Zip It!

by Kurtis Scaletta

  IT’S A PERFECT GAME . . . SHHHH!

  Chad, the Pine City Porcupines’ batboy, has just broken an unofficial rule of baseball: Never talk to the pitcher when he’s pitching a perfect game. If no one on the opposing team has reached base, zip it! But now, because Chad opened his mouth, the entire Pines’ dugout is upset. Lance Pantaño, the pitcher, is nervous. The Pines may lose to the lastplace West Valley Varmints. Chad’s got to do something—and that means picking out the perfect baseball card from his collection to help save the day.

  For Byron,

  who’s been perfect so far

  —K.S.

  To Ethan and Abbie

  —E.W.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Scaletta, Kurtis.

  Zip it! / by Kurtis Scaletta ; illustrated by Eric Wight.

  p. cm. — (A Topps league story ; bk. 3)

  ISBN 978-1-4197-0436-9 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4197-0437-6 (pbk.)

  [1. Baseball—Fiction. 2. Superstition—Fiction.

  3. Bat boys—Fiction. 4. Baseball cards—Fiction.]

  I. Wight, Eric, 1974– ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.S27912Zi 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012008406

  Copyright © 2012 The Topps Company, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Topps and Topps League Story are

  trademarks of The Topps Company, Inc.

  Book design by Chad W. Beckerman

  Published in 2012 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialmarkets@abramsbooks.com or the address below.

  115 West 18th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  www.abramsbooks.com

  Contents

  Chpater 1

  Chpater 2

  Chpater 3

  Chpater 4

  Chpater 5

  Chpater 6

  Chpater 7

  Chpater 8

  Chpater 9

  Chpater 10

  Chpater 11

  Chpater 12

  About the Author

  About the Artist

  fter the game I found a giraffe in my locker. I wasn’t surprised. Yesterday there was a crocodile, and the day before that a monkey. All three animals were made out of balloons. The giraffe was the best one yet, with orange spots colored onto the yellow balloons with a felt-tip pen.

  I was a batboy for the Pine City Porcupines. Balloon Day was coming up at Pine City Park, so Spike, the Pines’ junior mascot, was learning how to make balloon animals. Not many people knew Spike’s secret identity, but I did. I knew that Abby, a girl from my class, was inside the porcupine suit. Abby told me she wanted to be able to make any balloon animal a kid asked for, even if it was something crazy like a possum or an armadillo.

  “What did you get?” I asked Dylan. He was the other batboy.

  “I don’t know.” He opened his locker and pulled out a tangled knot of balloons. “What do you think this is?”

  “A spider?” I took it from him and made it crawl up the locker. “I guess Spike remembers the time you saved that spider in the visitors’ dugout.”

  “Spider? No way,” said Teddy “the Bear” Larrabee, the first baseman. He took the crazy balloon thing from Dylan and said, “It’s a … it looks like, maybe a …” He turned it this way and that, trying to think of something.

  “A rabbit?” I suggested.

  “Yeah, that’s it—a rabbit. Spike knows you have a pet rabbit,” Teddy said to Dylan.

  “A mutant rabbit with about nine ears, maybe,” said Wayne Zane, the catcher.

  Teddy glared at him. “It’s a rabbit with a bunch of carrots in his mouth.”

  “Just sayin’,” said Wayne.

  Someone tapped my shoulder. I turned around and saw our boss, Wally. He was the Pines’ clubhouse manager. He tugged on his mustache. “Chad, I need to talk to you. It’s important.” He looked worried, and that made me worry.

  Wally didn’t have an office, but he had a desk in the corner of the equipment room. We went there now.

  “What’s that for?” Wally pointed at my balloon giraffe. I’d forgotten I was holding it.

  “Nothing,” I said. I set it down, and there was a POP! Wally practically jumped out of his chair.

  “Gabbagah!” he shouted.

  “Sorry,” I said. I had set one of the giraffe’s legs down on a thumbtack.

  “It just startled me,” said Wally, giving the giraffe the evil eye.

  The rest of the giraffe was slowly deflating. I grabbed some tape from the desk and made a bandage.

  “Here’s the thing,” said Wally. “I can’t be here next Saturday. I need you to take on some extra duties. I picked you over Dylan because you know more about baseball.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Lots of stuff. Get here early on Friday and I’ll walk you through it.”

  “OK. Sure.”

  “One thing you’ll have to do is make coffee,” Wally said. “Lance Pantaño is the starting pitcher.”

  “Right.” I knew that Lance drank several cups of coffee before every game, especially when he was pitching. I had never used the big metal coffeemaker in the locker room. It looked complicated. When coffee was brewing, the whole machine whistled and rattled like it might blow up. But I didn’t want Wally to know I was scared. “I can do that,” I said. “No problem.”

  • • •

  “Did you ever figure out what that thing is?” I asked Dylan, pointing at his balloon animal. We were crossing the parking lot after work. The Pines were headed out on the road, so we had to load up the bus after the game. It had been a long day.

