included a complete dictionary of the animal languages, a saxophone, a design for the first car radio, compressed early rocket ship refueling pills, a map of Paris, a window defogger, a time machine, a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, a map of a secret route to the South Pole, and reindeer medicine for Santa’s team.)

He got out at Grand Central, took a cab all the way uptown to the Polo Grounds—his mother had told him to take taxis in New York—and asked to see John J. McGraw. McGraw, staccato and impatient, was at first skeptical, but he finally agreed to watch while the kid threw, because he was so polite and the letter from his parents was so insistent and because, well, you never know. He called Big Six, the great Christy Mathewson, out of the dugout to watch, and Chief Meyers, the great American Indian catcher, to get behind the plate. The Chief came out, with a weary, crippled, long-suffering gait, and squatted. (I thought of the Chief as a creased veteran, though the real Chief was still in his twenties and not yet even a Giant.) The little guy walked to the mound, tugged at his cap—not a baseball cap, the cap of his knickers suit—and let fly.

Everybody was impressed, to put it mildly. “Hey, Mr. McGraw!” cried the Chief. “I ain’t never seen speed like that, and ain’t he got movement on it too!”

“Well,” Matty said mildly, peering at the tiny, doughty figure on the mound, “when you think about it, he’s more or less got to have that upward movement on his fastball, don’t he?” (My ideas of credible 1908 ballplayer dialogue were heavily influenced by Ring Lardner.)

McGraw shrugged, since tryouts were one thing and baseball was another, but in the end he decided to give the kid a start that Sunday in a big benefit exhibition that the Giants were playing at the Polo Grounds against the Detroit Tigers.

I stopped. Outside we could hear the steady stop-and-start rhythmic passage of the sanitation workers. Impossibly chic, in grass green uniforms with a white stripe running down the side, the men of the Paris Propre come down our street every night to collect the garbage. The garbage is put out by gardiens in city-issued green plastic canisters, and the garbage men place the canisters on little elevators, one on each side of the rear of the truck. The containers are lifted, turned upside down, shaken out, and returned trembling to the ground. Then the truck proceeds, at a stately, serene, implacable pace; a cabdriver who gets caught behind one on a little street lets out a moan, like a man who has just been bayoneted.

At this point I decided I’d made a decent start and was getting ready to say good night. “Go on,” he said, muffled but sharp, from under his covers. An order.

In the benefit exhibition that Sunday (I went on at last), the big bathtub-shaped stadium, with its strange supporting Y beams, was packed with fans, come to see the three-year-old phenom. The Rookie took the mound, throwing smoke, and it looked as though it might be a first, a perfect perfect game, twenty-seven men up, twenty-seven Ks, until, in the sixth, he had to face the Terrible Ty Cobb. (I realized that I had a problem here since Cobb should have been batting cleanup from the start; I explained that he had been late suiting up, because he insisted on extorting extra payment from the Tigers’ management for playing in a charity exhibition, even though everybody else was playing for free. Cobb was just like that, I explained: terrible.) The crowd quieted as the confrontation neared. Cobb came to the plate, sneering and drawling.

“Hey, baby,” he called out, taunting the Rookie. “Looks to me like you’re nothin’ but a baby.” (Luke’s whole body stiffened. If there was a worse insult, he hadn’t heard it; Jackie Robinson, in his first year with the Brooklyn Dodgers, had never been called a name so vile.) Shaken, the Rookie lost a bit off his heater. It was still blazing, though, and Cobb just got a piece of it, dribbling it toward first; he took off, and the Rookie, who knew his assignments, dutifully scampered over to cover. Cobb came in hard, hard as he could, his spikes sharpened to razor tips, and stamped down on the Rookie’s three-year-old foot. The Rookie dropped the ball. Safe! Stinking rotten way to get on base, but safe all the same. Shaking off a couple of tears, the Rookie went back to the mound. “Hey, I reckon you’re a crybaby. Hey, everybody, look at the crybaby! Looks to me like you’re nothin’ but a crybaby” came the taunting Georgia drawl from first, and the Rookie pitched out of trouble. But the pain lingered, and in the top of the ninth, the Giants having pushed over one run on a hit-and-run executed by the Chief, he made a few mistakes, walked a couple of batters—hey, he was three—and left himself with the bases loaded and the Georgia Peach due up again. The crowd was going crazy, and now the taunting began again, worse than ever. (“Hey, baby! Hey, crybaby! Whyn’t ya cry some more, crybaby?”)

