by Alan Gratz
Frankie knew immediately what was going on. The numbers game worked like this: The players bet money on three numbers between zero and nine. The numbers used to be pulled out of a hat, but that was too easy to fix and people wouldn’t play. Then somebody got the bright idea to use the daily numbers the newspapers published from the local race tracks. Mickey Fist used Belmont Park. The New York Times printed the total take from the Win, Place, and Show bets from the Belmont, and Mickey used the last dollar digit in each one to come up with the daily winning number. If the Times said the Belmont took $2,597 for Win, $703 for Place, and $49 for Show, the daily numbers were 7-3-9. It was a good system. The players could check their own numbers in the paper, and since there was no way to fix the numbers everybody knew the game was legit.
Except the New York Times didn’t always list the numbers right. Like today.
“Sorry pal,” Mickey was saying. “You know the rules. We use the numbers printed in the Times.”
“But they’re not right, I tell you.”
“I get what you’re saying, friend,” Mickey said. He squared his body toward the other man, making it plain just how much bigger he was. “But we only use the numbers in the Times.” Mickey made a show of straightening the other man’s tie. The guy didn’t flinch, but he didn’t bat Mickey Fist away either. “And what is it they say? ‘If it’s in the Times, it must be true.’”
Mickey nodded to Amos, who escorted the man out. Conversation over.
A clock on the lamppost outside told Frankie she still had an hour before game time, so she wandered through Flatbush looking for her father. She found him on Carroll Street, whistling and twirling his baton, and ran up from behind him and jumped on his back.
“A robber!” he joked. “Help! I’m being mugged!” He swung her around and she tickled him until he deposited her on the steps of a brownstone.
“How do you always know it’s me?” she asked.
Her father reset his policeman’s cap and tugged at his shirt to make himself look smart again. “Sweetheart, a real bandit’d lay me out cold on the sidewalk, not ride me around like some steeplechase pony.” He took a break from his patrol and sat down on the step next to Frankie. “You run your numbers?”
Frankie showed him her haul. Fifty-five cents. Numbers rackets were illegal—just like blind pigs and speakeasies— but Pop and most of the other cops looked the other way. Frankie knew most of them went to those places to have a drink when they got off duty anyway, her pop included.
Her father reached into his pocket and pulled out another dime.
“Here. So you can have something to eat at the park.”
Frankie kissed her father on the cheek. “Thanks, Pop.”
“Who they playing today?”
“The Giants.”
“Easy win for the Giants then,” he said.
“Brooklyn might win!”
“Those bums? They couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a boat.”
Frankie’s father had been a batboy for Brooklyn a long time ago, but he hated them now, and would never tell Frankie why. He had to be the only Giants fan in all of Brooklyn—or at least the only one who was tough enough to admit it.
“You wait and see. The Robins’ll win the pennant this year.”
“If you like Brooklyn so much, why do you wear that old Giants hat of mine?” he asked, rubbing the cap on her head. She batted him away and fixed her hair under her hat.
“It’s mine now. I like it,” she said. She stood to go. “Mickey Fist talked to me today. Said I had a future in the organization.”
“Your future is in college, not a numbers racket. I’ll see to that if I have to work two jobs for the rest of my days. Three jobs.”
“No girls go to college, Pop. That’s just the way it is.”
Her father frowned. “It doesn’t have to be.”
“I’ll see you later, Pop. All right?” Frankie said, heading off.
“Be home by dinner,” her father called. “I’m making meat loaf!”
“Okay, Pop!” Frankie yelled back. She was already turning the corner, on her way to Ebbets Field.
2
There were twelve ticket windows at Ebbets Field, twelve turnstiles, and twelve baseball bats and baseball-shaped lights in the chandelier that hung in the rotunda—Frankie counted them. The grandstand stretched all the way down the right field line and most of the way down the left field line, with a view of a few scattered buildings over the center field wall where Montgomery Street and Bedford Avenue came together. The left field wall was 383 feet from home plate, but right field was just 301 feet away, making it perfect for lefty pull hitters like Babe Herman.
