by Mo'ne Davis
When we got to Pittsburgh, we went to the Josh Gibson Foundation. Josh Gibson was one of the greatest home-run hitters of all time. Many people used to call him the black Babe Ruth. After he died, his family started an organization to help children in Pittsburgh reach their potential. The next day we played a game against a team that Josh Gibson’s great-grandson coached.
We also walked over the Allegheny River on the Roberto Clemente Bridge. Roberto Clemente was a Puerto Rican baseball player who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was the National League MVP once, made the National League All-Star team twelve times, was the National League batting champion four times, and won the Gold Glove award for being the best fielder twelve times. Roberto Clemente was killed in an airplane crash trying to help people in Nicaragua after an earthquake. After he died, he became the first Latino player to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
When we were standing on the bridge, we could see downtown Pittsburgh on one side and PNC Park, where the Pirates play, on the other. Then we went to a Pittsburgh Pirates game with some of the kids from the Josh Gibson team. The Pirates’ stadium was probably one of the best stadiums we went to. One of the cool things about it is that they had these bushes in the back with the word Pirates spelled out on them. Also, we got to meet Josh Harrison, who plays third base for the Pirates.
From Pittsburgh, we went to Cleveland. In Cleveland, we were supposed to meet the Los Angeles Angels. But it was raining, so the Angels’ batting practice was canceled. But some of the pitchers for the Cleveland Indians—Tony Sipp, Justin Masterson, and Joe Smith—came out on the field with the catcher, Carlos Santana. They met us and said, “Let’s do some stretching,” so we ran out to center field and did some stationary stretches with them. Some of the players invited us to play catch. Then one of the pitchers wanted to see us run around the bases, then point to where we were going to hit a home run and try to hit it there. Then we went into the dugout with them.
From Cleveland, we went to Detroit. I remember that Detroit was super, super hot, and we were stuck in traffic on a bus with no air-conditioning. The bus driver gave us trivia questions.
After we played in Detroit, we went to Chicago.
In Chicago we went to this big pizza restaurant, which I remember because pizza is my favorite food.
After Chicago, we traveled to Dyersville, Iowa, to have batting practice on the “field of dreams” from the movie. It was an open field, so there were a lot of people fulfilling their dream of playing there. Two little boys were taking batting practice. So we threw the ball around and took a picture with them.
From there, we went to Cedar Rapids. It was raining when we got there. The team we were going to play, the Reds, greeted us when we got off the bus. We took pictures together, had a ceremony, and ate hot dogs and hamburgers with each other, then sat in the bleachers and talked. Then they got on the bus and rode with us to a minor league game. When we got there, the announcer introduced us on the field. Then both teams hung out together, talking to each other on this big patch of grass.
When the game was over, the kids got back on the bus with us. Then we gave each other gift bags. They gave us a hat and a cup holder.
The next day the Reds handed us our first loss on our trip. The kids on their team were thirteen and fourteen years old, so they were about two years older than us—but we only lost by one run. That was a nice game.
We made our way to Kansas City next, which was a lot of fun. Along the way, all of us had been buying baseball cards, and we pretended that we managed teams and made our own lineups.
When we got to Kansas City, we went to the Royals’ FanFest and the All-Star Legends and Celebrity Softball Game. At FanFest, fans could try out baseball equipment, play baseball video games, get a baseball card with their picture on it, sit in a dugout, and do a whole lot of other fun stuff. At the Celebrity Softball Game, a lot of stars played softball. That year, some stars from the TV shows Mad Men, Glee, and Desperate Housewives played, along with a bunch of reality show stars. USA Softball’s Olympic Gold Medalist hurler Jennie Finch was one of the pitchers.
We watched the Home Run Derby. Matt Kemp did pretty well that year, but Prince Fielder won.
We also went to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. At the Negro Leagues Museum you can find out anything you want to know about the Negro League players. They have old uniforms, players’ bats and baseballs and other memorabilia, and lectures and educational programs. You see things like old chairs marked Colored because during segregation in parts of this country, white people didn’t let African American players sit in the same chairs as they did.
While we were there, we talked to a man who actually knew Jackie Robinson and wrote him a lot of letters. He even read one of his letters to us.
Then we ran into Matt Kemp again. He was at the museum to accept an award.
From Kansas City we went to Columbia, and then St. Louis. Then on to Louisville, Kentucky, where we visited the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, where they make the famous Louisville Slugger bat.
From there we went to Indianapolis, Indiana; and then Cincinnati and South Point, Ohio.
One thing about the barnstorming tour was that we were only allowed to call home once a week. Squirt says that I didn’t call until the fifteenth day and I only called because I needed more money.
“Mo’ne’s very independent,” my mom says. “I guess she gets that from me.”
From South Point, we drove on to Washington, DC.
When we were in Washington, I met Miss Mamie “Peanut” Johnson in person. Meeting Miss Mamie Johnson was really cool. Coach had made me read a book about her before I met her. I found out that she even played with Hammerin’ Hank Aaron on the same Negro League team, the Indianapolis Clowns. Hank Aaron is an African American outfielder, who went on to play in the MLB for the Milwaukee Braves, a team that later moved to Atlanta. In 1973 he became the first player to beat Babe Ruth’s home run record.
