Cloning the Babe

Cloning the Babe

By Larry Lefkowitz

“Have you glanced at the standings lately?” the Indians’ owner fired hard and high at his manager, Brady, the moment Brady put his size 12’s inside the door.

The veteran pilot acted as if he hadn’t heard the question. He began to brush a piece of dirt he had just discovered from the sleeve of his uniform. “You wanted to see me, boss? Batting practice is about to begin,” he said without looking up from his sleeve.

Mike Rockford, the owner of the sliding baseball team, was tempted to let Brady brush his sleeve all day. Instead, he decided to play with his manager a bit. It wasn’t often you got Battling Brady (as the sportswriters had dubbed him) on the defensive.

He motioned Brady to take a seat. The manager distributed his bulk on the chair facing the huge wooden desk behind which Rockford sat. Rockford held up the Sporting News with its headline that cried:

“Indians Continue slide.”

He looked at Brady and shook his head as if greatly grieved.

“I hoped we would take at least one game of the double-header. Especially as we had a three-run lead going into the top of the ninth.”

“You win some, you lose some,” Brady said laconically. “But you lose some more than you win if you ain’t got the players.”

Brady jutted out his famous jaw, the same one that had earned him the sobriquet “Jaws.”

“Those meatheads belong in the minors,” Brady added, considerably less laconically. “I can’t win ballgames without ballplayers.”

This line of Brady’s was hardly new to Rockford. And although he had argued against it before, he knew Brady was right.

“Listen Brady, I’m the owner of those ‘minor leaguers,’ correct?”

“Yup.”

“Well I won’t be the owner much longer if we don’t get our attendance up. Losing games does not raise attendance.”

He said this last slowly for emphasis and when he had finished he glared at Brady with the “hard” look he usually reserved for sportswriters who explicitly questioned the merits of his team and implicitly his judgment.

Brady had seen the look before. Rockford had once been a hurler and a pretty good one. It was his stare-down-the-batter look. By way of answer, Brady settled for swatting a nonexistent fly off his pants leg with his baseball cap.

Rockford realized he wasn’t going to enlist Brady’s cooperation by trying to bully him. He switched tack. “I’ll have to sell the franchise if I don’t get more people into the ballpark. That means winning a few games. No, not a few—a hell of a lot. And if I go,” he paused for emphasis, “I don’t go alone.”

Brady followed his reasoning with the speed of a line drive. “Get me some ballplayers and maybe we’ll both stay. Assuming you haven’t called me here to hand me my walking papers.”

The owner smiled in spite of himself. Brady was disarming in his own hard-bitten way.

“You walk, Brady?” he joked. “That teddy-bear gait of yours could hardly be called ‘walking.’”

For the first time since he had entered the boss’s office, Brady felt relieved.

“What we need is a big draw,” said Rockford. “Which means a slugger. If you had your choice, who would you take?”

Brady ticked off the three top hitters in the league.

“Give me any one of ‘em,” Brady said, “and I’ll give you a pennant winner. But you don’t have the cash to buy ‘em—even if their owners would sell, which I doubt.”

Rockford leaned forward.

“Who would you take? I don’t mean only from today’s players. From the greats of all time.”

Brady frowned. The boss was being theoretical. Brady didn’t like conversations that weren’t all brass tacks. But he was in no position to call him on it. That was okay for first place managers.

“The Babe,” he replied.

“I thought so,” Rockford beamed. “Me too. Who wouldn’t?” He paused, then added in a tone half conspiratorial, half triumphant: “How would you like me to get him for you?”

The game’s up, thought Brady. The pressure finally got to him.

Rockford read Brady’s expression.

“No, Brady, I haven’t gone off the deep end. It wouldn’t be the Babe himself. It would be almost the same thing, though. A replica of the Babe. The same build, wrists, legs, everything.”

Brady leaned forward.

“I’ll take him. Where is he? Which Triple-A club? Who discovered him?”

“Whoa, hold on a minute. I don’t mean somebody similar to the Babe. I mean the Babe brought to life.”

Brady pulled on his ear indicating unconsciously the steal-home-from-third sign. He is confused, thought Rockford. Well, who could blame him?

“You ever heard of cloning?”

Brady shook his head.

“Who’s he play for?”

“He’s not a player. It’s a scientific technique by which you reproduce a plant—or a human—in such a way that the offspring is the genetic twin of the organism cloned.”

Brady blinked.

“I don’t know much about that sort of thing.”

“You don’t have to. I know somebody that does. A scientist. He’s going to clone us the Babe—from one of the Babe’s body cells. I call him ‘the Doc’. He’s kind of an obstetrician.”

This time Brady blinked twice, like a fly—of the insect variety—had gotten caught in his throat. “What’s he gonna do—rob his grave?”

“No, that won’t be necessary. The Doc thinks some skin cells on his bat or uniform in the Hall of Fame will suffice. He reactivates the cells somehow.”

“The Babe doesn’t need a mother?”

“Not really a mother—only a repository until the baby is born.”

But Brady wasn’t thinking of mechanics as he paced the thick carpet as if it were the third-base coaching box.

“I’ll shift Jacobs from batting cleanup to batting third. Dalloway will bat second—” Brady stopped short. “But it’ll be another twenty years till the Babe grows up!”

