Honus & Me Read online

  About forty feet away, standing slightly above us on the hill next to my house, was Amanda Young. I’d never seen the old lady set foot outside her house before, but there she was. In her hands was one of those old rifles I’d seen hanging on her wall, and she was pointing it at Birdie’s head.

  Birdie and I threw our hands over our heads. Birdie clung to the card in his right hand.

  “I…said…drop…it!” Miss Young’s voice sounded cracked, but firm.

  I knew what Birdie was thinking. The old lady didn’t exactly look like Annie Oakley. She could barely stand up by herself, much less aim a rifle. Who knew how old that gun was, or if it could still fire? Who even knew if she could load a gun?

  I could tell that Birdie was weighing the risk of making a run for it. For a half a million bucks, it might be worth it.

  “Young man,” Miss Young said sternly. “Would you like me to prove to you that this gun is loaded? I have nothing to lose. I’m a very old lady. They could throw me in jail for life and it wouldn’t matter. So whatever it is you’re holding in your hand, I’d advise you to drop it!”

  Birdie was still thinking it over.

  “I heard she murdered some kid once, Birdie,” I added, trying to be helpful.

  Birdie let out a sigh, then opened his fingers and let the card flutter to the dirt.

  “Joseph,” Miss Young commanded, “Pick that up and bring it to me. I want to see what silly nonsense you two are fighting over.”

  I picked up the card and ran over to Miss Young. She took it in her hand and squinted to look at it, all the while struggling to keep the gun pointed at Birdie.

  “Honus,” she said softly.

  Miss Young looked like she was lost in thought for a moment, but suddenly she snapped out of it and looked at the two of us.

  “You’re fighting over a stupid baseball card?!” she said. “Where did you get this?”

  “It was stolen from my store!” Birdie shouted.

  “It was not,” I said. “I found it in your attic when I was cleaning it out, Miss Young.”

  “I thought I told you to throw that stuff away.” Miss Young dropped the gun on the ground and took the card in both hands, pinching it between her thumbs and first fingers.

  “Wait!” Birdie and I yelled together.

  Miss Young ripped the card in two. Birdie dropped to his knees, as if he’d been shot. He let out a horrifying cry. Miss Young ripped the pieces again so the card was in four pieces.

  “Silly nonsense,” she said. “If I tell you to throw something in the trash, then throw it in the trash!”

  She handed me the four pieces of cardboard. Birdie was weeping like a baby whose bottle had been taken away.

  “What are you wailing about?” she asked. “I’m the one who loved him.”

  “A half a million bucks!” Birdie bawled. “You ripped up a half a million bucks! And I was so close to getting it back.”

  “It wasn’t your card, Birdie,” I said. “I did find it in her attic.”

  I wasn’t so devastated when Miss Young ripped the card. I had planned to give it back to her anyway. But poor Birdie, he looked like his dog had been run over by a truck or something. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  “Joseph, help me inside,” Miss Young said. “Nearly killed myself lugging this stupid gun out here.”

  Looking at it closely, it was obvious that Miss Young’s gun couldn’t fire a cork, much less a bullet.

  “And you,” she said, pointing at Birdie. “You should be ashamed of yourself, picking on a boy like that. Get out of here! And don’t let me catch you bothering Joseph again or I’ll call the cops on you.”

  Birdie slinked away, a beaten man. Miss Young put her wrinkled hand on my forearm to steady herself as we walked slowly to her house. I put the rifle back in the empty space over her fireplace.

  “Joseph,” she said gently, “what was all that about? Why are you hanging around with a man like that?”

  I explained how I stumbled across the card in her attic and why it was worth so much money. I told her that I first wanted to keep it and sell it, but that I’d decided to give it back to her.

  “Honus would have wanted you to have it,” I explained.

  “Joseph, how would you know what Honus would want?”

  “You’d never believe me if I told you.”

  “I’ve seen it all in the last century, young man. Go ahead.”

