Willie & Me Read online

  Those were the good old days, for me. How lucky I was to have lived through them and met all those great players.

  It would be cool to go back in time and visit those guys again. But no, I just couldn’t risk it anymore. The gift from Flip would have to do. That night, I fell asleep cradling the plaque in my arms.

  It must have been around midnight when I heard something. We have an old house, and it creaks with the wind and cold. But this was a different sound. I opened my eyes.

  Then I bolted upright. There wasn’t a man in my room this time. No, this time there was a crowd of people standing around my bed.

  I tried to scream, but no sound came out of my mouth. I hugged the plaque to my chest, as if it would protect me. They had me way outnumbered, and some of them were holding bats. What were they going to do to me?

  “Shhhh,” somebody whispered. “It’s okay, Stosh.”

  It was dark, so I couldn’t make them out at first. But after my eyes adjusted to the little night-light, I could see they were all wearing baseball uniforms. And then I was able to make out their faces.

  Honus Wagner. Jackie Robinson. Babe Ruth. Shoeless Joe Jackson. Satchel Paige. Ray Chapman. Jim Thorpe. Roberto Clemente. Ted Williams.

  All the guys on the plaque were there, including Flip. It was young Flip, and he was wearing his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform.

  “W-what’s going on?” I asked. “What are you all doing here?”

  “You must have wished for it, Stosh,” Flip told me, “and you made it happen. Just like all the other times.”

  “We came back,” said Honus Wagner, coming over to shake my hand. “It’s good to see you again, Stosh.”

  The others came over one by one to shake hands with me, too.

  I couldn’t believe it. I knew that I could take people back in time with me, because I’d done it with my dad, my mom, and Flip. And I knew that I could pull people from their time into my time, because I’d done it with Honus, Bobby Thomson, and Ralph Branca. But pulling ten people through time, simultaneously? Now, that was impressive.

  I looked around the room at their faces. Ray Chapman and Roberto Clemente, two players from completely different eras, were standing next to each other. I remembered that both of them would die tragically, Clemente in a plane crash and Chapman getting his skull fractured by a pitched ball. That’s why I had traveled back in time to meet them. I was trying to prevent Roberto from getting on that plane in 1972, and to prevent Ray from stepping into that batter’s box in 1920. I had failed both times.

  On the other side of my bed was Shoeless Joe Jackson. He had been kicked out of baseball for life because of a gambling scandal he hadn’t even participated in. I had traveled back to 1919 trying to prevent it from happening. That hadn’t worked out, either.

  Now that I was looking at their faces, it occurred to me that I had always failed when I went back in time. I wasn’t able to see whether or not Babe Ruth called his famous “called shot” home run in 1932. Ted Williams and I hadn’t been able to warn President Roosevelt about the attack on Pearl Harbor. I hadn’t been able to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

  I was a failure. Maybe that’s why they were all in my bedroom now, I figured—to get back at me.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to the group. “Every time I went back in the past with you guys, I had some mission I wanted to accomplish. And I failed every time. I was only trying to help.”

  “Fuhgetaboutit,” Flip said. “You didn’t fail, Stosh. Life is what it is. You coulda made things a lot worse.”

  “We lived our lives,” Jackie told me. “Everything is going to work out.”

  Honus Wagner came over to the head of the bed.

  “Do you remember what I told you, Stosh?” Honus asked me. “Remember what I said about being a great ballplayer?”

  I did. I remembered it like it was yesterday.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “I told you that I wasn’t any good at baseball. You told me that the secret to being a great ballplayer is to trick yourself into thinking you already are one.”

  “That’s right, Stosh.”

  “After that,” I said, “I convinced myself that I was good, and it made me better.”

  Honus nodded his head and stepped back so Jackie Robinson could get closer to me.

  “Stosh,” he said, “do you remember what I taught you that day at Ebbets Field?”

  “Sure,” I told him. “Those bigots on the other teams were screaming horrible things at you, and pitchers were knocking you down left and right. I tried to get you to go charge the mound and beat them up, but you told me that you fight back in your own way. Instead of fighting with your fists, you fought back by showing them how good you were. And a lot of those people who hated you came to respect you in the end.”

  “You got it, Stosh,” Jackie said.

  I looked over at Roberto Clemente, who was standing quietly in the corner.

  “Before I met you, Roberto,” I said, “I was really selfish. I didn’t care about anybody else. But seeing what you did made me care about other people, and not just about myself. I’ll never forget what you told me—If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you and you don’t do that, you’re wasting your time on this earth.”

  “That’s exactly what I said,” Roberto told me.

  “Hey, what am I, !@#$% chopped liver?” asked Ted Williams.

  Oh yeah. Ted might have hit as many homers as Babe Ruth if he hadn’t spent four years in the prime of his career fighting in World War II and the Korean War.

  “I tried to talk you out of joining the military,” I said. “But you told me that some things are more important than hitting home runs.”

