“Don’t they know I’m here?” Allison demanded.
“They know it,” said one of the Forest Citys. “They figure we’ll warm you anyhow.”
“Not by a long chalk,” said Allison.
I’d never seen Champion happier. The raucous crowds swelling the foot of Ontario Street near the lake shore and trying to enter Ogden’s Skating Park numbered at least ten thousand. Admission was pegged at fifty cents. Champion had negotiated half for us, a fourth for the Forest Citys, the remaining fourth for a sponsoring Chicago club. No carriages were allowed; Ogden’s was literally packed with bodies. We watched in amazement as men stormed the fences like besieging invaders, many with tickets clamped in their teeth. An overloaded bleacher toppled, trapping several persons beneath it. Then dozens of brawling young roughnecks burst through the foul ropes and surged over the field. It was the most chaotic ballpark scene I’d witnessed.
As if inspired by it, we and the Forest Citys put on a truly horrendous performance—“first-class muffinism,” Harry said disgustedly—once the diamond was cleared. It wasn’t wholly our fault. The field was terrible: bumpy, pitted, and splashed with white sand in right; worse, the fences were so close that the captains decided that balls hit over them—or over the high sand bank in left—were automatic doubles. The afternoon saw far too many of them.
Scoring nine runs in both the third and fourth, we burst to a 19-5 lead. To loud boos, the Forest Citys crumpled as we tallied a whopping twenty runs in the sixth. Harry pitched the final innings, allowing ten runs, but by then it didn’t matter. George sealed things with a blistering homer in the eighth, and we wrapped it up, 53-32.
We got off the field in a hurry. Harry sent me around the clubhouse to show each player his fielding column in the score book. We’d committed eight outright errors and any number of bonehead mistakes.
“I know,” Andy groaned when I approached. “Muffed two balls, slow handling on that caulker down the line, caught out four times striking.”
In an afternoon of general slugging Andy had scored five times and been put out four—seemingly not too bad, yet only Mac had done worse on the Stockings.
We shared a train car to Rockford with the Forest Citys. Addy wasn’t his usual wisecracking self. Barnes had disappeared. Spalding maintained an aloof silence. They’d had visions, I guessed, of defeating us in front of record crowds and seeing their pictures in national magazines. Instead, they’d been clouted around the lot and now faced the possibility that even on their home diamond they could not beat us in a fourth and final game.
There was talk of rumored plans in Chicago to field a top-notch pro club next season, the White Stockings. Businessmen were reportedly raising large sums to recruit ace players at no less than two thousand apiece—an unheard-of salary base. Brainard allowed as how he would play for them at that price; Sweasy and Allison said pretty much the same. George was noncommittal, though I suspect he was tempted. I admired Andy, Mac, and Gould, who said flatly that they would stay with Harry. It seemed to me that more than money was involved: Harry had molded them into the best team ever and gotten them the first guaranteed salaries. They owed somebody something, in my opinion. Waterman said nothing on the subject, but I figured he’d go with Brainard. Nobody asked what I’d do.
Banners flapped over the streets of Rockford. A brass band greeted the Forest Citys at the station. Local pride was untouched by the debacle in Chicago. After all, weren’t their home-grown boys putting the town on the map?
We waited out a sleepy—boring, to be more precise—Sunday. I hiked along the Rock River thinking of Cait and wondering if she thought of me. I wished I could take her boating on the river. And Timmy, too. It was strange to find myself thinking of him instead of Hope and Susy on a day like this. But I felt little guilt or sadness. They seemed of another age, distant now.
That evening I read Twain’s new piece, “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins,” in the current Packard’s Monthly. I remembered his fondness for Barnum’s Museum, where the twins, Chang and Eng—still alive and connected at the chest—had once been employed. Predictably, Twain’s humor was of the tall-tale sort. He had the twins fighting on opposite sides in the war and taking each other captive. I was moderately amused. But when Andy picked it up he chuckled, snorted, guffawed—and soon was reading it to the others.
“They filled Chang full of warm water and sugar and Eng full of whisky, and in twenty-five minutes it was not possible to tell which was the drunkest. Both were as drunk as loons—and on hot whisky punches. . . .”
They all howled. I realized I was still considerably out of synch in certain areas of taste.
The Chicago Tribune reported that the Brooklyn Eckfords had taken two of three from the Mutuals and now held the whip pennant. The item also noted that their ’63 championship team would play the new ’69 champs. A sort of old-timers game. Something like that might make a good promotional at the Union Grounds, I thought. And how about some kind of giveaway day? Hmm, not bad.
In other reprinted items, the New York Tribune branded as “monstrous” a scheme to revive the Chinese coolie trade to alleviate the South’s current labor shortage. In Philadelphia, Elise Holt’s troupe was wowing packed houses with shows “to which Miss Holt lends all the fascination of her shapeliness and the indecorousness of her posturings.” I closed my eyes and got fragmentary pictures of blond hair and high-kicking legs.
That night I made the mistake of testing Brainard’s skill on a pool table. Spotting me points and shooting left-handed, he won twenty bucks in less than two hours.
“Can you pitch lefty too?” I joked.
“Depends how much cash is
