How am I supposed to publish this? Sure, it’s the Mick. Purportedly, those are his words. We sent the questionnaire to him, and someone sent it back, but who’s going to believe it? It was a simple question: What was your most memorable moment at Yankee Stadium? There were so many great moments we could think of: any World Series, even losing the home run race to Maris. Any of those would have been publishable, but this: a blowjob behind the bullpen? Those are his words. People know he hit the bottle pretty hard, and drinkers, especially ones like the Mick, say things to be “funny” sometimes. Real funny Mick.
We’re just a small magazine, a newsletter. Once a year we publish a pullout of baseball statistics, so we can tell you decisively who should be in the Hall of Fame. (It’s our most popular issue.) We compare others to The Mick, Yaz, and the Babe. He’s one of the pillars.
I thought it was a joke. I checked the hand writing. It’s not a joke. It’s his handwriting. For as long as I’ve been staring at his signature on baseballs I don’t own, I know the Mick’s signature. Maybe it’s his joke, but even if it is, it would send our circulation into orbit, but I don’t want it that way. An editor has to have integrity for his subjects. Sure, the story will come out eventually, and someone will get a national newspaper job, where they watch games from the stadium box, instead of on a TV in an office. A blowjob behind the bullpen: someone will find out eventually. The Mick will probably be dead by then, especially the way he’s been drinking, and it will just be another quirky incident. Nah. Our readers can stomach another story on the bias in baseball statistics, and how goddamn unfair the whole Hall of Fame thing is.
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Richard Armitage has had his work featured in a number of journals across North America.
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