  “You’re !@#$%^ right!” Ted said, which made everyone laugh.

  Babe Ruth came over next. He threw an arm around me and put me in a friendly headlock.

  “You remember what I taught you, don’tcha, kid?” he said. “Swing for the fences. Swing big, with everything you’ve got. Hit big or miss big. Live as big as you can.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And Shoeless Joe taught me that sometimes life isn’t fair, but we’ve gotta deal with that. And Satch, you taught me there are no second chances. If you want something, you’ve got to go get it. Because nine times out of ten, if you let something slip away, it’s gone forever.”

  “I guess if ya go where learnin’ is flying round,” Satch whispered, “some of it’s bound to light on you.”

  I had remembered just about everything they had told me, and I realized that each of them had given me a little bit of wisdom. When I followed their advice, it made me a better player, and a better person.

  “Well, I know you didn’t learn nothin’ from me,” Flip said, “’cause I don’t know nothin’.”

  “Oh, I learned a lot from you, Flip,” I told him. “You taught me everything I know about baseball. And something more important, too. You taught me that sometimes you can change history, and sometimes history can change you.”

  We talked late into the night about baseball, life, and so many other things. At some point, I must have dropped off to sleep. When I woke up in the morning, they were all gone.

  It was over. But I would have their baseball cards to help me remember them forever. And the rest is history.

  EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK IS TRUE, EXCEPT FOR THE STUFF I made up. It’s only fair to tell you which is which.

  First, all the time travel stuff is a load of malarkey. No matter how many books you read or movies you watch, nobody has ever figured out how to travel through time, and we probably never will. Joe Stoshack, his mother, and Uncle Wilbur are fictional characters. And if you can’t find Flip Valentini’s name at the Baseball Hall of Fame, it’s because he doesn’t exist (although he is named after my good friend Fred Valentini).

  Everything else in the book is pretty much true. The Brooklyn Dodgers were on track to cruise to the National League pennant in 1951, but the New Y
ork Giants came from thirteen and a half games back in August to tie them on the last day of the season. Then the Giants won the final playoff game in the ninth inning on Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World” off Ralph Branca.

  If you ask historians what was the most famous home run in baseball history, they will probably name that one. In 1999, the U.S. Postal Service even issued a stamp commemorating the moment. You can watch the homer yourself on YouTube and hear Russ Hodges’s famous call: “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” Search for “Bobby Thomson.”

  Over the years, there were rumors that the Giants had cheated by stealing signs with a telescope hidden in the center-field clubhouse. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that New York Times sports columnist Dave Anderson started talking about it in print. Finally, Joshua Prager blew the lid off the story in a January 31, 2001, article in The Wall Street Journal. He turned that article into a 2006 book, The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World. Thanks to Prager’s exhaustive research, we now know that the Giants never would have caught the Dodgers if they hadn’t been stealing signs. There never would have been a playoff, and Thomson never would have even come to bat, much less hit the historic home run.

  To be fair, Bobby Thomson always denied that he knew what pitch was coming. He claimed that he was concentrating so heavily that he never looked over to the bullpen for the sign. He did tell the New York Times, “the Shot was the best thing that ever happened to me. I guess people remember me because of that moment. They wouldn’t have paid much attention to me if that hadn’t happened.”

  Bobby was traded to the Milwaukee Braves in 1954, and he also played for the Cubs, Red Sox, Orioles, and Giants again before he retired in 1960 with a lifetime average of .270. After baseball, he became a paper products salesman. Bobby Thomson died in 2010 at the age of eighty-six.

  Ralph Branca, I think, is the more interesting character. After giving up Thomson’s home run, his career nosedived. He hurt his back and retired in 1956. Branca became an insurance salesman, but briefly became famous again in 1961 when he won seventeen straight games on the TV show Concentration. He was also the president of BAT (Baseball Assistance Team), an organization that helps needy ex-ballplayers.

  In 2011, eighty-five-year-old Catholic Ralph Branca was back in the news when—much to his surprise—he found out that his mother, Kati (and he and his sixteen brothers and sisters), was Jewish, and that several of his relatives were killed in concentration camps during World War II.

  After the home run, Bobby and Ralph generally avoided each other. But as they grew older, they took advantage of their moment in history and made a lot of money together signing autographs of photos and memorabilia.

  “I lost a game,” Branca said, “but I made a friend.”

  Branca and Thomson

  Willie Mays went on to become one of the greatest and most beloved players in baseball history, finishing his career with 660 home runs, two MVP awards, twelve Gold Gloves, and of course, membership in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  But in 1951, when this story takes place, Mays was an insecure rookie. He started the season with just one hit in twenty-five at bats. At that point, he sat next to his locker and broke down in tears, telling Giants manager Leo Durocher that he didn’t think he could hit big league pitching.

