Babe & Me Page 9

  “He pointed!” I said to Lazzeri. “Did you see him point?”

  “Sit down, kid. You’re lucky we let you stay here.”

  I don’t think Root noticed that Babe pointed. He was looking in his glove as he was gripping the ball. Then he looked in for the sign and went into his windup.

  Babe didn’t choke up on the bat, the way my Little League coaches always told me to when there were two strikes. He held the bat right down at the end as usual.

  It was a curve, low and away. Babe lifted his right leg and took such a big swing that he almost fell down. The crack of the bat could be heard throughout Wrigley Field.

  This time, it was a line drive. Babe hit it so low that for an instant I thought the second baseman had a chance to catch it. Then the ball took off, like a golf ball. It started sailing. On the Yankee bench, we all stood up to follow the flight of the ball.

  The centerfielder raced back a few steps, but he could tell right away he had no chance. He just stood there watching as the ball sailed far over his head. It disappeared deep into the bleachers, near the flagpole and just below the scoreboard.

  The Yankees were screaming with joy. Tony Lazzeri looked at me suspiciously.

  Boooooo! screamed the fans.

  Almost instantly, stuff started to fly out of the stands and onto the field. Lemons. Tomatoes. Apples. Bananas. People were flinging eggs and cabbages. Somebody tossed an umbrella.

  I turned to look at Babe, and he was laughing all the way to first base. He made a remark to the first baseman as he rounded the bag, and he said something to the second baseman, too.

  Babe pumped his fist with delight. He pointed to the Cub dugout and thumbed his nose. He was still laughing as he rounded third, laughing so hard he slapped his knee. He held up four fingers and waved them at the Cubs, for four bases, I suppose.

  The Chicago dugout looked like a tomb. All the guys who had been having so much fun heckling Babe sat back on the bench like they had been shot.

  I looked over at Franklin Roosevelt’s box to see his reaction, but Roosevelt was already gone. He must have caught the first couple of innings and left.

  “Did you see that?” I said to the guys on the Yankee bench. “He called his shot! He pointed to centerfield, and then he hit the ball right there!”

  “I seen it,” Joe Sewell said.

  “He did not,” insisted Bill Dickey, the Yankee catcher. “He was pointing at Root.”

  After circling the bases, Babe stepped on home plate ceremoniously and shook hands with Lou Gehrig. Then he bowed to the left, and again to the right. Before he could get into the dugout, the Yankees came out and mauled him.

  “You do the same thing,” I heard him say to Lou Gehrig.

  The umpire had to stop the game for a few minutes so the groundskeepers could pick up all the junk people had thrown onto the field.

  People were still buzzing about Babe’s homer when Lou Gehrig finally stepped up to the plate. Some of them didn’t even notice that Gehrig swung at Charlie Root’s first pitch and drove it over the rightfield wall. The back-to-back Yankee homers made the score 6–4.

  The Cubs were beaten. You could see it in their eyes. They didn’t have anything else to say. Ruth and Gehrig had each slammed two home runs, and Chicago simply couldn’t match that kind of firepower. The game might as well have been over.

  Babe shook hands with Lou Gehrig after crossing the plate and told him, “You do the same thing.”

  So I had seen it. To my eyes, at least, Babe had called his shot. I had accomplished what I’d set out to do. But now I had to do something else—find my dad.

  17

  Something Better

  I DIDN’T STICK AROUND TO SEE THE END OF THE GAME. After the sixth inning, I left the Yankee dugout and hopped over the wall into the stands. The Cub fans were sitting there in their seats stunned, like a boxer who had just been pummeled.

  I asked myself this question—How am I going to find my father in a crowd of fifty thousand people…and a city of millions?

  I had to do some serious thinking. The last time I saw Dad, the game was about to begin and some guys were dragging him away because they thought he was threatening the life of Franklin Roosevelt. He could be anywhere.

