Blockade Billy

The story is told as a monologue by George "Granny" Grantham, a retired third-base coach for the now-defunct New Jersey Titans, a Major League Baseball team. Speaking from an assisted-living facility and addressing a visitor he calls "Mr. King," Grantham recounts the brief, violent career of a player known as Blockade Billy during the 1957 season, roughly a decade after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier, when the game is smaller, more local, and most players are working-class men earning modest salaries.

Grantham begins with the catastrophe that sets the story in motion. Two days before the Titans leave spring training in Sarasota, Florida, starting catcher Johnny Goodkind kills a woman in a drunk-driving accident and is arrested. His backup, Frank Faraday, is then crushed in a collision at home plate during the final exhibition game, ending his career as well. With both catchers gone, manager Joe "Jersey Joe" DiPunno calls the front office and demands they send anyone who can catch. The front office locates William Blakely from the Davenport Cornhuskers, a minor league affiliate.

On Opening Day, Grantham arrives at Old Swampy, the Titans' stadium, and finds a young man sitting on the bumper of an old Ford truck with Iowa plates. The young man introduces himself as Bill Blakely. Grantham notices a Band-Aid on the second finger of his right hand and jokes about a shaving cut; the young man echoes the phrase back, a verbal habit Grantham comes to recognize as characteristic. When Grantham walks him onto the field, the young man surveys the empty stadium without nervousness and says, "Billy can hit here," referring to himself in the third person. Grantham senses something both off-putting and endearing about him: an odd blankness combined with a sweet agreeableness that makes people want to like him despite feeling something is not quite right.

In the rookie's debut against the Boston Red Sox, Danny Dusen, the Titans' ace known as "The Doo," calls his own game. Dusen is four wins from 200 career victories and intensely competitive. The rookie catches competently, and in the seventh inning he golfs a sinker into the gap for an RBI double, giving the Titans a 2–1 lead. In the ninth, with two outs, the rookie catches a throw from Dusen, tags the runner Billy Anderson, and flips him over his shoulder. Anderson is called out, ending the game, but his ankle is bleeding and his Achilles tendon is damaged. Red Sox manager Pinky Higgins accuses the rookie of deliberately slashing Anderson's ankle, but DiPunno has the rookie display his clean, unbroken nails, and Higgins leaves. Grantham quietly notices that the Band-Aid is gone from the rookie's finger with no sign of any cut underneath and senses, without being able to articulate how, that the young man did something to Anderson.

Over the following weeks, the rookie establishes himself as a sensation. After a retaliatory fastball is thrown at his head, he hits the next pitch for a two-run home run, muttering as he rounds third, "Got it done, Billy, showed that busher and got it done." The Titans win their first five games. Dusen and the rookie grow close, an unusual warmth for a pitcher who normally blames others for his failures. Grantham notes the rookie's profound naivety: He can barely read, has seen only one movie, and does not know what the Cy Young Award, baseball's top pitching honor, is. Yet his baseball instincts are impeccable. After the rookie stops another runner at the plate during a series in Baltimore, a newspaper photo earns him the nickname "Blockade Billy." Fans begin bringing orange signs reading ROAD CLOSED to games, holding them aloft whenever the opposing team has a runner on third until the entire stadium flushes orange. The rookie's hitting streak reaches 19 games with nine putouts at the plate, though the team enters a losing stretch.

Before a home game against the Chicago White Sox, the game in which Dusen will attempt his 200th win, Grantham notices the Band-Aid is back on the rookie's finger. He confronts the rookie privately, warning him that Dusen would not protect him if he got caught doing something illegal. The rookie insists it covers a shaving cut. Grantham tells him not to wear it during the game. When Grantham goes to get the lineup card, he finds DiPunno behind closed blinds, crying on the phone. DiPunno emerges looking devastated and tells Grantham to manage the game, saying only that the games will not count and that Grantham should let the team have this one last game.

Dusen pitches brilliantly. In the fifth inning, the crowd chants "Blob-KADE!" and raises their orange signs as the rookie tags out a runner at the plate. In the sixth, a fan interferes with a foul ball the rookie is chasing, but umpire Hi Wenders rules it simply a foul ball. The batter, Luis Aparicio, then hits a home run, giving Chicago a 1–0 lead. Grantham charges out to argue and is ejected. As he leaves, he sees Dusen whispering in the rookie's ear while the crowd screams "KILL THE UMP."

In the locker room, Grantham finds DiPunno with police officers and a detective named Lombardazzi. The detective reveals the truth: The rookie's real name is Eugene Katsanis. The real William Blakely and both his parents have been dead for about a month, their throats slashed with a razor blade in their barn in Clarence, Iowa. Katsanis grew up in The Ottershaw Christian Home for Boys, where he was regularly beaten. The Blakely family hired him as a farmhand because he worked cheap and was talented enough to serve as their son Billy's practice partner. But Katsanis matured as a ballplayer while Billy plateaued, and the Blakelys used their influence to keep Katsanis off local teams. Grantham believes they pushed him too far, and the young man snapped, killing all three Blakelys and slaughtering the farm's cows so neighbors would not hear them lowing and investigate. He drove to New Jersey with Billy's identification, and in an era without photo IDs, no one questioned him. The deception collapsed only when a gas delivery man smelled decomposition from the barn.

DiPunno instructs Grantham to send the rookie to the locker room alone for a quiet arrest. Meanwhile, Dusen is struck in the forehead by a line drive, a blow that will end his career. Grantham tells the rookie DiPunno wants to see him about a "Rookie of the Month" award. Instead of walking directly to the locker room, the rookie cuts through a storage room, bypassing the waiting officers. He emerges near the umpires' room with a hidden device on his finger: a tiny tin band holding a spring-loaded sliver of razor blade. He knocks on the door, announces an urgent telegram for Wenders, and when Wenders opens it, slashes his throat.

Police find the rookie standing over the body in his blood-soaked uniform. He whispers, "I got him, Doo. I got him, Billy. He won't make no more bad calls now. I got him for all of us." Grantham connects the murder to the crowd's chanting and Dusen's insistence that Wenders was their enemy, which the rookie absorbed without understanding that none of it was meant literally.

All 22 of the Titans' games are erased from the official record books. Dusen, diagnosed with a brain bleed, never reaches 200 wins or earns a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame. DiPunno has a heart attack and never manages again. Katsanis, held at Essex County Jail awaiting extradition to Iowa, dies in custody after swallowing a bar of soap and choking on it. Grantham reflects that despite the horror, the story has brought back good memories, especially of the stadium flushing orange and the chant of "Blob-KADE" echoing through Old Swampy. He affirms that the rookie was "the real thing" and that baseball remains a good thing.