The Rookie knew what he had to do. In the dugout he had taken his old bottle from the suitcase his mother had packed for him when he went off to join the Giants, just in case, and stowed it under his cap. Now he dripped a couple of drops of milk onto the seams of the baseball, the Rookie’s soon-to-be-notorious bottleball. It was before they brought in the rule against foreign substances on the ball, I explained. The Rookie was playing fair. (“Hey, when are you guys going to sleep?” Luke’s mother’s voice came from the other room. “Soon,” I called back abruptly. The lights of the traffic on the boulevard Saint-Germain came in through the windows, but I didn’t even draw the curtains.)

The Rookie stretched and threw, and the bottleball dipped and twisted and dipped and twisted again, curving all the way out to the third-base line and then cruising halfway toward first before finally slipping in, softly and cleanly, right across the plate, a strike at the knees. Cobb had time to take a really good cut—he had all day—but the pitch had him so fooled that he didn’t just whiff, he twisted himself in knots while he whiffed: real knots, his whole body pulled around like a wet washrag, hands ending up back of his butt. (Luke chuckled deeply at that.) “Steer-rike-uh three,” cried the umpire. The bleachers of the Polo Grounds went nuts.

The Rookie trotted off the field. “Who’s the baby now, Mr. Cobb?” he asked, with quiet dignity, on his way back to the dugout.

My kid sat up, shot up in bed, like a mechanical doll, as though he had a spring hinge right at his waist. Christy Mathewson (I went on) didn’t say anything—that wasn’t his way—but he went over as the Rookie came into the dugout, took off the Rookie’s cap, and mussed up his hair. Outside, the crowd wouldn’t leave. They chanted, “Rookie! Rookie!”

Now the only sound from Luke’s pillow was of short, constant breathing. I had the uncanny knowledge of a kind of silent excitement, the certainty—I have witnessed it once or twice on opening night in a theater, though I had certainly never created it before myself—that what we had here was a hit. The Terrible Ty Cobb had called him a baby, and he had thrown the bottleball, and then who was the baby?

That night (I said) the Rookie was offered a contract with the Giants (doubtless a mean, exploitative contract, but I left that out), and the team got on the overnight sleeper to St. Louis, heading out to steamy Sportsman’s Park. (I knew that the Browns, not the Cardinals, played there, but I liked the way it sounded.) The Chief tucked the Rookie into his berth and, before he went off to play pinochle with the guys, asked him, gruffly, “You okay, Rookie?” “I’m okay, Chief,” the Rookie said, and then he listened to the sounds of the train tracks clacking and the whistle blowing and the other ballplayers in the next car, laughing and playing cards, before he fell deep asleep, somewhere outside Columbus.

“I’m okay, Chief,” Luke repeated, and he did something he had never done before, or at least not in my presence: Without negotiation or hesitation, without tears or arguments or requests to come and sleep in the big bed, he rolled right over and fell asleep.

From then on we had a story about the Rookie—Luke called it the Rookie story—every night. The characters firmed up pretty quickly. The Rookie was an earnest, resourceful, somewhat high-strung little hero. The Chief was blustery and honest, wanting nothing more than to settle in with his copy of the Police Gazette and have a peaceful afternoon at McSorley’s. The Rookie’s triumph over Ty Cobb, though, had bad consequences. Cobb developed a bitter, unappeasable Tom DeLay–type enmity toward the Rookie and set himself the task of doing anything he could to destroy his career. John J. McGraw, thumbtack sharp and demanding, and Christy Mathewson, handsome and deep-voiced and friendly, though a little remote—on a couple of occasions, when the Chief left town to go on a scouting trip to Cincinnati, he was the Rookie’s baby-sitter—filled out the dramatis personae.

After a couple of months I went down to the cellar of our building and got out the few baseball reference books I had brought to Paris and never unpacked. (This cellar is an honest-to-God cave, a stone cellar with little arches where you could keep wine. I kept meaning to bring the wine down, but I never remembered to do it, and instead the books were there, moldering away.) The 1908 National League pennant race, which I had plucked out of the air and dim memories of The Glory of Their Times, turned out to be even more interesting than I’d thought. It was a three-way race—Cubs, Giants, Pirates—that included Merkle’s boner and the season-capping rematch it produced, and in a sense, it made baseball in America. I discovered that 1908 had been a kind of watershed year, a time when baseball had, for the last time, an air of improvisation about it, with, as someone said of those days, “stupid guys, smart guys, tough guys, mild guys, crazy guys, college men, slickers from the city, and hicks from the country.” If a three-year-old with a major-league fastball had ever existed, 1908 would have been the right season for him to play, and he probably would have been roomed with an American Indian catcher.