  I told her everything—the power I had to travel through time, Honus coming into my room in the middle of the night, how we went back in time to 1909 together. I told her about the ladies in the stands, about Ty Cobb, and how I got the hit that crushed the Tigers in the World Series.

  Miss Young whistled. “You spin quite a yarn for a young man, Joseph,” she said, shaking her head. “If I told anyone a story like that they’d say I’d finally lost my marbles. Probably lock me up.”

  “I swear it happened,” I said. “I can prove it to you.”

  I pulled off my backpack and unzipped it. I took out the ripped photo of the Louisville baseball player she had given me. Then I took out the other half of the photo, which I had removed from Honus’s locker.

  I handed the two halves of the photo to her. She looked puzzled at first. She took the pieces and held one in each hand. Then she brought them together. They fit like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The two hands that were reaching out toward the jagged edges met in the middle of the photo.

  Two young lovers in a garden. Honus and Amanda.

  “How did you get this?” she asked me, wide-eyed.

  “Honus gave it to me.”

  “But Honus has been dead for years.”

  “I told you. I went back in time. Back to when he was alive.”

  She looked at me with wonder in her eyes. I was her link to the past.

  Suddenly, I had a brainstorm. If I could use a baseball card to bring Honus to the future, maybe I could send Amanda back to the past.

  “Hold my hands,” I said excitedly.

  I took the four pieces of the Honus Wagner card and put them between our palms. I closed my eyes and wished she could go back to 1909.

  I felt that familiar tingling sensation running up and down my spine and opened my eyes to see if anything was happening.

  Slowly, Miss Young began to smile, an expression I had never seen on her face. It made her look years younger.

  She looked into my eyes, and I watched as the wrinkles on her face smoothed out. Her hair turned from gray to blonde. She grew a few inches, and the shape of her body became like an hourglass.

  She was turning into a young woman before my eyes. A beautiful young woman, the young woman in the photo.

  “Honus, I never stopped waiting,” she said. And that was all she said.

  She began to fade away, like a figure receding into fog. I reached out to her, but my hand went right through hers. Within a few seconds she had vanished completely. Going, going, gone, as they say in baseball.

  Poof. Nothing there. It was strangely quiet.

  ON MY OWN

  16

  “HEY DUMBO!” SOMEBODY ON THE PANTHERS YELLED AT me, “How about some peanuts?”

  I laughed.

  It was a week later, the last game of Little League season. I spit in the dirt next to the batter’s box. They were hollering some really rude remarks, but I felt completely calm as I settled in the batter’s box.

  The pitcher went into his windup, and I saw the ball right from the moment of release. It broke in over my power zone and I belted it, ripping it up the middle and almost taking the pitcher’s head off. I laughed and scooted to first.

  I’d seen this pitcher before and knew he had no pickoff move. He tried to keep me close, but a right-hander has to turn his head all the way around to look at first base. Most pitchers just can’t master it. I took off as soon as he kicked his leg up and slid into second without his even attempting a throw.

  The pitcher pretty much ignored me. Not many guys try to steal
third because the catcher has only a short throw to make, and the chance of stealing safely is small. I let a couple of pitches go by to give the pitcher the idea I wasn’t thinking of stealing, and then I took off.

  The catcher got off a throw, but it was a foot or two to the left of the bag. The third baseman had to reach over, catch the ball, and then bring his glove back to try and tag my foot. By the time he did that I was already slapping the dust off my pants.

  Now the pitcher was really steaming. He was slamming the ball into his glove and talking to himself. I thought about swiping home, but I didn’t want to humilate the guy or anything.

  It didn’t matter. He bounced the next pitch in front of the plate. The catcher tried his best to block it, but the ball skidded past his mitt and back to the backstop.

  I took off from third. The pitcher ran to cover home plate. The catcher snatched the ball on a slide and flung it to him. I barreled in and the poor pitcher didn’t have a chance. I did the best I could not to smash him up too badly. But we both tumbled in the dirt, the ball skipping down the third-base line.