  “I was a scared rookie,” Willie wrote in his autobiography, Say Hey, “so scared that when Bobby Thomson stepped into the batter’s box and belted his historic, pennant-winning home run against the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds, I was crouched in the on-deck circle praying to God: Please don’t let it be me. Don’t make me come to bat now, God.”

  “If Bobby made an out, it would be my turn at bat,” Willie wrote. “I would have been in a position to become the hero, sure, but the way I was swinging I was more likely to make the last out of the season.”

  It’s doubtful that Willie Mays would have quit baseball if he had hit into a season-ending double play. He was just too talented. Admittedly, I invented that possibility for the sake of the story. But Willie also wrote this in his autobiography: “Who knows, if I had come to bat one more time that year, there might not have been as much history to write about after all.”

  Everybody knows how the regular season ended in 1951, but hardly anybody remembers what happened in the World Series. According to Joshua Prager, the Giants were afraid they would get caught using the telescope and they did not cheat in the World Series. Maybe that’s why they lost. The Yankees beat them four games to two. The Giants did win the Series a few years later in 1954, and didn’t win another one until 2010.

  Six years after the Shot Heard Round the World, the Dodgers and Giants both left New York and moved to California. The Polo Grounds, where this historic game was played, was demolished in April 1964. Today, you’d never know a ballpark was there. But if you look around the apartment complex that stands on the site, you’ll find a plaque on the wall at the exact location where home plate used to be—the spot where Bobby Thomson hit what came to be called “The Shot Heard Round the World.”

  Willie Mays—Lifetime Statistics

  Two-time NL Most Valuable Player

  NL Rookie of the Year

  12-time Gold Glove winner

  24-time All-Star

  Led the NL in batting, slugging, runs, hits, triples, home runs, walks, and stolen bases

  Hall of Fame 1979

  Major League Baseball All-Century Team

  *Willie missed the 1953 season because he was serving in the military.

  †After the 1957 season, the Giants moved from New York to San Francisco.

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Photo by Nina Wallace

  DAN GUTMAN has always been a baseball fanatic. He played in Little League as a kid, and one of the first magazine articles he ever sold explained the science behind the spitball, the scuffball, and corked bats. When he thought about the T206 Honus Wagner—the most valuable baseball card in the world—he began to write HONUS & ME, his first Baseball Card Adventure.

  Dan is also the author of the New York Times bestselling Genius Files series, as well as the internationally bestselling My Weird School series. You can visit Dan online at www.dangutman.com.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Books by Dan Gutman

  The Get Rich Quick Club

  Johnny Hangtime

  Casey Back at Bat

  Baseball Card Adventures

  Honus & Me

  Jackie & Me

  Babe & Me

  Shoeless Joe & Me

  Mickey & Me

  Abner & Me

  Satch & Me

  Jim & Me

  Ray & Me

  Roberto & Me

  Ted & Me

  The Genius Files

  Mission Unstoppable

  Never Say Genius

  You Only Die Twice

  From Texas with Love

  License to Thrill

  My Weirdest School

  Mr. Cooper Is Super!

  My Weirder School

  Miss Child Has Gone Wild!

  Mr. Harrison Is Embarrassin’!

  Mrs. Lilly Is Silly!

  Mr. Burke Is Berserk!

  Ms. Beard Is Weird!

  Mayor Hubble Is in Trouble!

  Miss Kraft Is Daft!

  Dr. Nicholas Is Ridiculous!

  Ms. Sue Has No Clue!

  Mr. Jack Is a Maniac!

  Miss Klute Is a Hoot!

  Mrs. Lane Is a Pain!

  My Weird School Specials

  It’s Halloween, I’m Turning Green!

  Deck the Halls, We’re Off the Walls!

  Bunny Double, We’re in Trouble!

  Back to School, Weird Kids Rule!

  Oh, Valentine, We’ve Lost Our Minds!

  And don’t miss any of the zany books in the My Weird School and My Weird School Daze series!

  Credits
/>
  Cover hand lettering © 2015 by David Coulson

  Cover illustration © 2015 by Steve Chorney

  Cover design by Kate Engbring

  Copyright

  WILLIE & ME. Copyright © 2015 by Dan Gutman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  The author would like to acknowledge the following for use of photographs and artwork: Robert Edward Auctions LLC (here), the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown NY (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here), Nina Wallace (here), and Howard Wolf (here).

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gutman, Dan.

  Willie & me : a baseball card adventure / Dan Gutman.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Joe ‘Stosh’ Stoshack uses his power to time travel using baseball cards to go back to 1951, when Bobby Thomson hit the famous Shot Heard Round the World home run to win the National League pennant for the New York Giants”— Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-06-170404-8 (hardback)

  EPub Edition © February 2015 ISBN 9780062332073

  1. Polo Grounds (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. [1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Baseball—Fiction. 3. New York Giants (Baseball team)—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title: Willie and me.

  PZ7.G9846Wi 2015

  2014028436