Dead Ball

Blissberg returns to baseball to protect a player who’s on the verge of making history

Fifteen years after retiring from baseball, Harvey Blissberg is suffering a bad case of what his girlfriend, Mickey Slavin, calls “sad man-ism” when the owner of his former team, the Providence Jewels, tracks him down. The team’s star, Moss Cooley, is on the verge of shattering Joe DiMaggio’s “unbreakable” fifty-six-game hitting streak. But Cooley has been receiving racist threats, such as a decapitated lawn jockey with a note reading, “escape retribution.” Would Blissberg mind playing bodyguard for a while?

When Cooley’s streak ends shy of DiMaggio’s record, the threats and hate mail continue, suggesting that there’s more at stake than preserving a white man’s supreme achievement. Blissberg follows the trail of clues back into the past, and finds that Moss is not the first Cooley man to be persecuted. A determined psychopath is out for Cooley’s neck, and if he has to murder a few ex-ballplayers on the way—so be it.