The stands were already beginning to fill, even though the Robins weren’t playing all that well again this season. It didn’t matter to Frankie, and it didn’t matter to anybody else either. Brooklyn loved the Robins. They might have been bums, but they were Brooklyn’s bums.
The game was about to start, and Frankie didn’t bother finding the left field bleacher seat listed on her ticket. Instead she climbed to the upper deck and looked for a good spot. She liked to see the action from above. The players might be tiny, but at least she could see the game straight on, not from one side or the other.
There was a whole row of seats close to the front that was almost empty, and Frankie slid across and sat down like she belonged there. A man two seats away from her wrote in a notebook resting on his knee. He had big ears and he held his chin out like he was sucking on a cough drop. He looked up at Frankie, then went back to his writing. Frankie started filling out the lineups in her scorebook.
“What paper are you with?” the man asked her.
“What?”
“Are you with the World Telegraph and Sun? The Daily News?”
Frankie looked at the guy like he was screwy.
“Sorry. You’re sitting on Press Row, so I assumed you were with one of New York’s esteemed periodicals.”
“Oh cripes,” said Frankie. “Does that mean I have to move?”
The man smiled. “No. Stay. Please. It’ll be nice to have the company for once. My name’s John Kieran. I write for the New York Times.”
“Frankie Snider,” she told him. “I write for P.S. 375, but only when they make me.”
Kieran laughed. He nodded at Frankie’s hat. “I see you’re a Giants fan.”
“Can’t stand ’em.”
“But . . . you’re wearing a Giants cap.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to like ’em.”
“A girl named Frankie who sits on Press Row but only writes for school, and who wears a Giants cap but is . . . a Brooklyn fan, I take it?”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” Kieran repeated. “Do I contradict myself?” he said like it meant something. “Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
“You don’t look so big to me,” Frankie told him.
“Indeed.”
“Who’s playing center?” Frankie asked.
“Gus Felix.” Kieran turned toward her. “So, if you sneaked up here, did you sneak into the stadium too?”
“Of course not! I do honest work. I get paid.”
“Do you now? We’ve already established that you’re not a member of the fourth estate.”
“Are you smart or something?” Frankie asked.
Kieran smiled. “Something.” The game started on the field below them, but he seemed more interested in talking to Frankie. “Come now. Information, please. What is it you do for a living? Besides go to school, I mean.”
“I run numbers.”
“Ah. Yes. Very honest work indeed. And do you wager some of your honest pay on those numbers once in a while?”
“Chuh. No. The numbers game is a sucker’s bet.”
“Curiouser and curiouser. How so?”
Frankie sighed. It was getting difficult to keep score and talk at the same time. “Look, do the math. Mickey Fist’s numbers game pays six hundred
to one. You bet a penny and win, you make six bucks. You bet a dollar, you win six hundred. Sounds good, right? Only nobody hardly ever wins. You gotta pick the right digits, in the right order. That’s a one in a thousand chance, see? It’s a sucker’s bet. And the marks who play, they think they’re not suckers because they only bet a penny or a nickel or a dime. But you bet a penny every day for a year, you spend $3.65. You win once every thousand times, that’s like once every two and a half years. Two and a half times 3.65 is nine dollars and thirteen cents. You just spent nine dollars to make six.”
“It does seem rather ridiculous when you put it like that.”
“Yeah, and Mickey Fist is the one laughing his way to the bank. Say a thousand people bet a penny every day. That’s three thousand six hundred and fifty dollars a year, which ain’t bad. Now let’s say he’s got one winner every week—which he don’t, but let’s just say he does. Six dollars a week times fifty-two weeks is three hundred and twelve dollars. Subtract that from his yearly take, and he’s made $3,338, free and clear.”
