Out of the Ballpark

by Christopher Duggan


Babe Ruth’s clone is a CPA in Rochester, Minn. I know because my dad grew up as his brother. Not his real brother. I mean, the government cloned him in the ‘50s a few years after the real Babe Ruth died. Don’t ask me how they did it. I bet he had to give blood or something once and they kept it is what I’m thinking.

So the idea was that Ruth was the greatest baseball player ever and he didn’t even take it serious. They thought if you had the Babe without the reform school, the drinking, the smoking, and all the women, you’d have the greatest, greatest baseball player ever. So, they implanted their Babe Ruth embryo in my grandmother. Why my grandmother? How they hell do I know? My granddad worked for the Army; I bet that had something to do with it.

To me, he was just Uncle Herman--thick black hair, big, quiet--didn’t look nothing like my dad, who’s thin and muscular, face like a rock. When I was a kid, Herman was already too old to play baseball. None of us would have ever known, but after grandma died we were all over at the house except for Uncle Herman. Someone says it was a shame he couldn’t make it into town for the visitation. All of a sudden, Gramps looks up from his ham sandwich and potato salad and starts bawling.

“Herman ain’t mine,” he says. Then, he just tells us the whole God damned story.

“We were supposed to get him playing baseball,” Gramps says. “That’s what kids did then, but Herman never wanted to. He was more interested in figuring out the kids’ batting averages than he was in playing ball.”

My dad was a great ballplayer, though, the best that ever played at Westlake High School. All that work they did trying to get Uncle Herman to play ball really got my dad going. When he hit the ball on Saturday, it didn’t come down until Tuesday. He even got drafted out of high school by the Cincinnati Reds, but he never made it to the majors. Turns out he couldn’t hit a curve ball. My mom still talks about when he called her up crying and said he was giving up. She was pregnant with me, and he wanted to be with us. He sells beer to grocery stores now.

Herman went to school on a scholarship. He was smart like none of us ever were. Them government boys just shrugged their shoulders; wasn’t anything more they could do. These days, he sits in an office, crunches numbers, swats flies, and he’s happy to be doing it. People come up to him all the time and tell him he looks exactly like Babe Ruth.  Makes me laugh. He barely knows who the hell they’re talking about.