Babe & Me (10 page)

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.

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.

The game was still tied after six innings. Ordinarily, six innings is all we play in our league. But if the score is tied at the end of six, we're allowed to play an extra inning—as long as the seventh inning doesn't start more than two hours after the game began. Those are league rules.

The sun was starting to set. The umpire told both coaches he would have to call the game in fifteen minutes on account of darkness. They're always worried that some kid might not see the ball in the dark and get hurt.

Coach Zippel whispered to our pitcher, Casey Tyler, to throw the ball over the plate and try to make the Surgeons hit it. The faster we could get them out, the sooner we would get our turn at bat. We rushed out on the field, and I took my position at third base.

Fortunately, the first two Surgeons both swung
at Casey's first pitches. One of them hit a pop-up to me at third, and the other grounded out to second. Two outs. Their next batter struck out on four pitches.

We dashed to our bench. We had ten minutes, tops, to score a run and win the game. Otherwise, it would go in the books as a tie. I grabbed a batting helmet and my batting gloves. I would be up second.

“Go up there swinging, kids,” Coach Zippel instructed us. “We've got to score a run
now
.”

Kevin Dougrey led off for us. He swung at the first pitch, too, and hit a dinky grounder to third. It should have been an easy out, but the third baseman didn't get his glove down and the ball glanced off the webbing. Kevin was safe at first.

“Nice hit, Kev!” Kevin's mom shouted from the “mom” section of the bleachers. Mrs. Dougrey was clueless about baseball. She doesn't realize it's no great achievement to reach first base on an error.

But at least we had a base runner. I picked out my favorite bat and hustled up to the plate. I didn't want the ump to stop the game in the middle of my at bat.

“Whack it, Joey!”

I could tell from the sound of the voice that it was my mom. I scanned the leftfield foul line to check the “mom” section. She wasn't there. I spotted her sitting closer to home plate. That was odd. She gave me a little wave and gestured with her hand to her right.

I looked to the right of Mom. Sitting next to Mom was…

Dad!

Huh?

I stepped out of the batter's box and asked the umpire for time out. Dad had never come to one of my Little League games before. I shook my head to make sure I wasn't seeing things. It was Dad all right. He flashed me a thumbs-up.

“Let's go, Joe!” hollered Coach Zippel. “He's gonna stop the game any minute.”

“Are you okay, son?” the umpire asked.

“Yeah,” I said, getting back into the batter's box. Thoughts were flying through my mind. What was my dad doing here? Were Mom and Dad getting back together again? Or were they just sitting together to make me feel good? I tried to put it all out of my mind and focus on the pitcher.

“Smash it, Stoshack!” one of my teammates yelled from the bench.

“Five minutes, coaches!” yelled the umpire. “It's getting dark out here.”

“No batter, no batter,” one of the Orthopedic Surgeons hollered.

I looked over to Coach Zippel. He touched the brim of his cap with his left hand. That's our bunt sign.

Bunt?

That took me by surprise. The last time I bunted, the coach told me I'd made a big mistake. He told me what a good hitter I was and said I
should have swung away. Now he was telling me to lay down a
bunt?
It didn't make sense.

I looked over at Coach Zippel again just to make sure I had the sign right. He touched the brim of his cap with his left hand again. Yeah, he wanted me to bunt.

I thought about the situation. Kevin was on first base with nobody out. Casey Tyler would be coming to bat after me, and he was the best hitter on our team. If I laid down a quick bunt and advanced Kevin to second base, he would be able to score on a single by Casey. But if I got a single, Kevin wouldn't be able to score all the way from first. He would only make it to third, and the umpire could stop the game at any time.

I had to admit Coach Zippel's strategy made a certain amount of sense.

I set my feet in the batter's box. The pitcher looked in for his sign. As he went into his windup, I squared around to bunt.

The pitch came in. It was perfect, right down the heart of the plate. When you're swinging the bat well, the ball looks bigger and slower, for some reason. It looked like a big, fat melon floating up to me in slow motion. Or an ice cream sundae. With marshmallow sauce.

What a shame it would be to waste such a juicy pitch on a dinky little bunt.

Attack the ball!
That's what Coach Zippel always tells us when we have batting practice.
Pretend the ball is your worst enemy. The schoolyard
bully. That cousin you hate. This is your chance to teach them a lesson. Attack!

I couldn't resist. I attacked.

I brought my bat back far and whipped it through the strike zone as hard as I could. I swung so hard that I almost fell down.

Somehow, I made contact, and it felt
good
.

Sometimes when I hit the ball, the vibration from the bat stings my hands. There was no sting this time. I hit it right on the sweet spot. The ball took off toward rightfield.

At first I didn't think it had much distance. But then the ball got up into the wind and it carried. I took off for first.

Nobody has ever hit a ball out of Dunn Field. When I saw the rightfielder backpedaling, I knew I had a chance.

“Go!” my teammates were shouting. “Go!”

The rightfielder had his back against the fence. The ball was over his head. It made it over the Moyer Dry Cleaning sign. Over the Karjane Hardware sign. Over the Biros Used Cars sign at the top of the fence.

Then it sailed out of Dunn Field and everybody went nuts.

There was a bang in the parking lot behind the field. A bunch of little brothers and sisters went running off to retrieve the ball.

They can never say that nobody ever hit a ball out of Dunn Field again
, I thought,
because I just did
.

I slapped hands with the first-base coach. The kid playing shortstop for the other team didn't shake my hand or anything, but he did say “Nice smack!” when I jogged past. Then I high-fived our third-base coach. The Yellow Jackets mobbed me when I jumped on home plate with both feet.

“Okay, let's call it a game,” the umpire announced.

My heart was pumping so fast and I was on such a high that I couldn't think straight. Everybody was shouting and pounding me on the back and taking pictures of me. The little girl who'd retrieved the ball came over with a pen and actually asked me to sign it for her.

I saw Dad coming down from the bleachers to congratulate me, but Coach Zippel got to me first. He put his arm around my shoulder.

“Boy, you bunt
hard
,” he said.

“I'm sorry, Coach,” I replied. “The pitch was coming in like a big lollipop and I just couldn't resist taking a cut at it.”

“It's okay, Joe,” the coach said. “It worked out for the best. Who taught you to swing like that?”

I wasn't sure what to say. My dad was next to us now, and I was a little tongue-tied. I still couldn't get over the fact that he'd showed up for the game.

“Must've been Babe Ruth,” Dad said, squeezing my shoulder.

Everybody laughed, but Dad and I knew the truth.