Willie & Me Read online

  “Probably the same way you got here in the first place.”

  I climbed back into bed with the plaque in my arms, closed my eyes, and tried to will myself back to sleep. It was probably just a dream, I remember thinking. It had to be a dream. Baseball players don’t just show up in your bedroom in the middle of the night.

  When I opened my eyes the next morning, Ralph Branca was gone. The first thing I did was look at the plaque.

  His baseball card was signed.

  It really happened.

  MY HOMETOWN, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, IS ON THE OHIO River, about halfway between Indianapolis and Nashville. It’s a pretty cool city, I think. Churchill Downs is here. That’s where the Kentucky Derby is run every year. The Muhammad Ali Center is out on Museum Row, and Colonel Harlan Sanders, the guy who started KFC, is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery. For baseball fans like me, there’s the Louisville Slugger Museum. They have a huge bat outside. It’s 120 feet tall and 68,000 pounds. I’ve been there a few times.

  The next day after school, my mom drove me over to Norton Audubon Hospital. It’s just a few miles from our house, across the street from Clark Park. The lady at the front desk told us that Flip was in the ICU, which stands for Intensive Care Unit. It’s on the third floor.

  The Louisville Slugger Museum

  Hospitals are creepy. There were a lot of old people in the rooms we walked by, and some of them were lying on rolling beds in the hallways. Some of them were in bad shape. We had trouble finding Flip’s room, so we had to ask a nurse. She told us where to go and added, “You can’t miss it.”

  She was right. We couldn’t miss it. There were so many flowers and balloons, they were spilling out of the room and into the hallway.

  Flip acts like such a regular guy that sometimes I forget how famous he is. But as soon as Flip got hurt, the story hit the newspapers and the Internet, and get-well wishes must have poured in from people all over the country.

  When we opened the door, Flip was sleeping. His wife, Laverne, was sitting next to the bed looking out the window. She smiled and got up to greet us, giving me a big hug as she always does. Laverne knows that she and Flip never would have met if it hadn’t been for me taking him back to 1942.

  She brought us over to the far corner of the room so we could talk without waking up Flip.

  “How’s he doing?” my mom whispered.

  “It was a femoral neck fracture,” Laverne whispered back. “It’s bad, but the doctor told me the operation went well.”

  I figured that meant Flip broke his neck, but my mom is a nurse and she told me a femoral neck fracture is in the hip. As we get older, apparently, our bones get thinner and weaker. It’s much easier for a guy Flip’s age to break a hip. It’s also really serious with older people because a hip fracture can trigger other problems and dangerous complications after surgery, like blood clots, infection, and pneumonia. Mom and Laverne talked about a bunch of other medical stuff, but most of it went over my head.

  “Could Flip die?” I asked.

  “Possibly,” Laverne replied. “The doctor told me that mortality rates in the year following a hip fracture are very high for men of Flip’s age.”

  “That ain’t gonna happen,” said a rough voice from the other side of the room. “Fuhgetaboutit. I ain’t dead yet.”

  “Flip!” I said, rushing over to his bedside. I grabbed his hand. Flip’s voice was weak, but he had a smile on his face and a strong grip. “How are you feeling?”

  “I won’t be dancin’ anytime soon,” he replied. “That’ll teach me not to argue with umpires, huh, Stosh?”

  My mom came over, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and asked if there was anything she could do for him while he was laid up in the hospital.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Have your kid go back in time a couple of days and stop me from fallin’ on my butt.”

  “Language, dear!” Laverne scolded him. “There are children present.”

  “What, ya think Stosh never heard that word before?” Flip asked. “I’m an old fart and I could drop dead any minute. So I’m allowed to say what I want.”

  Flip was in good spirits. Laverne told us she was sure he would make a full recovery, but it might take a year for him to walk again. Flip joked that he didn’t mind, because Laverne would have to push him around in a wheelchair all the time.