The Robins got the third out, and Frankie flipped her scorebook over for the bottom half of the inning.
“Worst thing is,” she told Kieran, “the folks who can’t afford it are the ones who play all the time. They see that six hundred to one and their eyes light up. And yeah, they win once in a while, but they’d be better off spending that money when they had it the first time. Mrs. Whitt had her electricity turned off last week. The Orvilles have four boys and haven’t eaten meat in a month. This old lady that lives next door to us, Mrs. Radowski, her husband is dead and her only boy died in the war in Europe. Pop says she’s broke, but she still finds a coin to play the numbers almost every day.”
They watched as the Robins got something going with a double and then a single.
“So tell me something,” Kieran said. “Why do you run numbers on your street if you know your neighbors can’t afford it?”
Frankie shrugged. “It’s just a job I’m good at is all. Besides, it’s their money, right? I can’t tell them what to do with it.”
Kieran went back to scribbling in his notebook, then snapped it shut.
“Finished,” he said.
“With what?”
“My story about today’s game.”
Frankie looked down at the field. It was still the first inning, and the Robins had two men on base with only one out.
“But it’s only just started.”
Kieran crossed his legs, leaned back, and tilted his hat forward on his head.
“They’re all pretty much the same,” he said. “I go in right before the paper goes to press and change the one or two things I got wrong.”
“You mean, like who won?”
“Well, yes, occasionally there are some inconvenient facts that have to be worked in. Although with the Brooklyn Robins I can say they lost, and I’m not often wrong. ‘Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson once wrote, yet Brooklyn’s poor Robins proved featherless yet again today at Ebbets Field.’ Something like that. You see how easy it is?”
“Yeah, well, you better start rewriting, mister. The Robins have the bases loaded with only one out, and Babe Herman’s up to bat.”
Kieran leaned forward to watch. “Ah yes, not the best hitter in New York named Babe, but perhaps a close second.”
Herman smacked a double to right, and Frankie stood and cheered. Hank DeBerry scored from third, but then things got crazy. Chick Fewster, who was on first when Babe got his hit, rounded second and slid into third. Dazzy Vance, who had been on second, got caught in a run-down trying to score. Meanwhile, Babe Herman, who’d kept his head down the whole time and run as hard as he could, tried to stretch his double into a triple.
And somehow three Brooklyn Robins ended up standing on third base at the same time.
The Giants catcher tagged them all and let the umpires sort it out. Five minutes later, Herman and Fewster were called out. Babe Herman had doubled into a double play.
Frankie looked across at John Kieran, who leaned out over the rail with a huge grin on his face. He caught her looking and laughed.
“Oh, now I’m going to have to add that!”
None of Frankie’s neighbors won the numbers game that day, but that didn’t stop them from betting again. Frankie made enough to go back to the ballpark on Sunday, and she kept score from Press Row until John Kieran showed up late in the third.
“You’re just in time,” Frankie told him. “The Robins have three men on base.”
“Oh?” Kieran asked. “Which base?”
“Ha-ha.”
Kieran sat down a seat away from Frankie and opened up his notebook.
“Want to know what’s happened?” she asked.
He held up a hand. “No need.”
“Why do you come if you’re not even going to watch?”
“Oh, I watch the games, Frankie. I watch and enjoy. Particularly the Brooklyn Robins. Who wouldn’t like a team with names like Chick Fewster, Trolley Line Butler, Rabbit Maranville, Snooks Dowd, Buzz McWeeny. Buzz McWeeny, for heaven’s sake! And did you know that this ballpark sits in the exact same spot where a pigsty once stood? They called it Pigtown. Priceless.”
“Maybe you’d prefer Yankee Stadium then,” Frankie told him.
“Oh, it’s very fancy. And Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri, Babe Ruth—they hit a great many home runs and win a great many ball games, if you like that sort of thing. But a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I much prefer the capricious Brooklyn Robins. You never know what’s going to happen next.”
