"The Brewers slammed 8 runs into our ballpark, Chief. We was comin’ back from the city of Milwaukee. Just delivered the loss. The World Series game 2 loss. Nine men went onto the field. Game went down in 4 hours.
“Didn’t see the first run until about the 5th inning. Single. 200-footer. You know how you know that when you’re in the outfield, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the bat to the roof. What we didn’t know, was that the Brewers offence was so secret, no distress signal had been sent to the bullpen. They didn’t even list them overdue for an inning. Very first base hit, Chief, Brewers come cruisin’, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was kinda like old squares in the battle, like you see on a calendar, like the Battle of Waterloo, and the idea was the Brewer player comes to the nearest base, that Rays player, well he starts missing the ball’, hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes that Brewers he go away… sometimes he wouldn’t go away.
“Sometimes that Brewer looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a Brewer is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at your base, he doesn’t seem to be livin’… until he passes you, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’ from the Rays fans. The field turns blue, gold and white, in with all the hitting and the scoring they all come in and… they beat you to pieces.
“You know by the end of that 5th inning, lost a hundred fans. I don’t know how many Rays, maybe all nine. I do know how many Rays pitchers, they averaged six an inning. In the top of the fifth inning, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Richie Palacios from Brooklyn. Rays baseball player. Second baseman. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up and down on his base, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been knocked down below the waist from a steal.
“Ninth inning, the third game, Mr. Hooper, a Goodyear Blimp saw us, he swung in low and he saw us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and three hours later big old golf carts come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a baseball uniform again. So, nine men went onto the field. 25,000 thousand fans come out, and the Brewers took the rest, October 26, 2026.