  “Why don’t we leave these two boys alone for a while so they can talk boy talk?” Laverne said, escorting my mom into the hallway.

  I pulled a chair up close to Flip’s bed so I could hear him better.

  “Listen, Stosh,” he said hoarsely, “I need to talk to you about somethin’. I’m not gonna be able to coach the team next season. They’re gonna have to get somebody else.”

  “I know,” I assured him. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Another thing. Laverne and I decided that when I finally get out of this joint, I should retire for good. Close down the store, liquidate the inventory. You know, the whole nine yards.”

  “You’re going to turn all those baseball cards into a liquid?” I asked. “Why? How would you even do that?”

  “No, you dope!” Flip shouted, coughing. “Liquidate means to sell off all the stuff. I’m gonna get rid of it all. So if you want anything, you can have it before the vultures descend on the store and clean it out. I got a lot of good cards in there, you know, Stosh. You might want to use some of them to, uh . . . do that thing you do. The time travel thing.”

  Wow. That was some offer. Flip had thousands of baseball cards, from every decade. They could keep me busy for the rest of my life.

  “Thanks, Flip,” I told him, and then I lowered my voice. “You know, speaking of cards, I need to talk to you about something, too.”

  “Shoot, Stosh.”

  “Remember I told you about the night Honus Wagner showed up in my bedroom a few years ago?”

  “Yeah. That was when you first found out about your . . . power.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, I had another visitor last night.”

  “Was it Cobb?” Flip asked, his eyes wide.

  “No.”

  “Lou Gehrig? DiMaggio? Stan the Man Musial?” Flip guessed.

  “No,” I told him. “Ralph Branca.”

  “Ralphie?” Flip smiled as he struggled to sit up in the bed. “The guy who threw the pitch that Bobby Thomson hit over the wall to win the 1951 pennant for the Giants?”

  “That’s the guy,” I replied. “Did you know him?”

  “Sure I knew him,” Flip told me. “He was my teammate. We were on the Dodgers together. But tell me this—how did you know the guy in your room was Ralph Branca? He coulda been anybody.”

  “He looked like the pictures I’ve seen of Branca,” I said. “He was wearing a Dodger uniform and he knew stuff that only Ralph Branca would know. He was depressed because he had a good career going, but then he threw that one pitch to Thomson and it ruined his life.”

  “It made him famous, too,” Flip told me. “Did he mention that? Nobody ever would know Ralphie’s name today if he hadn’t served up that gopher ball to Thomson.”

  “He doesn’t see it that way,” I told Flip. “He doesn’t want to be famous for being a loser. He says he can’t walk down the street without people pointing at him and whispering. Everybody he meets asks him how he feels about losing the pennant. He wants his life back, and he thinks I can give it to him. He wants me to erase the mistake.”

  Flip sighed and shook his head.

  “We all wanna go back in time and erase the mistakes we made when we were young and stupid,” he said. “How did Branca know you can travel through time with baseball cards, anyway?”

  “Jackie Robinson told him.”

  “Of course,” Flip said, nodding.

  “So what do you think?” I asked. “Should I do it?”

  Flip leaned back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling for a while. I gave him the time to think things over.

  “Let me ask you this,” he finally
said. “How would you do it? What could you do to help him, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “There are a million things I could do to stop Thomson from hitting that homer. I could go back to 1951 and tell Branca to walk Thomson intentionally. That would make sense. First base was open. Or I could tell him to throw a different pitch. I could pull out an air horn and blast it at the moment Thomson is about to swing. I could poison Thomson’s food before the game. Hey, I could poison Branca’s food so he can’t pitch that day. Something. Anything. It wouldn’t take much.”

  Flip crossed his arms in front of him and closed his eyes. I thought that he might be taking a nap, but he was just thinking things over.