Miss Mamie was really energized to meet me, and gave me good advice.
“Don’t ever throw the ball down the heart of the plate,” she told me. “Always put it to the inside or the outside. And if you put it close to the player, put it right underneath his armpits.”
She told me that she started playing baseball when she was my age, and that she had a lot of fun striking out the guys.
“All you’ve got to do is strike them all out,” she told me. Then she told a photographer something I’d never thought of before: “I predict she’s gonna be the first lady in the major leagues.”
Miss Mamie even came to our game—I was pitching that day! And she likes to yell. I could hear her while I was pitching, saying, “Follow through, Mo!” and “Take your time, baby!” I felt really inspired. I think I pitched five and two-thirds innings that game, and the Monarchs won 6–0.
So the rest of the time during the tour, my teammates and some of our fans started telling me to “Take your time, baby!”
Later that year, when I went back to school, I made this sculpture in art class that I called Peanut and Me. It has two white circles of clay, like baseballs, with a big one on the bottom and a little one on top. She was the big circle, and the little one standing on her shoulders was me.
After the game, we went to the Lincoln Memorial, a huge white building with all these columns around it, like a Greek temple, built to honor Abraham Lincoln, the president who ended slavery. The weather was super hot and we had to walk up a lot of steps to get to the top. But when you reach it, you see a big statue of President Lincoln, and you can look down across to the Washington Monument. I remembered that this was the place where Marian Anderson sang in front of all those people. I imagined that it must have been really nerve-racking. A photographer took pictures of us while we were there. A couple of the kids took a walk around the monument, but there were so many people there that we had to look for them before we left.
Then we went to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. I really
liked how the statue was sculpted to make it look like he was looking down over us. Then we walked along the black granite wall that is filled with Dr. King’s sayings, and tried to read all the quotes that we could.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
My life hasn’t always been the most convenient or comfortable, but I’ve tried to live up to the challenge.
After Washington, we went to Baltimore, where we wound up the barnstorming tour with a win. We finished with a 16–2 record. We were exhausted, darkly suntanned, and had been exposed to a whole new world.
After we left Baltimore, we came home to Philly for a day or two, then we went right up to Cooperstown, New York, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. When we got there, we went to the ceremony they have every year, where they induct great retired players into the Hall of Fame.
I remember that it was so, so hot and we were wearing our uniforms and had our hats on. They gave everyone a bottle of water, but we all finished ours because it was so super hot.
Barry Larkin, who played shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds, and Ron Santo, who played third base for the Chicago Cubs, were inducted into the Hall of Fame that year.
Later that day, I went to a CVS drugstore. Just as we were walking in, Barry Larkin was walking out. He gave us all a little card that had the Hall of Fame plaque and something written about him on it, and signed it.
That weekend we also played a team from Oneonta, New York. I was batting fourth, which was different for me—I usually batted second.
The first pitch I swung at and missed. Strike one! The next pitch was low, but I got a good cut at it and connected. I hit a line drive. But that line drive kept going and going and going—I hit it out of the park. It was my first home run! And nobody was more surprised than me. I was super, super glad that I hadn’t quit baseball.
It was a lot of hard work and a lot of time on the road. But it was also a lot of fun. I was seeing the country with my friends, getting to play baseball, and learning a lot about the role African Americans played in baseball history, as well as learning more about Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King.
That fall a new kid, Zion, joined our team.
“The first time I came to practice, I was sitting alone and the team was all together, and she came over and introduced herself and then brought me to the rest of the team,” Zion says.
Zion always prays before our games. He goes to the same school as Scott, so he stays overnight at Coach Steve’s a lot, too, and he and I became very good friends.
Zion is very funny. One time Scott was in the kitchen, and Zion called Scott’s name from another part of the house, and then turned out the lights. I froze because I’m afraid of the dark. Scott walked really slowly through the dining room, the living room, and even looked in the bathroom, knowing that Zion was going to jump out and scare him. But he couldn’t find Zion. I knew where Zion was, but I wasn’t telling. When Scott walked back into the bathroom, he saw Zion standing there pressed up flat against the wall, holding a baseball bat over his head. Zion yelled “Woo!” and scared everyone.
CHAPTER 10
LET IT SHINE
THE KID TOOK ONE STEP OFF OF FIRST BASE, THEN HE crouched down and took two more steps sideways—shuffle, shuffle. He turned his head back toward first base and looked at his coach. Then he looked back toward the field and took one more shuffle-step away from the bag.
I was standing on the mound, facing third, with my hand in my mitt, getting my grip for my next pitch. It was the spring of 2013, and we were playing a team from New Jersey on our home field at Anderson.
I had the runner in my peripheral vision, but I didn’t know that he was following the same pattern every time he took his lead. Fortunately, Scott saw it. Scott sees everything, and by now, we hardly needed to say any words to know what the other was thinking.