  Maybe he was in jail. Maybe they were questioning him as if he was John Wilkes Booth or something. Maybe he had escaped on the way to jail. Maybe there was a manhunt. Maybe they shot him. Maybe—

  I was being ridiculous.

  There was no point in trying to find Dad in the stands. If he was in Wrigley Field, I reasoned, he would simply go to our seats and find me. Our seats were empty, so Dad had to be outside the ballpark.

  I could go to one of the Yankee officials and see if someone could help track Dad down, I thought as I made my way toward the exit. Maybe they could make an announcement over the public-address system—“We have a lost child in section fifty-four.”

  Nah. When I reached Addison Street in front of Wrigley Field, the thought crossed my mind that maybe I should do nothing. I mean, until a few days ago, what had my dad ever done for me? Not much. I could just go find a quiet grassy spot by myself and use my new baseball cards to take me back home. I could just leave Dad in 1932 and let him fend for himself.

  But that would be wrong, I decided. And besides, being together for the last couple of days had brought us closer together. I wanted him to be part of my life when I got back home.

  If I was my dad, where would I be? I wondered.

  At that moment, everything went black. Somebody had slapped two big hands over my eyes from behind and gripped my head tight. I struggled to turn my head around but the hands held me firm.

  “Guess who?” the voice asked.

  “Dad!”

  I whirled around, and we grabbed each other in a big bear hug.

  “So,” Dad said. “Did he point? Did Babe call his shot or not?”

  “I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, it looked to me like he called his shot,” I explained, “but some of the guys on the bench said he was just pointing and yelling at the pitcher.”

  “The guys on the bench?” Dad asked, amused.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I was watching from the Yankee dugout.”

  Dad shook his head and laughed. “I think our luck is changing, Butch,” he said.

  I noticed he had a slightly blackened eye and his jacket was torn.

  “Are you okay, Dad?”

  “They roughed me up a little dragging me out of the ballpark,” he replied, “but I’ll be all right.”

  “So you never delivered the message to Roosevelt?”

  “No,” Dad said. “But I tried. At least I made the effort. And somehow, I feel good about that.”

  “Did they put you in jail or anything?”

  “Nah. They took me to a police station and questioned me for a few minutes. When they saw that I wasn’t nuts and that all I had in the sack was a bunch of baseballs, they let me go.”

  The sack! I had forgotten about it! Dad wasn’t holding the sack filled with baseballs autographed by Babe Ruth!

  “Where is it?” I asked, concerned.

  “They confiscated it,” Dad said simply. He had a little smile on his face, like he had a secret to share with me.

  “You don’t look very upset,” I pointed out.

  “I’m not,” Dad said, as he reached into his jacket pocket. “I’ve got something better.”

  He gently pulled out a baseball with two fingers and held it up for me to see, like he was holding a rare coin. The ball was clean and white, with one smudge mark on it. It wasn’t autographed or anything.

  “A baseball?” I asked, puzzled. “I don’t get it.”

  “Not just any baseball,” Dad teased, continuing to smile slyly at me.

  Slowly, gradually, I came to appreciate the significance of what Dad was holding before my eyes.

  “You caught it?” I shouted, my mouth and eyes open as wide as they could possibly
be. “You caught Babe Ruth’s called shot?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Dad said modestly. “You see, after the cops let me go, I went back to the ballpark. Roosevelt was gone, so I went to the centerfield stands, where I knew the ball was going to land. I was a couple of rows away when it came down. It bounced off some lady’s head and rolled under some seats. Me and a few other guys dove for it, but I got there first. They tried to beat it out of me. That’s how I got the black eye, actually. But I wouldn’t let ’em have the ball.”

  I took the ball in my hand and examined it. It looked like any other baseball I’d seen, but holding this one made me tremble. Not only had I seen Babe Ruth hit the most famous home run in baseball history, but now the ball he hit was in my hand.

  It doesn’t get much better than this, I thought to myself.

  “I want you to have it,” Dad said, smiling at me.