I even found a wonderful photograph of the Polo Grounds in that magical year, and we hung it over Luke’s bed. It shows a hundred or so fans lining up on Coogan’s Bluff, overlooking the ballpark—too poor or, more likely, too cheap to buy tickets, since you can see that there are still a few seats left in center—backs turned and heads bowed as they stare down at the field. Every single one of the men (there are no women) is wearing a derby; the kids are wearing cloth caps. One kid and an elderly gent have got up on a barrel, and five men in suits and hats are standing, precarious but dignified, on a plank that slopes down from it. You can’t really see a thing going on in the park—not a baseline, not a ballplayer, not a glimpse of a dugout or a bullpen, nothing except the outfield grass down below, a perfect and absolute blank. It’s as good as a Magritte: the solemnly dressed businessmen, backs turned, gazing out at the bare and uneventful field. Of course Luke didn’t have to be told whom they were looking at down there, and why; we both could see it plain as day. They were watching the Rookie, pitching his way out of another pinch.

Yet I began to wonder: What picture did he summon up when, night after night, he heard the words Polo Grounds, full count, all the way to the backstop? Not an inexact picture; no picture at all. He had never been to a baseball game, never seen a bat or a glove, never been inside a ballpark or even watched a ball game on television. He spent his days in parks where kids played soccer on dusty gravel, and you put a toe in the grass on pain of being whistled down by the surveillant, watching from his shed. No one Luke knew played baseball, no one talked about it; the words and situations were pure language, pure abstract lore. The clichés I rolled out—“He had all day,” “steamy Sportsman’s Park,” “no foreign substances on the old pill”—what did he think, what did he see when he heard them? I knew that he wanted to hear the words as much as I needed to say them—he zipped through dessert to get to bed every night—but what did the words mean to him?

I had spent my adult life believing that storytelling depends on the credibility of its details, and now, finally, I had made up a story that someone liked, and the details had no credibility at all, no existence except as sounds. You are supposed to use a word, I had always been taught, to point at a thing and hope that the thing will somehow end up pointing at a symbol: a feeling, a state of mind. When I lived in New York, I had on occasion even brought this faith to writing students. (Not that they cared. The fetching female ones listened gravely and then came up after class to ask if I had Gary Fisketjohn’s phone number.) But now I said “Polo Grounds” or “full count” and the words called up in my son a powerful reaction. What of that second range, where the words were supposed to become things, even just images in his head?

There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn’t. Sometimes the words fly right over the fence and all the way out to the feelings. Make them do it one time out of three in private, and you’ve got a reputation as someone who can play a little, a dad who can tell a decent bedtime story. Do it three times out of three in public, and you’re Mark McGwire or Dickens.

And I needed the words too, just as words. After four years in Paris I found that though I missed American sports a lot less than I had thought I would, I missed the lore of American sports keenly. I didn’t really miss sports; I missed the sports pages. I didn’t miss the things—sometimes the baseball season was twenty or twenty-five games old before I knew it had started—but I missed the words that went with the things. My passion for baseball, which at one point in my life was pretty intense, is now almost gone. My team, the Montreal Expos, is on the verge of going out of business; when I visit New York, I no longer know, or can even guess, which player is wearing which cap.

I still care about the words, though. One day, shopping for dinner along the rue du Bac and waiting in one of the interminable lines that are created by the individual care of French service—a line that is briskly, infuriatingly violated by the same arrogant dyed-blond woman in a fur coat and with a great jaw—I thought, Nobody in this line but me knows what an RBI is, or who Gene Mauch was, or what Jarry Park used to look like, or what a twinight doubleheader is. And I felt yearningly, unappeasably homesick. (This was not a rational emotion, since I have lived for years with a woman who doesn’t know what an RBI is either.)