  Too bad Honus can’t see me now, I thought, as the umpire threw his arms to his sides and hollered, “Saaaaaaafe!”

  HMMMM, I WONDER…

  17

  IT’S BEEN SIX MONTHS NOW, AND RUMORS ARE STILL FLYING around town about what happened to Amanda Young. Some people say she had a lot of money stashed away, and she was kidnapped by somebody who wanted it. Others claim she was a witch. There’s a lake nearby, and the police dragged it looking for her body.

  They never found anything, of course, and my lips are sealed. Amanda Young is long gone, and I don’t think she’s coming back.

  I felt bad that Miss Young ripped up the Honus Wagner card, and I stopped collecting cards for a few months. But I got over it. Soon I was haunting the baseball-card stores again.

  One day I was browsing in a place called Sport Card City, when I heard two men arguing.

  “He did!” one of them said.

  “He did not,” said the other, just as strongly. “If he did, they would have knocked him on his butt!”

  I went over to see what they were talking about. As it turned out, the discussion was about Babe Ruth and an incident that took place during the 1932 World Series. Some people say that Ruth pointed to center field and said he was going to slam the next pitch right there. Others say he never pointed. In any case, it’s a fact that Ruth walloped the pitch high over the center-field fence for a home run.

  The guy who owned Sport Card City joined the discussion. “Nobody will ever know for sure if Ruth called his shot,” he told them. “The people who were there that day are all dead now. It’s baseball’s biggest mystery.”

  Hmmm, I wondered.

  “You don’t happen to have a 1932 Babe Ruth card, do you?” I asked the owner.

  He looked around the display case for a minute or two, then pulled out a card and showed it to me.

  “Can I hold it?” I asked.

  He handed it to me, and suddenly I felt a powerful tingling sensation all over my body.

  TO THE READER

  THIS BOOK IS A COMBINATION OF FACT AND FANTASY, AND it’s only fair to tell you which is which. Honus Wagner was a real person of course, and many baseball historians rate him the greatest all-around player in history.

  “He was the best I ever saw,” umpire Bill Klem once said, “and I saw ’em all.” John McGraw said, “He was the nearest thing to a perfect player.” Even Ty Cobb said Honus was “the greatest ballplayer that ever lived.”

  Nearly all the information in this book is correct. The statistics, names, streets, years, and historical information are accurate, to the best of my knowledge. The Pontchartrain Hotel was not across the street from Bennett Park in Detroit as described. It was about sixteen blocks away.

  The stories Honus Wagner tells Stosh are stories he actually regaled rookies and sportswriters with when he was a coach for the Pirates. Honus’s manager, Fred Clarke, really did invent flip-up sunglasses. The story about Pete Browning and the first manufactured baseball bat in Louisville is true.

  Ty Cobb really did scream out, “Look out, Krauthead, I’m coming down on the next pitch!” At least according to baseball legend. And the Wagner 1909 baseball card was sold to Wayne Gretzky for $451,000 in 1991. So if you find a Wagner T-206 card, you’re rich.

  Amanda Young did not exist in real life. Honus Wagner was shy with women and didn’t marry until he was 42, to a 27-year-old Pittsburgh woman named Bessie Baine Smith. Honus and Bessie dated for eight years and finally married on December 30, 1916. Eight months later Honus played his last big-league game. Honus and Bessie had two daughters, Betty and Virginia, both of whom are now deceased.

  As far as I know, none of the characters in this book traveled through time. That part, I admit, was fabrication.

  After 1909, Honus Wagner played eight more years in the majors, but he never reached the World Series again. Neither did Ty Cobb. Wagner was inducted into the first “graduating class” of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936 along with Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Babe Ruth.

  Honus’s brother, Albert “Butts” Wagner, died suddenly in 1928 from apoplexy, which is a rupture or obstruction of an artery to the brain. He was 58. Bessie Wagner passed away in 1971.

  Honus Wagner died on Tuesday, December 6, 1955 at his home in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, the same town in which he was born. He lived his entire life within walking distance of the ballpark in Pittsburgh.