  “To keep?” I asked, astonished.

  “To keep,” he said. “Being with you these last few days was good enough for me. Just having the chance to do something about the Holocaust gives me a peace of mind I’ve never felt. This is my present to you.”

  He took the ball in his hand again and looked at it for a moment. Then he nodded his head and gave it to me.

  “What about the money?” I asked. “It could be worth three million bucks.”

  “What am I gonna do with three million bucks?” Dad asked. “I’d just give it to you as an inheritance someday anyway.”

  Dad and I hugged each other again.

  After we finished pretending that neither one of us was crying, we both realized something—the called shot ball wasn’t worth a dime unless we had Babe Ruth sign it, date it, and write on it exactly what inning he hit it.

  We had promised Babe that we wouldn’t ask him to sign anything else, but I figured he wouldn’t mind writing his name on just one more baseball. Especially a baseball that he’d hit for a game-winning home run in the World Series.

  Dad and I rushed back inside Wrigley Field. The stands were mostly empty now, except for a few depressed Cub fans still sitting there like they were at a funeral. We hopped over the rail and into the Yankee dugout. The door in the back of the dugout led to the locker room.

  Most of the players were still there, changing into their street clothes and happily discussing the game. I didn’t see Babe anywhere.

  An equipment manager was shoving bats and gloves and catcher’s gear into a big canvas bag.

  “Where’s Ruth?” Dad asked him. “My son wants him to sign a ball.”

  “The big ape already left.” The equipment manager laughed. “Off to some party at Al Capone’s house, I heard.”

  “But we’ve got the home-run ball!” Dad said urgently. “I caught the ball that Babe hit in the fifth inning.”

  “You and everybody else.” The equipment manager chuckled. “Just throw it in that bucket with the others.”

  In front of Babe’s locker was a metal bucket filled to the brim with baseballs.

  “But our ball is the real one!” I protested.

  “Sure, sonny,” the guy said. “Just toss it in the bucket and come back tomorrow around dinner time. I’ll ask Babe if he’ll sign ’em all.”

  “We can’t come back tomorrow!”

  The guy shrugged. Dad put his arm around my shoulder.

  “Let’s go home now, Butch.”

  18

  Slipping Away

  DAD AND I WALKED OUT OF WRIGLEY FIELD ALMOST IN A daze. I flipped the baseball Dad had given me up in the air and caught it. There would be no way to prove it was the ball Babe hit for his famous called-shot home run. When I got back home, it would just be an ordinary baseball. I wouldn’t be able to sell it for ten dollars, much less three million.

  But I wasn’t too depressed. Seeing Babe Ruth hit the homer had been all I’d wanted in the first place. And, as a bonus, Dad and I had gotten to know Babe—and each other.

  “How do we do it, Butch?” Dad asked as we crossed Waveland Avenue outside the ballpark. “How do we get back home?”

  “Are you sure you want to go back?” I asked him. “Movies are only fifty cents here, y’know. Breakfast is a quarter. You can live pretty well in 1932.”

  “I’m sure,” Dad said, throwing an arm over my shoulder.

  “We’ve got to find a nice, quiet place.”

  Down the street was a big vacant lot. Dad and I headed for it. There was no grass on the ground. Just dirt, with weeds popping up through the cracks here and there. There was some garbage strewn about. Dad and I sat down against the wall of the building at the edge of the lot, being careful not to sit on any broken glass or sharp objects. A group of boys was playing ball at the other end of the lot, but they were too far away to bother us.

  I took my pack of new baseball cards out of my pocket. They would be our airline tickets home. I handed the pack to Dad to open. I flipped the Ruth baseball in the air.

  “I thought you told me you couldn’t travel through time with recent cards,” Dad said.

  “I can’t,” I explained. “But in 1932, these aren’t recent cards. They’re cards from seventy years into the future. They should be very powerful.”

  Dad tore off the plastic wrapper and fingered the cards.

  “Last chance to change your mind, Dad.”