The things an American who is abroad for a very long time misses—or at least the things I missed—I was discovering, weren’t the things you were supposed to miss. We are supposed to come to Europe for leisure, sunshine, a more civilized pace, for slowness of various kinds. America we are supposed to miss for its speed, its friendliness, for the independence of its people and the individualism of their lives. Yet these were not the things I missed, and when I speak to Americans who have lived abroad for a long time, those are not the things they seem to miss either. I didn’t miss crosstown traffic, New York taxicabs, talk radio or talk television, or the constant, appalling flow of opinion that spills out like dirty floodwater. (Paris is an argumentative but not an opinionated city; it is the ideal of every French newspaper columnist to have premises so inarguable that the opinions can more or less look after themselves while he goes to lunch.)

I didn’t miss American “independence” either. If anything, I missed its opposite, American obsequiousness, that yearning, beseeching tone of a salesman trying to sell something that you never hear in statist Europe. (The French, I think somebody said, have every vice except obsequiousness.) Buying shoes for my son, I missed the shoe salesmen of my childhood, my own uncles among them, their glasses held together with tape, their voices keening as they got down on their knees to tie the laces and make the sale. “Now the youngster can wear this shoe as a sports shoe or a dress shoe. Yeah, you got plenty of room there at the toe, young fellow—stand up. Now show your mom these shoes. Walk around.” Quieter: “I have it in burgundy, in brown, in blue . . .” A French shoe salesman, indignant at his position, laces the child’s shoes in silent anger and rises to his feet pretty much shaking his fist in your face.

I found, to my surprise, that what I missed and longed for was the comforting loneliness of life in New York, a certain kind of scuffed-up soulfulness. In Paris no relationship, even one with a postman or a dry cleaner, is abstract or anonymous; human relations are carved out in a perpetual present tense. There’s an intricacy of debits and credits. Things have histories. The little, quickly forgiven bumps of New York social life—the missed phone calls, the suddenly canceled lunches, the early exit from the dinner party, which are, if anything, signs of status, of “busyness”—are sources of long grievances, permanent estrangements, endless reexplanations. It isn’t possible just to remove yourself from a friendship in Paris for a month or two, as you can in New York. (“What have you been doing?” “Working.” “Oh.”) Even the most apparently professional relationships get overloaded. The dry cleaner is recovering from cancer, and her visits to pick up the clothes are scheduled around her treatments, with enough time to talk about them; the man who puts up shelves is a jazz guitarist, and an extra hour must be budgeted in to trade licks and discuss Jim Hall. On your way down the street in the early morning to run with all the other Americans in the Luxembourg Gardens—only Americans and French riot police go running; the Americans you know by their music festival sweatshirts, the French police by their flattop cuts and thoughtful, coiled power—you hear footsteps coming after you, and you worry that you have violated some ordinance, stepped on some forbidden grass. It is the fishmonger. “The wild salmon went well?” he demands anxiously. You find a café where you feel at home—and then become reluctant to go there, since it will involve such a wearing round of handshakes and “How is Madame?”

New York is devoted to the cult of busyness, but like all cults, it has at its heart the worship of a single, unforgiving idol, the office. After the idol has been served, life can be pretty formless. The things Americans miss tend to involve that kind of formlessness, small, casual, and solitary pleasures. A psychoanalyst misses walking up Lafayette Street in her tracksuit, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup with the little plastic piece that pops up. My wife, having been sent the carrot cake that she missed from New York, discovered that what she really missed was standing up at the counter and eating carrot cake in the company of strangers at the Bon Vivant coffee shop. I thought I missed reading Phil Mushnick in the sports pages of the Post; when I read him on-line, I discovered that what I really missed was reading Phil Mushnick on the number 6 uptown train on a Monday morning around ten.

It was, in a way, the invisibility of the men up on Coogan’s Bluff in 1908 that drew me to them. The consensual anonymity of men in crowds is what we are escaping when we leave, and then it is what we miss. You can be alone in Paris a lot, but it is hard to be lonely; there is always another pair of eyes, not unfriendly, appraising you. (The French husband of an American friend will not meet her in the park in his tennis shorts. He does not know who will see him, but he is sure that he will, in some way, be seen.) You are a subject, not an object, and if this is part of the narrow, centuries-old happiness of life in Paris, it is also one of the things that narrow that happiness. Walk into Central Park to watch the sea lions, and you disappear from the world for a little while. In the Luxembourg Gardens, or at the menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes, you are always conscious of the long allées leading you back the way you came; of the surveillants’ shed at the center of the park, where the two uniformed men sit with their hot plate, warming up coffee and watching the world; of the lion looking back at you. We go to cities to be invisible, or to be invisible and visible by turns, and it is hard to be invisible in Paris. The light at night is too strong. Gershwin got this right at least: The car horns and the syncopations in An American in Paris are all French. What that American misses is the blues.

