Free Dead Ball by R. D. Rosen Page A

mythology for him.
    No matter how many television shows were set in Providence, no matter how much they gussied it up with canals and urban renewal, it was still a city ensnared in the past. In fact, it was the only major American city whose entire downtown was listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. For forty years, from the late 1920s to the late 1960s, there had been virtually no money for new building downtown. Despite its recent growth spurt, the city continued to exhibit what a Christian Science Monitor journalist once called “a curious lack of bustle.” Who could explain Providence? The New England mob, with roots in Prohibition, when Narragansett Bay was a rum-runner’s paradise, made a Federal Hill storefront its headquarters, while only a mile away, on College Hill, Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design churned out the power elite and the avant garde. In this tight town, everything was a stone’s throw away from its contradiction. Its mayor was a man who had once extinguished a lighted cigarette on the forehead of a man he suspected of sleeping with his estranged wife, but now sold “The Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce” on the Internet.
    On the empty straight stretch of 95, Harvey unfolded the printout Mickey had given him, propped it up on the steering wheel, and read it in snatches. It was a short item from Sports Illustrated, published almost six years ago, headlined “Farewell to Al Molis.”
Journeyman catcher Al Molis was found dead last week in an Ohio motel, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Thus ended one of the saddest major league baseball careers in recent memory. Molis, 35, who had been released this spring by the St. Louis Cardinals, failed to catch on with another team and at the time of his death was contemplating a coaching offer from an undisclosed minor league team, according to his estranged wife Jeannette.
    He had a major league lifetime batting average of .244 with six teams, but was perhaps best known for his highly unorthodox political activities in a sport not known for its players’ political involvements. A professed right-winger and member of the rogue white supremacist group Izan Nation, based in Virginia, Molis recruited fellow major leaguers to his cause. As a member of the Colorado Rockies, Molis was arrested, along with teammates Andy Cubberly and Rod Duquesne, for disrupting a Black Pride parade in downtown Denver by shouting racist slogans and hurling white paint-filled balloons at the marchers. The charges were eventually reduced, and all three were required to perform community service.
    On the field, Molis was twice reprimanded by the league for his habit of whispering racist comments to black batters from his position behind home plate, but his defensive skills and knack for handling pitchers—yes, even African-American ones, as long as they were his teammates—kept him in the league for twelve years.
    Always prone to erratic behavior and drug use, Molis’s troubles seemed to worsen over the winter. Police in his hometown of New Welford, Ohio, arrested him in January for possession of crystal methedrine and had to subdue him with pepper gas.
    Molis once said to a reporter who asked him what it was like playing for so many different teams: “I’ve only played on one team my entire life—the white team.”
    Harvey gunned his Honda southward. As he approached the gleaming domed Rhode Island State House off 95, just north of downtown, he was surprised by Snoot Coffman’s face smiling down on him from a billboard. Coffman was holding up a baseball glove, which seemed to be catching the line of copy “ CATCH EVERY JEWELS’ GEM ON WRIX WITH SNOOT COFFMAN .” A cartoon bubble coming out of Snoot’s mouth contained his signature “Now how ’bout dat?”
    Harvey stopped at the AG’s office to fill out his pistol permit application and get fingerprinted, then got back on 95 South, making Rubino’s Warwick real