  Wagner was remembered as a modest, kind, and funny man who cared little for money and a lot for the game of baseball. It was not unusual to find him out on the sandlots of Pittsburgh after games, playing ball with a bunch of kids.

  His obituary in The New York Times read, “Honus was such a delightful storyteller that it generally was difficult to determine where fact and fiction parted company.”

  HONUS WAGNER’S BASEBALL TIPS FOR KIDS

  from Sporting News, December 6, 1950

  START PLAYING BASEBALL AS EARLY AS YOU CAN. THE MORE experience you receive, the better it will be when you’re fully developed physically. The position you play doesn’t matter. Just practice all of them.

  I say practice all positions because a boy doesn’t know where he can best fit in. Simply because you admire a certain pitcher or outfielder or infielder is no reason why you should try to play that particular position.

  When you reach 18, you should begin concentrating on one position. But be sure you like it best and play it better than the others. Always seek the advice of older players and the manager and coaches. Above all, don’t be discouraged at their criticisms. Keep trying. Don’t be afraid to make an error. Go after every ball within reach. Soon you’ll be making plays you once thought impossible.

  Always keep your eye on the ball, whether you’re at bat or in the field. Never lose it. Most young men have little success with curveball pitching because they fail to keep their eyes on the ball.

  Keep posted on the number of outs, the score, how many men are on base and what bases are occupied. Often a player throws to the wrong base or fails to realize how many men are out. If you concentrate on the game, bonehead plays should never occur.

  Study the speed of each batter and this will help you play him properly. Remember to what field a batter usually hits and play him accordingly. The percentage is in your favor. Practice sliding as much as possible. And don’t forget to relax when you hit the dirt.

  Team play is a great asset in baseball. Always remember you’re only one-ninth of the team. A hustling bunch of youngsters with teamwork can beat a group of stars without teamwork.

  THE MOST VALUABLE BASEBALL CARD IN THE WORLD

  THIS IS A LIFE-SIZE REPRODUCTION OF THE T-206 HONUS Wagner card. It was one of 522 cards in a set produced by American Tobacco Company in 1909–10. The cards in this set are sometimes referred to as “white borders.”

  This card is so valuable—legend has it—because Wagner was opposed to cigar
ette smoking and insisted the card be discontinued shortly after presses had begun to run. In 1996, a card just like this one sold for over a half a million dollars.

  PERMISSIONS

  The author would like to acknowledge the following for use of photographs and artwork:

  Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh: 79, 91; Library of Congress: 35 (LCUS262-28926); National Baseball Library & Archive, Cooperstown, N.Y.: 49, 55, 57, 70, 74, 87; “Honus Wagner Baseball Card Goes to Gretsky,” by Rita Reif, 3/23/91, copyright © 1991 by the New York Times Co., reprinted by permission: 30; courtesy Pittsburgh Pirates Baseball Club: 97.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The following people were kind enough to help with this book: Dennis and Jeanne DeValeria, Bill Deane, Pat Kelly, Bill Burdick, and Milo Stewart of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, David Pietrusza and Bob Bluthardt of the Society of American Baseball Research, David Kelly of the Library of Congress, Gill Pietrzak of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Sally O’Leary of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Tom Mortenson of the Sporting News, Ted Taylor of Fleer Corp., Nina Wallace, Stephanie Siegel, the Haddonfield Public Library, Jeff Samoray, Jerry Cosover, Jack Kavanagh, Allen Barra, Liza Voges, Julie Alperen, Art Hittner, Philip Von Borries, Harold Berlin, Jon Kwartler, and David Plaut.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAN GUTMAN is the author of many books for young readers, including four other Baseball Card Adventures: JACKIE & ME, BABE & ME, SHOELESS JOE & ME, and MICKEY & ME. When he is not writing books, Dan is very often visiting a school. He lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey, with his wife, Nina and their children, Sam and Emma.

  You can visit him at his website www.dangutman.com

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