 

After about a year of telling the Rookie story, I went to New York to give a talk, and I turned the trip into a literary mission, a sort of Rookie collecting expedition. I wanted to bring home tangible evidence of something that, as a matter of fact, had never taken place there. I bought a baseball encyclopedia and a box of books on the Cobb era and borrowed a Ken Burns video. A vintage Giants cap, child size, which I thought would be the hardest thing to find, turned out to be absurdly easy; the past is so neatly packaged now that I just walked into a memorabilia store on Lexington Avenue and found a replica cap, no problem.

When I got home, I put on the video, from the PBS Baseball series, which I had never seen, and we watched all those flickering, overfrantic little ghost figures racing around. One by one the faces and bodies and actions that you couldn’t see in the photo above Luke’s bed were being filled in. There was Ty Cobb, looking appropriately evil; there was John J. McGraw. There was pitching and batting (I realized, from Luke’s comments, that he had them the wrong way around). There was baserunning.

There was Christy Mathewson, and then a picture of Matty, handsome and assured as ever, slowly dissolving into a picture of a small, serious boy with blond bangs, wearing a baseball cap and a perfectly sober expression, going into a pitching windup. I still have no idea who he actually was (it’s not Christy Mathewson’s kid; I’ve found a picture of him, and he had darker hair), but of course Luke knew, perfectly well.

“There he is,” he said. “Rewind it.” We watched Matty and the Rookie appear again, and then he told me to turn it off. He was uncharacteristically silent for the rest of the afternoon, but before dinner I heard him talking to his mother in the bath. “He had his hands up like this,” he was saying chattily. “I don’t know why.”

That was enough excitement, enough reality, for one night, I thought, and it wasn’t until a week later that I tried out on him a picture of the Chief—an honest-to-God picture of Chief Meyers, looking just as he ought to look.

“Hey, look, that’s the Chief,” I announced proudly, opening the old baseball encyclopedia at his bedside.

He paused, looked at the picture, looked back at me—peering in, for a moment—and then got a funny, guilty smile on his face that I had never seen there before.

“Oh,” he said, peering intently at the picture. “I thought it was his mother.”

“What do you mean?” I said, surprised.

“I mean, I knew it was—but I thought it was. I mean I knew it was a man . . . but I thought he was the mother,” he concluded, stumbling a little. “I thought it was his mother.”

He actually blushed, and I could sense that there was something at once so deep and so important going on in what he was trying to tell me that he feared at some other level it would seem silly. In his mind’s ear, he could hear Ty Cobb calling. Baby.

“But remember,” I said. “His mother packed the suitcase for him. He had the mama’s suitcase.”

“I know. I know that,” he said quietly, stubbornly. “I can’t—I just thought.” He held his hand up to his head and tried to smile. “I thought it was a girl. I thought it was his mama.”

I got it then. He knew that the words the Chief stood for some kind of older man—though whether he could have summoned up the kind of older man I had, a bearded grizzled fortyish American-Indian catcher with boozy breath, I’m not sure— but the symbolic place that he occupied was so deeply maternal that it was, well, the Chief was his mother. What had been lulling him to sleep, night after night, I realized, was not the all-purpose fit. The words pointed directly to the symbol, and it was the obvious one, but it wasn’t my symbol. The trouble with mental catch is that the ball you throw changes in midair into another. Staring down into the Polo Grounds, from Coogan’s Bluff, what he had seen was what he needed to see, and that was the same face he saw at every window. His mother had been there at his bedside all along, and I had been too slow a reader of my own fiction to spot her lurking.

Sometime that month I began to think that it was time to round off the Rookie story, give it a suitably grand ending, turn the legend into a myth; I would find another story. I was having a hard time thinking of new plots, and anyway, it had been two years.

It was, at last, the seventh game of the 1908 World Series. The Rookie had started three for the Giants, Matty the others. (Of course we had made the Giants, not the Cubs, grab the gonfalon on the final day.) It was the bottom of the ninth, the score tied one to one on homers by the Chief and Sam Crawford. Cobb was up. He dragged a bunt and headed for first, and this time he didn’t just spike the Rookie; he actually slid into first base, razor-clad feet up. Hit hard, the Rookie held on to the ball. But the umpire ruled that the ball had rolled foul down the first-base line. The Rookie was bleeding, fed up, homesick, crowded by a ringer like Gizmo McGee, a Tiger midget pretending to be a four-year-old, and he had endured a full season (in two years) of cruel torment at the hands of this terrible man. So he did an awful thing: He loaded up and threw his best fastball right at Ty Cobb’s head, threw so hard that Cobb’s head came right off, popped up high, before settling back down, with a surprised look, on his shoulders.

