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decided that our best approach was to investigate this note quietly, together,” Heather said.
    â€œIt’s going to be hard to find out anything if we can’t tell anyone what we’re trying to find out,” Sam said.
    â€œI know,” Kenwood said. “That’s why I called David Porter at Augusta National.”
    â€œYou’re a member?”
    â€œYes, for almost thirty years. I liked how you handled yourself at the Masters, but I wanted to be sure that you could be trusted to keep your mouth shut, so I called David. He recommended you without hesitation.”
    â€œThere were lots of other cops working on that case. I just happened to be the one who was there at the right time.”
    â€œHe’s so modest, Lou,” Heather said.
    â€œNever mind. Sam, I believe you can help us now, or I wouldn’t have sent for you.”
    For the next hour, Sam talked over the facts of the situation with Kenwood and Heather. Neither of them had ever heard Sox manager Gil Mahaffey or any of the players even suggest that the Cardinals—who went into the Series as a very slight underdog—had not tried their best in that Series sweep. Yet the writers and broadcasters who covered that Series were unanimous that the Cards did not play as well as they’d been expected to. They’d booted easy plays, missed signs, had runners picked off, hit poorly with runners on base, and their pitchers had been hammered.
    In particular, the Cardinals’ two best players, Ivan Hurtado and Alberto Miranda, had played badly. Hurtado, an All-Star right fielder, hit a home run in Game One, but was thrown out stealing three times, dropped a fly ball, misplayed several others, and hit only .211. After the Series, the Cardinals decided they didn’t want to try to sign him to a long-term deal and traded him to the Red Sox for pitching prospects.
    As disappointing as Hurtado’s play was, he’d been stellar compared to National League Most Valuable Player Alberto Miranda. Miranda had been the first major league player since Babe Ruth to regularly play a position in the field when he wasn’t pitching. He’d won 23 games as a starting pitcher, batted .328 with 27 home runs while playing 120 games in the field, and had gone to the mound from his third base position to post three saves late in the season. He’d made the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
, heralded as the vanguard of a new kind of player, who would actually be a throwback to the multi-position players of baseball’s early days. Writers kept predicting that Miranda would break down physically as the season progressed, but if anything, he seemed to get stronger as the Cardinals leaned on him more and more—that is, until the World Series. He batted just .188 with three singles and no RBIs, and he was shelled in his two starts. Worse, he’d thrown two balls away on potential double play grounders that could have got the Cards out of big innings.
    The Cardinals, and the reporters who covered them, wrote off Miranda’s poor performance to exhaustion from the supreme effort it had taken to get his team to the Series. In retrospect, it should have been expected, they said. The following season, Miranda went back to his normal workload, starting 30 games on the mound and playing third base when he didn’t pitch. He was among the league leaders in both wins and home runs; all along, however, Miranda’s name had been linked to steroid rumors. No one could believe a modern baseball player—even one as young and strong as Miranda—could excel at both hitting and pitching. A year after the Series, the Cardinals allowed Miranda to sign a four-year, $60,000,000 free-agent deal with the Dodgers, the team that had initially signed him and brought him to the big leagues as a skinny twenty-year-old.
    The dismal World Series performances by Hurtado and Miranda had been forgotten in the lingering euphoria over