The Star and the Rockets

Not much to spring training, not when you play for an independent team in a Class C league. On weekends, the guys go out to Park Field to hit and to field grounders and shag flies. Joe puts in as much time as he can. He usually gets off to a slow start. Maybe this year he won’t. He can hope. You can always hope, even if you’re in the Longhorn League.

He doesn’t remember much of what happened that cold January night. Most of what he does remember is missing part of Milton Berle and getting the nice tip. Sometimes he thinks there’s more to it, but less and less as the days go by.

He doesn’t talk about it. What’s to say? Nothing that makes sense. Nothing anybody will believe. He can’t even joke about it, the way Berle made a joke out of Lamont Cranston. People in Roswell don’t laugh at jokes about flying saucers.

He boots a ground ball. It goes right between his legs. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” says the guy who hit it. “You shoulda snagged that one in your sleep.”

“Musta been thinking about something else,” Joe answers sheepishly. Why is he worrying about flying saucers? He’s never seen one in his life. He’s seen the two red taillights of that Oldsmobile receding down Second Street, though.

 ”Don’t think, for Chrissakes,” the other Rocket tells him. “You’ll only screw yourself up.”

He’s not wrong. You can’t think when you’re playing ball. You’ll be a split second late, half a step slow, if you do. You have to play and play and play till your body automatically knows what to do, and your head backs off and lets it.

Joe’s swing is like that. He’s always been a hard hitter. This year, he’s something extra special. The ball jumps off his bat, in the practices and after the season starts. Some of the shots he hits go farther than Professor Goddard’s prewar experiments that gave the Roswell Rockets their name.

He hits ‘em long. He hits ‘em early. He hits ‘em often. The Longhorn League belongs to the hitters. So do the West Texas–New Mexico League, the Big State League, and the Arizona-Texas League, all in the same part of the country. The air is thin. The weather’s hot. Pitching staffs are small, and wear down as summer grinds along. Lots of guys run up big numbers here. But even by the inflated standards people in these parts are used to, Joe has a season to remember.

They play mostly night games. During the day, when the Rockets are home, Joe pumps gas. At night, he takes dead aim at the whitewashed planks of the right-field fence at Park Field. It’s only 329 down the line. He’s smacking ‘em way farther than that. He knocks one into the rodeo grounds next to the ballpark, which interrupts the calf-roping.

He gets a free ham every time he hits one out, too: the team has a deal with a local meat-packer. He doesn’t keep most of them. Some of the Cuban kids who play for the Rockets praying a big-league organization will notice them are hungry all the time. They don’t get paid the way he does, and they need the meat.

He passes fifty homers early in August. By the end of the month, with the season winding down, he has sixty-four. That means he’s passed Babe Ruth, whose sixty has stood as the major-league mark since 1927. But the record in the minors is sixty-nine. Joe Hauser did it in 1933, and Bob Crues tied it in 1949 playing for Amarillo in the West Texas–New Mexico League. Joe Bauman played with him there a couple of years earlier.

On the night of September 1, Joe gets close. Real close. The Sweetwater Spudders are in Roswell. Their franchise is spuddering; they moved from Wichita Falls in June. And Joe has a game for the ages. Four homers. A double. Ten RBIs. Oh, yeah. The Rockets win, 15-9.

Sixty-eight. One to tie the record. Two to bust it wide open. Nobody in history has ever hit seventy, not since Abner Doubleday said “Let there be bases” and there were bases. All of a sudden, Joe’s a big story. Oh, he’s been a big story in Roswell the whole season, and in the other Longhorn League towns, too. But now he’s a story across the whole country. AP lines carry news of what he’s doing from coast to coast. When’s the last time that happened in Roswell?

Oh. The thing back in ‘47, the one people don’t care to talk about. Whenever Joe thinks about that, he shies away from it like a cat that just got a squirt in the face from a water pistol. So he doesn’t think about it much. It’s not as if he hasn’t got other things on his mind.

The next day, Pat Stasey, the manager, moves him from cleanup to the leadoff spot so he’ll get more chances to hit. But he doesn’t connect on the second. The record sits on his shoulders, heavy as a piano. He hates the flash bulbs going off every time he comes up. It’s not just the local photographers, either. Sports Illustrated has sent a guy to Roswell. So has Life. He is big news, and kind of wishes he weren’t.