  “Life is life,” Flip finally said. “What happened, happened. Ninety-nine percent of the time I would say don’t do it. Don’t mess with history. You could make things worse. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “But I see both sides,” Flip continued. “Sometimes, breakin’ the rules can be the right thing to do.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Who am I to say you shouldn’t help Ralphie?” Flip told me. “If you hadn’t taken me back with you and changed my past, I never woulda had a career in baseball. People wouldn’ta sent me all these flowers and cards and stuff. And most important, I never woulda met Laverne.”

  “You might not be in this hospital bed either,” I pointed out.

  “Hey, if it weren’t for you, Stosh, I might not be in any bed,” Flip said. “I might be in a casket. If you ask me, I say give Branca another chance to live his life over again, just like you did for me.”

  Flip closed his eyes again. I could tell he was tired.

  At that point, I decided I would do it.

  THE NEXT STEP WOULD BE TO BREAK THE NEWS TO MY mother. Mom’s a bit, you could say, overprotective. So I had to be careful how I handled things. I waited until she was in a good mood. It was after dinner the next day. I washed the dishes while she dried. She told me a funny story about something that happened at work that day, but I wasn’t really paying attention.

  “Mom,” I said right out, “I want to go on another trip.”

  She stopped wiping the dish in her hands.

  “You mean . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That kind of trip.”

  I told her all about the Shot Heard Round the World and about my visit from Ralph Branca. I said the reason I wanted to go back to 1951 was to help him out.

  As expected, Mom wasn’t too crazy about the idea. She gave me all her usual objections: I might get lost in New York. I might get stuck in 1951. I might get hurt, and the medical care wasn’t as good in the old days. On and on like that. She softened a bit when I told her that Flip said helping Branca was the right thing to do. I promised not to go on a school night, and she made me promise to take some food, Band-Aids, and an umbrella with me.

  “Okay, okay,” she finally agreed. “You can go. But be careful.”

  Well, that was a relief. I really wasn’t sure she was going to give me her blessing, because every time I’ve gone on a trip so far, something has gone wrong. I’ve landed in the wrong place, or the wrong time. I’ve found myself in the middle of a war zone, with bullets flying around my head. I’ve been chased down the street by a maniac with a baseball bat. I’ve been kidnapped by gamblers, locked in a closet, and stuck inside a fighter plane that crash-landed.

  Of course, I didn’t tell my mother about all the bad stuff that has happened to me while traveling through time. If she knew, she would never let me go anywhere.

  But this time, I decided, nothing was going to go wrong. This time, I was going to be ready for anything. Because I was going to do my research.

  After school the next day, I rode my bike over to the Louisville Free Public Library on York Street. It’s easy to look stuff up online, I know, and I do that a lot. But I also like to go into the stacks in the library and get lost in the books.

  First, I wanted to find out what October 1951 would be like. The reference librarian showed me a book that listed important events that happened throughout history. The Korean War had started the year before, and it was raging. In July 1951, it was announced that the transistor had been invented, and it revolutionized electronics. You could go to a gas station and buy a gallon for nineteen cents, believe it or not. It was a different world.

  The Catcher in the Rye came out that year. Patti Page was singing “Tennessee Waltz.” The King and I was a hit on Broadway. In the movies, people were watching A Streetcar Named Desire, The African Queen, An American in Paris, and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. Hardly anybody had a TV back then, but the people who did were watching I Love Lucy, The Jack Benny Show, What’s My Line, and Bozo the Clown.

  All that stuff was good to know, but more importantly, I needed to know exactly when, where, and how Bobby Thomson was going to hit that home run off Ralph Branca. It didn’t take long to find all the details. There are entire books written about that game.

  It took place on Wednesday, October 3, at the Polo Grounds in New York City. I had been there before. I met Jim Thorpe at the Polo Grounds in 1913 and Ray Chapman in 1920. I even remembered the cross streets—West 155th Street and Eighth Avenue. It was near a river, I recalled.

  As I read about the end of the game, I tried to picture it in my head so I would be ready when I got there. It was the bottom of the ninth inning. The Brooklyn Dodgers were leading the New York Giants 4–1, and the Giants were getting their “last licks.”