“Nope,” Rockford beamed. “Two years. The Doc’s got a speeder-upper. He calls it a ‘super catalyst’.”

Brady jutted out his lower lip.

“What the hell is it, Viagra for babies?”

“The Doc keeps the formula in his head.”

“And the Babe comes out swinging the bat?” 

“According to the Doc, giving the baby the formula enables him to grow a year every month.”

“This doc guy really believes that?”

“He has already succeeded with it using rabbits. Before that with frogs.”

“He’s going in the right direction,” Brady grumbled.

“The Doc’s a brilliant scientist,” agreed Rockford. “It’s our good luck he’s crazy about baseball. The idea of the Babe is an obsession with him. I think the Nobel Prize in chemistry is in the back of his mind, too.”

“Maybe they’ll let him throw out the first ball at the World Series.” 

“The Babe will be entirely in your hands, Brady.” And here Rockford lowered his voice. ”You’ll keep your mouth shut about all this, you hear. No bragging to your managerial cronies on the other teams. If it gets out, the other teams will raise hell.”

“All of it seems a bit way out,” mused Brady our loud.

“Veeck and his midgets were nothing compared to this. The public will battle to buy tickets.”

In the following two seasons while the Babe grew up, the Indians continued to flounder at the bottom of the standings just ahead of the last-place Athletics. Both Brady and Rockford knew that everything was riding on “Babe Two,” as they called him. Every time he swung the bat, Rockford found it hard to believe that the King of Swat himself wasn’t standing in the batter’s box. There was only one difference. Rockford called his manager over to discuss it once more.

“Why the hell can’t he hit?”

Brady shrugged.

“I dunno,” he mumbled, looking at his shoes.

Rockford thrust his face close to that of Brady’s, as Brady was prone to do to umpires with whose opinions he differed.

“You ‘dunno’? You can’t get him to hit the ball to the outfield, let alone out of the park—the greatest hitter of all time!”

Brady averted his eyes. Rockford thought he detected tears in them.

“He looks like the Babe. He talks like the Babe. He swings the bat like the Babe. But he can’t clout ‘em like the Babe. I can’t understand it, boss. You’ve watched him. He is the Babe—except for one thing. He can’t hit.”

“It’s one hell of an exception. My whole future is riding on him. What am I supposed to do?”

Both men watched the Babe take one of his magnificent swaths, but the ball dribbled a few feet to where the shortstop lackadaisically picked it up and threw it to first.

“Maybe you can let him pose for hologram bubblegum cards,” said Brady.

“I’ll tell you what we are going to do,” said Rockford, putting his mouth so close to Brady’s ear that the manager feared for a moment that he was going to snatch a piece of it with his teeth. ”We’re going to sell his contract before it gets all over the league that we cloned a hitless wonder.”

With the cleats of his left shoe, Brady methodically cleaned the dirt off the cleats of his right shoe.

“That’s not ethical,” he said finally.

“You never heard of caveat emptor, Brady?” Rockford shouted.

“No, who’s he play for?” Brady shouted back.

“It means ‘Let the buyer beware.’”

“If you’re so damned set on it, you’d better sell fast. I’ve heard rumors that the Red Sox are trying to clone Walter Johnson, and the Senators, Ty Cobb. ‘Course nobody knows yet that the Babe can’t hit—only that he’s been cloned. If he can’t hit, the others will probably turn out to be no better. They’ll all look like their fathers, but they’d be a damn sight better off selling insurance than playing baseball.”

“Sure, we’ll move fast,” Rockford said. “Because if anybody gets a look at him at-bat, the game’s up. Start dropping hints with your managerial colleagues that I’m willing to sell the Babe’s contract. They’ll pass the word on to their bosses. Try the Athletics first – they are most in need of help. Don’t be too anxious or they will smell a rat.”

A week later Brady entered Rockford’s office. The owner jumped to his feet, expectant.

“Did you get any bites?”

“Nope. I tried the Athletics like you said. They offered me Honus Wagner—dirt cheap. They said I’d have to wait a while to get him. Didn’t say why, but I suspect he’s only a month old. I tried the Yankees. They’re trying to palm off Rogers Hornsby. ‘Course he’s not quite ready yet either. Nobody wants the Babe. Everybody’s dealing for cash. The cat’s out of the bag. The only thing I can’t figure out is how they got in on the act. Where’d they learn to clone so fast?”

“The Doc!” sputtered Rockford, hitting the desk with a fist that caused the pages of the Sporting News to jump. “I told you he was a baseball fan. He went crazy. Tempted by coming up with the best baseball team of all time. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear he cloned Abner Doubleday.”

“He won’t bring much on the market right now,” opined Brady. “What’ll we do now? With the Babe, I mean.”

“What you do is move Jacobs back to cleanup and have Dalloway bat third. What I’ll do is give the bubblegum card people a call. Or better yet, the wax museum.”

“Maybe the Baseball Hall of Fame could use him to greet visitors.”

“I think you’re on to something, Brady.”

Larry Lefkowitz has had published over 150 stories, as well as poetry and humor. His literary novel, The Critic, the Assistant Critic, and Victoria is available as an e-book and in print from Amazon. Lefkowitz’s humorous fantasy and science fiction collection, Laughing into the Fourth dimension is available from Amazon books. His story collection, Enigmatic Tales is published by Fomite Press.

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