None of the baseball fans gathered in Fenway Park that night—whether living or dead—would ever forget the game that followed. Here were two teams of unmatched ability and both were determined to win.
Once he realized that there was nothing he could do to stop the game from proceeding, Ah Pukuh decided to focus on searing this night, as if with a branding iron, into the collective memory of Middleworld so that mortals would never, ever, again forget who was in charge.
To make things more interesting, in much the same way that he’d loaned Max and Lola superhero abilities at the Grand Hotel Xibalba, he’d given each of the Death Lords phenomenal skills in baseball.
But there were two things he hadn’t counted on.
The first was that Max and Lola would show up with, excluding themselves, the greatest team in the history of baseball.
The second was that baseball is not just about the physical skills of pitching, hitting, fielding, and running. It also requires mental qualities like courage, patience, endurance, and the capacity for teamwork—none of which the Death Lords possessed.
Even though the Death Lords directed most plays toward the Hero Twins as the weakest links in their team, the seasoned Red Sox players anticipated this and covered for them. They also used their knowledge of the quirky layout of Fenway to their best advantage.
By the end of the third inning, the Hero Twins had crept into the lead and the crowd was beginning to sense that victory was possible. This strengthened the home team’s mental resolve and further spurred them on.
Ah Pukuh was livid.
Realizing that the Death Lords could not win by out-playing their opponents, he called on a skill his team had been honing for thousands of years in Xibalba—the art of blatant cheating.
At his signal, the Death Lords began to use every trick they could think of to gross out, distract, disgust, and confuse their opposition.
Skull Scepter was the master of this tactic.
For example, when he’d just rounded third base and was heading for home. Jimmie Foxx sent the ball to catcher Hick Cady on home base, but Skull Scepter kept on running. Ten feet from home, he purposely disintegrated his body into a mass of bones, sinews, and intestines that slithered on independently, in order to get past Cady.
Undaunted, Cady calmly tagged several squishy parts of Skull Scepter before any of them hit home plate and called for a new, clean ball. The Hero Twins cheered the out. The Death Lords argued that Skull Scepter couldn’t be out because his foot was still on second.
And there it was—his disembodied foot on second base, wiggling its toes in victory.
The Hero Twins appealed to the umpires.
After some deliberation, the Paddler Gods decided that in the nature of Maya duality, Skull Scepter was both in and out, and had both scored and not scored.
Max was tearing his hair out, but the bottom line was that the Death Lords were up by one and Skull Scepter was still on second.
Such wayward tactics, coupled with increasingly more baffling pronouncements from the umpires, helped the Death Lords edge forward. By the time they reached the bottom of the ninth inning, they were ahead by seven runs to five.
The game was winding to a close.
Jimmie Foxx was on third and Max was up to bat.
“We have two outs, kid,” muttered Babe Ruth. “We need two runs to stay in the game. Think you can handle it?”
Max nodded, because how could he tell the legendary Babe Ruth that he didn’t have any hope of hitting the ball? Max had had a really bad night. Not only had he failed to get on base, he hadn’t even been able to get a good hit.
He stepped up to the plate.
The Death Lords smirked at each other. If it had been one of the Red Sox players, they might have been a little nervous. As it was, they knew the game was securely in their bony hands.
Max could feel the crowd willing him on.
Just hit it, he told himself. Just hit it.
The Demon of Pus was on the mound. His first pitch was a curveball that seemed so far out of the zone, Max didn’t even think of swinging at it.
At the last minute, whether by fair means or foul, the ball swung in over the plate.
“Strike one!” shouted the umpires.
The second pitch was a blistering fastball that blurred past Max and hit the catcher’s mitt before he’d even started to swing.
“Strike two!”
This was it.
Max was two strikes down and one pitch away from defeat.
The future of the world hung on this next pitch.
Max stepped back and looked at the crowd. He saw Och’s little face, so tense and worried. He saw his parents’ faces, full of encouragement. He saw Lucky, nodding at him sagely, and Lady Coco, pumping her hairy little fists.
If he missed this ball, he was condemning everyone in this park and their children and their great-great-great-grandchildren to four hundred years of misrule by an unstoppable Ah Pukuh. If he got a hit, the Hero Twins would be on track to win for Middleworld.
He stepped back up to the plate and focused on the Demon of Pus.
He never even saw the ball.
All he knew was that he swung the bat with all the anger and frustration that had been building up inside of him since the day that his parents had announced they were canceling the family vacation and taking off for a dig in San Xavier.
Crack!
Against all expectation, logic, and common sense, the bat made solid contact with the ball.
There was stunned silence in the stands, in the field, and in the dugout.
But no one was more stunned than Max himself. He just stood there with his mouth hanging open in disbelief.
The bat dropped from his hands.
The ball floated out past the infield, past center field, and hit deep into the stands, where it was caught by Och. The crowd went wild.
A home run.
The only home run Max had ever hit.
Eventually, he came to his senses and, to wild cheering from the crowd, did the obligatory run around the bases.
The score was now tied and Dom DiMaggio was up to bat.
Rattled by Max’s home run, the Demon of Pus struggled to get the ball over the plate and Dom walked to first base.
Babe Ruth was up next and the crowd went wild, sensing that a victory for the good guys was at hand.
Ah Pukuh pulled Skull Scepter out of center field and put in Lord Kuy.
Ruth came up to the plate, waved to the crowd, and then pointed with his bat to the single red seat in the stands that marked the longest home run ever hit at Fenway.
“That’s what you think,” snarled the Demon of Pus. He wound up and threw a fastball straight at the Babe, who only just jumped out of the way.
“Ball one!” shouted the umpires in chorus.
The next pitch bounced off the plate.
“Ball two!”
The next pitch was another lethal fastball, but Babe Ruth was waiting.
Crack!
The ball lofted high and arced toward the stands.
It was a home run for sure.
Until …
… Lord Kuy spread his owl wings …
… flew after the ball …
… and caught it in his talons.
NO! NO! NO! The home team’s fans protested, but the umpires ruled it a fair catch. Now the score was tied and the game was going into extra innings.
Lord Kuy’s dastardly aerial defense had a devastating effect on the Red Sox players. Nobody could get a ball past the swooping owl in outfield.
In the twelfth inning, the Death Lords scored.
Once again, the home team had to tie the score or lose the game.
Joe Cronin, up first, was caught out by Lord Kuy’s flying fielding.
The great Ted Williams stepped up to bat.
He hit low, fast and straight down the first base line. Kuy flew to catch it and crashed into Pesky’s Pole. As the owl-man was carried away on a stretcher, Ted Williams smiled a “mission accomplished” kind of smile.
In his anger, Ah Pukuh’s bloated body released a cloud of gas so toxic that a nearby popcorn seller passed out from the smell.
Johnny Pesky was up next and hit a single. Hick Cady and Jimmie Foxx both got hits. With the bases loaded and two outs, it was Max’s turn to bat again.
He relished the moment.
This time, when he stepped up, the crowd didn’t groan. They knew what he was capable of. They waited for him to repeat his home run.
“Go, bambino!” cried his mother’s voice.
The first two pitches flew by as strikes.
Max let slip a curse word.
The crowd went quiet.
Someone said: “Did he just curse?”
Someone else said: “Did she call him bambino?”
Babe Ruth put his head in his hands.
With the fate of the world resting on his next ball, Max focused.
Time slowed.
He saw the ball coming at him and swung his bat hard.
He missed.
“Strike three!” called the umpires. “You’re out.”
The Curse of the Bambino had struck again.