  “Maybe it’s a mosquito,” Dylan said. He made the balloon thing fly, then landed it on his arm and made slurping sounds. “Spike knows I’m going camping this week at Otter Lake.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  Dylan liked animals. He probably loved camping out—all that nature.

  “It’s great during the day,” he said. “I get to go hiking and swim in the lake. I just don’t like it at night. It gets so dark.”

  “Don’t you have a lantern?”

  “They don’t make a lantern big enough for how dark it gets,” Dylan replied. “There might be bears out there.” He shuddered.

  We got to the end of the parking lot, where we usually split up and headed home.

  “Guess I’ll see you next week,” Dylan said.

  “Don’t get eaten by a bear,” I told him.

  “Don’t even joke about that!”

  • • •

  My giraffe was pretty much done for, even with my first aid. I kept it anyway, since it came from a friend. I set it next to the other balloon animals on my dresser. I didn’t know why Abby kept giving me jungle animals, but they did look good together, even if the giraffe was the shortest one up there.

  I thought about how Wally had reacted when the giraffe popped. He nearly jumped out of his chair, and the pop wasn’t even all that lou
d. Maybe he was scared of balloons. Maybe that was why he was taking Balloon Day off. It was funny to think of a grizzled old guy like Wally being afraid of balloons, but people are afraid of all kinds of things. I once saw a neighbor shriek and run inside after seeing a caterpillar, and he was a grown man! Even Dylan had just told me he was afraid of the dark.

  I was only scared of one thing, and it wasn’t silly at all—I was afraid of that coffeemaker.

  y dad had over a thousand books, about everything from bread mold to black holes. I figured he had to have one about making coffee.

  Dad saw me going through the shelves. “Looking for something to read?” He sounded hopeful.

  “I need a book about coffee. I need to know how to make it.”

  “Your mother already made some. Anyway, you’re too young to drink coffee.”

  “Drink it? Bleah!” Coffee was just a mud puddle in a cup. For some reason, adults hadn’t figured that out. “I need to make coffee next week at work.”

  “Oh. Well, watch me make it tomorrow morning.”

  “We have the wrong kind of machine.” Ours didn’t shimmy or shake or make whistling noises. It just gurgled a bit and dripped glop into a glass pot.

  “OK. Then read the instructions that came with the coffeemaker.”

  “I don’t know if we still have them.” The Pines’ machine was so old, the original instructions probably came carved in stone.

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine.” Dad left the room whistling. He probably didn’t mean to sound like the coffee machine at work, but he did.

  I looked at his books for a while. Dad is interested in everything. He has books about history, science, cooking, business, and entertainment. I saw a book about balloons and took it off the shelf. If he had a book about making balloon animals, I could have taught Abby a thing or two. But it wasn’t about that kind of balloon. It was about the kind of balloon you ride in. That book was kind of interesting. It made me want to ride in a hot-air balloon.

  • • •

  I was bored all week. I didn’t have school, and I didn’t have a job. I called some of my friends, but it seemed like everybody was either at camp or on vacation with their family.

  I wasn’t just bored. I missed the Porcupines. They’d gone on road trips before, but this one felt longer. It was because they were playing so well and were almost in first place. It made every game more important. I wished like anything I could be there. I missed listening to the guys crack jokes in the locker room. I missed shagging fly balls during batting practice. I missed high-fiving the players when they scored a run. I missed being part of the team.

  I missed baseball so much that I volunteered to be a batboy for a T-ball tournament at the park. But they wouldn’t take me. The woman in charge said I was too old to play and too young to volunteer.

  “But I’m a professional!” I showed her my Porcupines badge.

  “That’s nice,” she said. “But there are rules. Why don’t you stay and cheer for the players? They can always use some encouragement.”

  So I watched part of the tournament. It just made me miss the Porcupines even more.

  I also spent a lot of time playing with my baseball cards. I’m always trying to figure out the best way to sort them. Should I organize the binders by year or by team? And inside each binder, should I sort the players by card number, by name, by position, or by uniform number?

  The toughest decision was figuring out which cards should go into my red binder. The red binder is my baseball card hall of fame. The cards in there are not always the rarest cards or the most famous players. They’re simply my favorite cards.

  Some of the Porcupines think those cards are magic. Earlier in the season, a Rafael Furcal card helped Mike Stammer, the shortstop, turn an unassisted triple play. Later, a Bengie Molina card helped Sammy Solaris, the designated hitter, steal the first base of his career. I didn’t think those cards were magic, but I did think they helped remind players what they were capable of.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, the Porcupines won five out of six games that week, with one day off. When they came home, they were tied for first place with the Rosedale Rogues. Usually at this time of year, the Porcupines were just trying not to wind up in last place. This season, it seemed like anything was possible.

  got to work early on Friday, like Wally had asked. The coffee was already brewing in the kitchen area. The machine shivered and gasped a cloud of steam.

  “I wanted to see you make the coffee so I can do it tomorrow,” I told Wally.

