"What's that?"

Mark Eques hung his shoulders. "She's a better ball player than 1 am."

We learned the following day that Lewis and his people had indeed discovered it. Carza took the field wearing a Cardinals shirt and started warming up with the rest of the team.

She was a lovely young woman, frisky and smiling, and she captured the hearts of almost everyone at once. The Yankee owners were not quite so enchanted, and they could be seen huddling with the baseball commissioner in his box. Certainly no one could object to a centaur playing baseball, nor to a woman, since Iris Schultz had pitched a full season for the Dodgers. But this was a new player, joining the team just in time for the Series!

The game was delayed an hour while they argued the point, disrupting television schedules around the world, but the commissioner finally ruled that she could play. The teams took the field- It would be centaur against centaur.

For the first few innings the crowd went wild each time Mark or his sister took the field. But it soon became obvious that each of them was so skilled in playing the outfield that nothing less than a home run would make it onto the scoreboard that day. Mark was the better hitter, probably because he'd been playing since July, but he only succeeded in hitting two high flies that Carza caught without any trouble. The crowd wanted hits, but all they were getting was a demonstration of some remarkable fielding.

As the ninth inning ended in a scoreless tie I spotted Lippy Lewis at a refreshment stand by the back of the stadium.

"How's it going, Lippy? I see you switched your allegiance from the Sox to the Cards."

"You gotta go with the smart money, Danny," he said, squeezing some mustard onto a hot dog.

"The smart money used to say you should never bet against the Yankees."

"Yeah? Well, we got our own centaur now."

The tenth inning had begun while we chatted, and suddenly there came a groan of anguish from the St. Louis fans. Lippy and I hurried to see what had happened, and 1 think we were equally horrified to see Carza tying on the field in obvious pain. She'd tripped while chasing a hard-hit grounder to center, and the ball had rolled ail the way to the outfield fence for a triple.