“Then why don’t you write about what really happens?”
Kieran searched the high blue sky for an explanation. “It’s like—it’s like reading a book to review it. Somehow having to break a book down into its parts to critique it sucks all the joy out for me. I greatly prefer to write my story in advance, and then sit back and enjoy the sum total of the afternoon. Besides, the truth is subjective.”
Frankie didn’t know what that meant. “I like baseball because it’s mathematical,” she said. “You know, geometry and algebra and stuff.”
“I’m vaguely acquainted with the concepts, yes,” Kieran said. He wrote another few lines in his notebook.
“A guy gets a hit, it changes his batting average,” Frankie said. “He scores a run, it changes the pitcher’s ERA. He makes an error? Count it on the board. There’s numbers everywhere. Even the positions are numbered.”
“You’re quite fond of numbers, I take it.”
Frankie recorded the last out of the inning in her scorebook. “Numbers are the one true thing in the world.”
“That’s a rather bold statement,” Kieran said. “And I dare say there are a few poets out there who would disagree with you. You don’t think numbers can be made to lie? Here. Take today’s pitcher, Burleigh Grimes. Besides his wonderfully Dickensian name, Burleigh Grimes sports a 3.71 earned run average.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Indeed. It’s very good. But consider this: He allows roughly the same number of base runners per inning as fellow Robin Jesse Barnes. Yet Master Barnes possesses an ERA of 5.24.”
Frankie frowned. “Well, not every guy that gets on base scores.”
“My point exactly. So might we consider Burleigh Grimes ‘luckier’ than Jesse Barnes? If they are, in fact, comparable pitchers in terms of base runners allowed, how else can we reconcile the differences in their earned run averages? To wit, does Burleigh Grimes’ far better ERA mean he is a far better pitcher, or just far more lucky?”
“Okay, so ERA is a measure of luck,” Frankie told him. “It’s still mathematical.”
“Sticking to your guns, eh? All right. How about two players with an equal number of home runs—only one of them hit half of his with men on base, and the other hit none with men on base? The numbers say they are equally dangerous, but is that true?”
“That could just be the fault of the guys batting in front of him. Maybe h
e’d hit more with men on if his teammates hit better.”
Kieran shook his head, but he was smiling. “I see this is going to be a difficult argument to win.”
Below them, Brooklyn slugger Babe Herman came to the plate.
“All right, let’s take a different tack,” Kieran said. “How many home runs has Babe Herman hit this season?”
“Nine.”
“And have you seen him hit all nine?”
“Well, no. So what?”
“So what if he really hasn’t hit nine. How do you know?”
Frankie frowned. “Because other people saw them. Because the papers said so.”
“Ah. And ‘if it’s in the Times, it must be true,’ correct? Or have you never seen the paper make a mistake?”
“Well, sure. They make mistakes all the time. Just the other day the Belmont take was wrong. That’s what Mickey Fist uses for the numbers game, the last three digits of the Win, Place, and Show takes. But there were other people there who saw it, who know what the numbers really were.”
“So those numbers—the right ones—those were the ones used for the payout?”
“No. It was the numbers in the papers. Those are the official ones for the game.”
“Aha.” Kieran nodded and thought for a moment. “So the numbers lied. They cheated someone out of his winnings.”
“Nobody cheated, it was just a mistake.”
“But someone could cheat, couldn’t they?” Kieran said, keeping his eyes on the game. “They could, say, change the last three digits to the numbers one, two, and three, in place of whatever they really were.”
“I guess, but it’s almost impossible,” said Frankie. “They’d have to change the numbers on the machines before the papers got printed.”
“Of course. And who in the world could do that?” Kieran asked. He snapped his notebook closed. “Well, it’s been fascinating talking with you, Frankie, but I think I’ll visit the Brooklyn Museum this afternoon. The Robins don’t seem to have that certain je ne sais quoi today.”
“They’re winning,” Frankie pointed out.