  “Sorry. I didn’t think about that.”

  “Did the machine come with instructions?” I asked, remembering what Dad had suggested.

  “Oh, those are long gone,” Wally replied. “But don’t worry. I’ll write up what to do.” Wayne Zane overheard us.

  “You want to make coffee like Wally’s?” the Pines’ catcher asked me. “First, you need some old ground-up baseball mitts. Throw about six gloves into the pot, fill it with hot water, boil it for a few hours, and you’re done.”

  “Use twice as many mitts and be sure to throw in some pine tar,” added the pitcher, Lance Pantaño. “Wally’s coffee is too weak.”

  “If you guys don’t like my coffee, you don’t have to drink it,” Wally said as he filled his own mug with the steaming black brew.

  “Just sayin’,” said Wayne.

  “The coffee is fine,” said Myung Young, the center fielder. He filled his mug, poured in lots of creamer, and dumped in three or four packets of sugar.

  “That’s not coffee,” said Wayne. “That’s a milk shake.”

  “It’s too hot to be a milk shake,” said Myung.

  Lance filled his Porcupines mug. There was a piece of tape on the mug that said “Property of Lance.”

  Wayne was right behind him. I guessed Wally’s coffee couldn’t have been that bad.

  • • •

  I followed Wally around. He had a checklist with everything from “Put out fresh towels” to “Count shoelaces in the supply chest” on it.

  “Nothing you need to do is a big deal,” he told me. “It’s a million little deals.”

  “Got it.”

  Dylan came in, nodded hello, and started changing.

  “How was Otter Lake? Guess you weren’t eaten by a bear,” I said.

  “Nope,” Dylan answered. He scratched his arm. “I got eaten by one hundred thousand mosquitoes, though. Are you ready to be in charge tomorrow?”

  “I’m not in charge,” I said. “Just twice as busy.”

  Wally was still going through his checklist. I followed him to the Pines’ equipment room. He flipped the switch. The lightbulb flickered and went out.

  “Uh-oh,” Wally said. “We have to find the flashlight.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In here somewhere.” He groped around on a shelf—I could hear things getting tipped over and knocked around.

  “I can find it,” I told him.

  “Thanks. And good luck.” Wally propped the door open so I had some light from the hall. I searched the shadowy shelves until I found the flashlight. It was as long as my forearm. I turned it on. It shone like a spotlight.

  I found Dylan so I could show it to him.

  “This is what you need for your next camping trip. You could spot a bear a mile off with it.”

  “So I can blind him?” Dylan held up his hand to block the beam. I’d forgotten to turn off the flashlight.

  “So you won’t have to be afraid of the dark,” I explained.

  “Shh!” Dylan said. “I don’t need all these guys to hear. Besides, I’m not afraid of the dark. I’m afraid of being eaten by bears.”

  “Can I borrow that flashlight?” asked Sammy. He took the flashlight from me and pretended to shine the beam through his hand. “I tweaked my left hand, and I’ve been meaning to get it X-rayed.”

  Wayne peeked over his shoulder. “Looks like a misassociated linguini hypotenuse.” He put a hand on Sammy’s el
bow. “You’ll need surgery, Sammy.”

  “Will I be able to play the banjo after the operation?”

  “If things go well,” said Wayne in a somber voice.

  “Awesome,” said Sammy. “I’ve always wanted to play the banjo.”

  “Knock it off,” said Wally. He reached for the flashlight, but Sammy handed it off to Tommy Harris, the third baseman.

  Tommy backed up and held it in front of him like a lightsaber. He made zwip and zwoop sounds.

  “Use the force, Tommy!” Wayne said helpfully.

  “Might as well be teaching kindergarten,” Wally grumbled.

  Tommy handed the flashlight over to the manager. “You seem a little tense, Wally. What’s up?”

  “I got a lot on my mind.”

  “He doesn’t like balloons,” I explained. “Tomorrow’s Balloon Day, and Wally …” I saw Wally staring at me and stopped.

  “Is that true, Wally?” asked Tommy. “You have a problem with balloons?”

  Wally turned red. “Mind your own business,” he said. “I got to go change a lightbulb.” He stalked off with the flashlight.

  “You don’t even need that flashlight,” Wayne shouted after him. “Your face is glowing like a lantern.”

  Dylan nudged me. “Maybe you shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Oops.” I went after Wally.

  He was unfolding a stepladder so he could change that lightbulb in the equipment room.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to say anything.”

  “What’s done is done,” he said. “Here, hold the flashlight for me.”

  I pointed the flashlight while Wally clambered up the ladder. He reached up, unscrewed the knob, and took off the glass fixture.

  POP! A balloon burst behind us.

  Wally dropped the glass fixture, which bounced off the ladder and smashed against the floor.

  The equipment room door was still propped open. I saw Wayne Zane zipping back into the locker room. I think he was laughing.

  Wally muttered something under his breath. He changed the bulb while I swept up the broken glass. Then we went back to the locker room. Several of the players were snickering.