baseball on this radio," said the Professor.
"Of course! You can get it on any radio."
"My brother bought it for me a long time ago, for practicing English conversation. I thought it would only pick up English."
"So you've never listened to the Tigers?" Root said.
"No, and I haven't got a TV, either ... ," murmured the Professor, as if confessing something awful. "I've never seen a baseball game."
"I don't believe it!" Root blurted out, nearly shouting.
"I know the rules, though," the Professor said, a bit defensively. But Root was not to be appeased.
"How can you call yourself a Tigers fan?"
"But I am—a big fan. When I was in college, I went to the library at lunch to read the sports pages. But I did more than just read about baseball. You see, no other sport is captured so perfectly by its statistics, its numbers. I analyzed the data for the Hanshin players, their batting averages and ERAs, and by tracking the changes, even miniscule shifts, I could picture the flow of the games in my head."
"And that was fun?"
"Of course it was. Even without the radio, I could keep every detail fixed in my mind: Enatsu's first victory as a pro in 1967—he beat the Carp with ten strikeouts; the game in 1973 when he pitched an extra-innings no-hitter and then hit a walk-off home run himself." Just at that moment, the announcer on the radio mentioned the name of the Tigers starting pitcher, Kasai. "So when is Enatsu scheduled to pitch?" the Professor asked.
"He's a little farther on in the rotation," Root answered without missing a beat. It surprised me to see him acting so grown-up. We'd promised that where Enatsu was concerned, we'd do anything to keep up the illusion. Still, it made us uncomfortable to lie to the Professor, and it was hard to know whether it was really in his best interest. But we could not bear to upset him again.
"We can tell him that Enatsu's back in the dugout, or that he's throwing in the bullpen," Root had said.
Since Enatsu had retired long before Root was born, he'd gone to the library to find out about him. He learned that he had a career record of 206 wins, 158 losses, and 193 saves, with 2,987 strikeouts. He'd hit a home run in his second at bat as a pro; he had short fingers for a pitcher. He'd struck out his great rival, Sadaharu Oh, more than any other pitcher, but he'd also surrendered the most home runs to him. In the course of their rivalry, however, he'd never hit Oh with a pitch. During the 1968 season, he set a world record with 401 strikeouts, and after the 1975 season (the year the Professor's memory came to an end), he'd been traded to the Nankai Hawks.
Root had wanted to know more about Enatsu, so he would seem more real to both of them as they listened to the cheers on the radio. While I had been struggling with the "homework" problem, he had been seeing to the Enatsu problem. Then one day, as I was flipping through a copy of Baseball Players Illustrated that he'd brought home from the library, I was stunned to find a picture of Enatsu, and see on his uniform the number 28. When he'd graduated from Osaka Gakuin and joined the Tigers, he'd been offered the three available numbers: 1, 13, and 28. He'd chosen 28. Enatsu had played his whole career with a perfect number on his back!
That evening, after dinner, we presented our solution. We stood before the Professor, pen and paper in hand, and bowed.
"This is the problem you gave us," said Root. "Find the sum of the numbers from 1 to 10 without adding them." He cleared his throat and then, just as we'd arranged the night before, I held the notebook while he wrote the numbers 1 to 9 in a line, adding 10 farther down on the page. "We already know the answer. It's 55. I added them up and that's what I got. But you didn't care about the answer."
The Professor folded his arms and listened intently, as if hanging on to Root's every word.
"So we decided to think about 1 to 9 first, and forget about 10 for right now. The number 5 is in the middle, so it's the ... uh ..."
"Average," I whispered in his ear.
"Right, the average. We haven't learned averages yet, so Momma helped me with that part. If