I was starting to get good at pick-off plays—quick throws to catch runners who stray too far off a base while one of their teammates is at bat. Sometimes, when I was playing shortstop, I’d give a secret signal to Scott, who usually played catcher, to tell him I thought we could pick a kid off. Our pitcher would pitch the ball, and Scott would then rifle it to me. I’d tag the runner.
Out!
Before I started my movement to pitch, Scott called a time-out.
“I walked out to the mound,” says Scott. “I went, ‘Mo, the kid who’s on first base? After his second step off, he looks back to the base every single time.’”
Then Scott turned around and walked back to home plate.
I set up to throw my next pitch, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the pattern that Scott was talking about. Scott signaled a fastball, and I threw it.
“She pitched once, just like I hadn’t told her anything,” Scott says.
Then Scott threw the ball back to me like normal and I set up for the next pitch.
“She sets, and the kid goes shuffle, shuffle, and, right when he looks back, Mo’ne fires to the first baseman,” Scott says. “She did it without me even saying a word. Most kids would have been like, ‘What do you mean?’ when I went to the mound. The kid she picked off didn’t even know what happened.”
The Monarchs had been playing together long enough that we didn’t even need to speak to each other and were able to make playing look easy.
But the thing about sports is that you have your ups and downs and you have to keep playing through. Sometimes things go your way, and sometimes things don’t. That’s all part of the game.
Coach Steve, he tells us to always stay classy. Even if you win or lose, always have the same expression on your face, and don’t let the other team know that you’re mad about anything.
That June, we went to the tournament at the Cooperstown All Star Village, where teams like ours play other teams from around the whole country. We did pretty well that year—we came in fifth. And we got to meet kids from all across the country.
Zion likes to talk to people, so he puts himself out there with other teams and helps us meet a lot of new kids. We got really close to two teams at that tournament: the Minnesota Storm and the Sacramento Hitmen.
We played the Hitmen in the quarterfinals and beat them. After the game, we exchanged hats and undershirts—the team T-shirts that we wear under our uniforms—like we normally do with kids from other teams. We also exchanged Instagram names and phone numbers.
There was another team from Minnesota. We thought they liked all of us, but they only liked Sami. That’s just how it is sometimes—everyone loves Sami. Sami is super, super social. He came in really handy when we met a team from the Dominican Republic. In case you don’t know, Dominicans are big in Major League Baseball.
Not all of the team from the DR spoke English. Fortunately, Demetrius takes Spanish classes, so he knew what they were saying. There was one kid on the team who was super nice, and who spoke a little English. We were trying to teach him English, and he was trying to teach us Spanish.
One day, the Dominican kids played a big joke on us and made something that they called Dominican soda. Really they just took a bunch of fountain drinks and mixed them together, and put salt and pepper in them, and tried to get someone to drink it.
“You wanna try this?” they’d ask some of the kids on our team. “It’s soda we brought with us from the Dominican Republic.”
“We don’t trust the look on your face,” people would tell them. “No way!”
Tamir wasn’t there when they started the joke, so he didn’t know he was getting pranked. He drank it and his face scrunched up. Everybody laughed. Laughing is the same in every language.
Then Zion came around and the Dominican kids handed him some.
“What is this?” he said when he looked in the cup and smelled it.
He didn’t fall for the joke.
Most of the time when we play in baseball tournaments, the teams trade hats, T
-shirts, and pins with each other. We had our barnstorming pins and everybody wanted one.
The Dominican kids didn’t have pins to trade, but they did have necklaces in red, white, and blue—the colors of the Dominican Republic’s flag—and bracelets with their flag on it.
Their necklaces were really cool—everybody wanted one. They were like twisted rope, and had a DR flag on them. They stayed on with a little baseball that you slipped through a circle with a knot. But they didn’t have a lot of them.
“We’ll trade you these pins for them?” we asked with our fingers crossed. “No one has a pin like this at this tournament but us. We’ll trade you. . . .”
At first, they weren’t giving their bracelets and necklaces out. But after the final game, all of us kids were standing on the hill, talking and laughing, and trading pins and undershirts and hats. One of the best things about playing sports is that you have a lot of fun and make a lot of friends from all over the country and even around the world.
That was the same year that I had my worst day as a pitcher. During the fall league championship game, we were playing one of the best teams, and we were tied with them for first place. The weather was cloudy and cold, and I was pitching. I don’t like to pitch in the cold because my hands get cold and feel hard, and I can’t grip the ball right. I was not doing well. I walked so many people that it wasn’t even funny. Needless to say, we were losing. Those are the kinds of days when you really need your teammates to cheer you up. We were sitting in the dugout, and the Monarchs were at bat. The sun had started to come out from behind the clouds a little bit.
“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. . . .” Myles started singing.
What?!
“I’m gonna let it shine, I’m gonna let it shine. . . .”
Myles and his singing just came out of nowhere. It was so random that we all started laughing.
“Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. . . .”
But his singing and laughing seemed to pick us up. Suddenly we started coming back from behind.