  “No,” he said. “I want to go with you.”

  “What are you going to do when we get home?” I asked.

  “Get a job,” Dad said right away. “It should be a lot easier than it is here.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t make a lot of money here.”

  “That’s okay,” he replied. “I got something better.”

  I took his hand, the same way I did back on the living room couch a few days earlier. Before closing our eyes, we looked around to take one last glimpse at 1932.

  The boys at the other end of the lot were in the middle of a pickup game. I could see there were runners on second and third base, which were simply pieces of old roof shingle. The bat they were using looked like the handle of a broken axe. None of them had a baseball glove or any protective gear. The catcher was using an old pillow to cushion his hand. These were poor kids, Depression kids.

  The pitcher went into his windup and whipped a pitch over the plate. The batter swung the big axe handle and connected. It was a long drive, over the head of the rightfielder, toward where Dad and I were sitting. The rightfielder started chasing it, but the ball took a big hop off the hard dirt and barely slowed down at all. The runners scored easily, and the kid who hit the ball tore around the bases for an inside-the-park home run.

  The ball kept rolling, until it stopped about fifteen feet in front of us.

  “Hey kid!” the rightfielder shouted to me, panting for breath. “How about a little help?”

  I stood up and picked up the ball. It was a ratty old thing, torn, lumpy, and discolored. It looked like it had been made from an old sock with a rock inside, probably wrapped with tape or yarn.

  I held the lumpy ball in my left hand and the called-shot ball in my right hand. I was about to throw back the kid’s ball, but I stopped.

  I looked over at Dad. He nodded his head slightly, a small smile on his face. He was thinking the same thing I was thinking.

  I stuck the ratty old ball in my pocket and threw the kid the Ruth ball.

  The kid caught my throw on one hop. He was about to whirl around and wing the ball back to his friends, but he stopped and looked at what he had in his hand. I saw him flinch. Then he looked at the ball carefully, gripping it different ways. A big smile spread across his face. He’d probably never held a real baseball in his hands, it occurred to me.

  “Whaddaya waitin’ for, ya dope?” one of the others shouted. “Throw it in!”

  The kid looked at me and waved, then dashed toward the infield to show the ball to his friends. They huddled around him and looked at it like he had discovered buried treasure.

  “Ready, Dad?”

  “Ready.”

>   He handed me a card from the pack. I didn’t even notice what player was on it. It didn’t matter. I closed my eyes and held Dad’s hand with one hand and the baseball card with the other. I thought about what it would be like to be home. To be back in my own time. My own house. With my own stuff.

  The tingling sensation began almost immediately. That buzzy feeling moved up my fingertips, through my arms, and across my body.

  I began to feel myself slipping away.

  19

  Attack!

  A WEEK LATER…COACH ZIPPEL BENT DOWN AND PLUCKED a few blades of grass from the area behind the Yellow Jackets bench at Dunn Field. He tossed them in the air and watched them blow away.

  “The wind’s blowing out, everybody,” he informed us.

  Our game was about to begin. The parents on the sidelines were pulling out toys and snacks to keep their babies and toddlers occupied while we played.

  I stole a peek at the batting order on the clipboard Coach Zippel was holding. He had moved me up to second in the lineup, which made me feel good. The number two batter is supposed to be a kid who can consistently get the bat on the ball and advance the runner. I had been swinging the bat really good—I mean well. I was feeling kind of, oh…hitterish.

  We were playing the University Orthopedic Surgeons, who had beaten us earlier in the season. They jumped out to a quick 2–0 lead in the first inning, but we tied it in the second. We scored two more runs in the fourth inning, but they came back with two in the fifth. The score was tied at 4–4.

  I hit the ball pretty hard my first three times up, but each time I hit it right at somebody. The third one was a bullet that would have hit the first baseman in her face if she hadn’t stuck up her hand in self-defense. When she looked in her glove, she was astonished to find the ball there. I was robbed of a sure double.