Umpire Bill Klem checked out Cobb—he was okay; the Rookie knew what he was doing—and then looked at the Rookie. “You’re outta here, Rookie,” he said, giving him the longest, slowest, saddest thumbing heave-ho that the major leagues have ever seen. “There’s just no throwing at people in baseball.” The crowd sat silent, disbelieving. The Rookie, head bowed, walked off the field.

And (I said) he kept walking. The Chief and Matty and Mr. McGraw were waiting for him in the dugout, but he walked away from them, didn’t even stop to take off his uniform in the center field clubhouse, just kept walking, right out of the Polo Grounds, day after day, week after week, until he was back in Anywhere, U.S.A., still in his uniform. His mother didn’t ask any questions. She hugged him, helped him out of his uniform (she hung it in the closet), and asked him if he wanted something to eat, and the next day he went back to school. His legend grew, but he never picked up a ball again.

Luke sat up. “He did not go home to his mother,” he said clearly. I felt horrible, as evil as Ty Cobb. I saw in his eyes what seemed to me not anger, exactly, but something more like doubt, religious doubt as it is described in nineteenth-century novels. What if the Rookie hadn’t risen again? What if the story had been only a story? What if someone was obviously manipulating it for a moral purpose? He had the relics and the photos, but like a true believer, he knew that it was all just talk if the Rookie didn’t rise again.

“He did not go home to his mother,” he said again, and as quickly as I could, in a panic, I turned it around. Of course not, I said. He went home for that day, to relax. The next day a delegation from both leagues was in his front yard, insisting that he come back to the Giants. “Baseball can’t survive without you, kid,” said Ban Johnson, president of the American League. Even Cobb himself, bandaged and sheepish, was there. Finally the Rookie agreed to come back—“But no more dirty tricks,” he said—and they played an eighth game (as they’d done once before), which he won.

“You told the story wrong,” he said finally. (And the next day he said to his mother, “Daddy told the Rookie story wrong.”) So the story goes on, only now it is much more under the child’s control. The Rookie soon entered a Gothic phase, as the little boy began to demand scary Rookie stories (“With a real witch. Not Ty Cobb dressed up like a witch. Not the Chief dressed up like a witch. A real witch”) and, more recently, a decadent phase. The current story, for instance, involves Sherlock Holmes, the genie from Aladdin, a T. rex, and the Pirate King from Pirates of Penzance. Having been, if only momentarily, betrayed by the story, he was doing what the literary critics would call “contesting the narrative.” The story belongs to him now.

My Rookie never really played ball again, no matter how many stories I tell, any more than Sherlock Holmes really came back alive from the Reichenbach Falls, no matter how many stories Conan Doyle wrote about him afterward. I think the Rookie just went home to Anywhere, U.S.A., and back to school like all the other kids.

Luke and I tried playing a little catch this spring in the Luxembourg Gardens but gave up after about five minutes. For a present, around that time, he asked us to make him his own carte d’identité, marked with a métier de journaliste—a press pass from the government—so that he could pretend to cut through red tape. We made him an impressive-looking fake government document, with a black-and-white photo and lots of cryptic, official-looking stamps. At bedtime now before the Rookie story starts, he likes to act out a French bureaucratic drama: I play a functionary guarding an entrance to something or other who scowls at him until he haughtily flashes his carte, and then I let him pass with many apologetic, ah-monsieur-I-did-not-recognize grimaces and shrugs, while his mother acts out the role of irate bystander, fuming in line as the privileged functionary serenely passes by. I suppose it is about time we took him home.

I don’t think about the Rookie as much as I used to, but when the bombs began to fall in Serbia I began thinking about that other Serbian conflagration, in 1914, and everything it had led to, and I realized with a start that by making the Rookie three years old in 1908, I was leaving him, unprotected, to the century’s horrors. Then I did a quick calculation and realized that he would have been far too young for the First War, and just too old for the Second. The Rookie was lucky that way, I think.