  Don Newcombe was pitching for the Dodgers. Alvin Dark singled to right field to start things off. Then Don Mueller hit another single, sending Dark to third. Runners on first and third. Monte Irvin fouled out to first. One out.

  The next batter, Whitey Lockman, hit a double to left, scoring Dark. The score was 4–2 now. When Mueller slid into third base safely, he twisted his ankle so badly that he had to be carried off-field. A pinch runner was brought in—Clint Hartung.

  There were runners on second and third, with the tying run at second and the winning run at the plate. That’s when Bobby Thomson came up. Willie Mays was on deck.

  At that point, Don Newcombe was taken out of the game and Ralph Branca came in to relieve him. This was the big moment. Branca threw his first pitch right over the plate and Thomson looked at it. Strike one.

  It was Branca’s second pitch that turned into the Shot Heard Round the World. All accounts said the pitch was high and inside. Thomson had no business swinging at it. But somehow, he managed to get around on the ball and tomahawk it down the left field line. It landed in the lower deck that hung slightly over the field, and that was it.

  One of the books in the library had a photograph that was taken the instant Thomson hit the ball. You could even see it in the air.

  The Shot Heard Round the World

  The Giants won the game 5–4, and the National League pennant, of course. New York went crazy. Two people at the Polo Grounds were so shocked that they suffered heart attacks.

  So that’s what I would be dealing with. That’s the situation I would have to undo. Hit the reset button. I would have to come up with some way to change history, for Ralph Branca’s sake.

  The next day, my mom surprised me by giving me an envelope with thirty dollars in it—in 1951 money. She said she knew a guy who collected old money, and she thought I might need some. Uncle Wilbur, who is just about my size, gave me an old pair of his pants, shoes, and a shirt so I would fit in with what guys wore back in 1951. If I showed up wearing Nikes and a T-shirt that said just about anything on it, people would be suspicious. I was going to be prepared this time.

  I decided to make my trip the following night, Friday. On Thursday, I sat up in bed reading Ralph Branca’s autobiography, A Moment in Time, which I had checked out of the library. It was interesting to read about the relationship between Ralph and Bobby. For years after the Shot Heard Round the World, the two men barely spoke. Then later, they got to know each other and reali
zed they could make money from the historic event they had shared. In fact, on the fiftieth anniversary of “the Shot,” they each earned $220,000 by autographing bats, balls, photos, and jerseys.

  Wow, that’s a lot of money for signing your name.

  I dozed off reading the book. I was as ready as I would ever be. Nothing could go wrong.

  Until something did.

  In the middle of the night, I heard a noise. Yes, again. Somebody was in my room. I figured it was Branca again. He was probably angry that I hadn’t changed history yet.

  “Ralph?” I whispered. “Mr. Branca?”

  “No,” said a man’s voice.

  I strained to see him. He wasn’t wearing a Dodgers uniform. He was wearing a Giants uniform.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “My name is Bobby Thomson.”

  “You gotta be kidding me!”

  I sat up in bed and flipped on the light at my bedside so I could see him better. He was a tall man with dark hair, and his eyes were wide apart.

  Bobby Thomson

  “Is your name Joe Stoshack?” Bobby finally asked. “The kid who can travel through time with baseball cards?”

  “How do you know who I am?” I said. “How did you find out about me?”

  “Word gets around, Joe,” Bobby said. “People talk.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I want to ask you a favor.”

  “What is it?”

  He pulled my desk chair up to the side of my bed.

  “I hit a home run back in 1951,” he whispered. “You might have heard about it. It was a pretty big one.”

  “I know all about it,” I replied. “They call it the Shot Heard Round the World.”

  “Yeah. I understand that Ralph Branca was here.”

  I nodded. I had a feeling about what he was going to say.

  “And Branca asked you to go back in time and do something—I don’t know what—to prevent me from hitting that homer.”