by Paul Haven
For more than forty years,
Yearling has been the leading name
in classic and award-winning literature
for young readers.
Yearling books feature children's
favorite authors and characters,
providing dynamic stories of adventure,
humor, history, mystery, and fantasy.
Trust Yearling paperbacks to entertain,
inspire, and promote the love of reading
in all children.
OTHER YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY
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THE BOY WHO OWNED THE SCHOOL Gary Paulsen
TYLER ON PRIME TIME, Steve Atinsky
RUNNING WITH THE RESERVOIR PUPS
Colin Bateman
SPIDER BOY, Ralph Fletcher
THE YEAR MY PARENTS RUINED MY LIFE
Martha Freeman
NAASTASIA KRUPNIK, Lois Lowry
To Vicky,
and to my parents
First Inning
Two Hot Dogs with Everything
The Curse of the Poisoned Pretzel
Nothing's Working
A Day at the Park
Troubling News
A Desperate Plan
Second Inning
Secret Rendezvous
A Trip to the Country
West Bubble
The Boddlebrooks Mansion
Old Man in an Old House
The Study
The Round Room
Third Inning
The Return
The Disappearance of Lou Smegny
A Change of Fortune
Who Won It for the Sluggers?
A Knock at the Door
The Reckoning
Sizzling Sid Canova
The New Caretaker
On a Roll
Winning Streak Stadium
Sleepless Night
Fourth Inning
The Kid Who Makes the Sluggers Win
Diamond Bob Honeysuckle IV
The Snowed-Out Summer of 1934
The Two Sides of Fame
The Search for the Lucky Kid
Danny in Demand
Mayor Fred Frompovich Gets an Idea
The Gurkin Report
Fifth Inning
Danny Strikes Out
A Flash of Fame
The Fall of Skidmore Boddlebrooks
The Roar of the Crowd
A Date with Destiny
Molly Suspects
Sixth Inning
An Unexpected Visitor
No Pumps
Time for Baseball
The Lost Years of Lou Smegny
Poached Eggs and Disbelief
A Special Invitation
The Offer
Moment of Truth
Seventh Inning
Friendship Follies
Home-Field Advantage
The Gurkin Sours
Diamond Bob's Masterpiece
Danny's Big Choice
Danny Spills the Beans
Eighth Inning
Clubhouse Blues
All on the Field
The Last Resort
Final Preparations
You're Danny Gurkin!
Ninth Inning
Taxi Ride
The Inner Sanctum
The Story of Seymour Sycamore
Fingers Crossed
Two Hot Dogs with Everything
Danny Gurkin turned the corner on Midland Avenue and raced up Splotnick Street, carefully avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk and making sure to keep other pedestrians on his left as he sped past. It was 3:57, and he had just eight minutes left if he was going to make it home for the start of the Sluggers game. They were playing Oakland, and Danny's favorite pitcher, Sid Canova, was on the mound.
Danny always wore the same shirt when Canova was pitching: a bright red T-shirt that said EL SID on the back in big white letters.
When Danny got to the corner of Beacon and Drew, the light began flashing DON'T WALK, so he rushed across the street, quickly hopping onto the curb on the opposite side before any cars passed him. With Canova on the mound, Danny had to be especially careful not to do anything that would jinx him, and letting cars pass you before you got to the other side of the street was a sure way to bring bad luck.
Actually, Danny had been doing a lot of things wrong that summer. Crossing the wrong fingers. Chewing food on the wrong side of his mouth. Sitting on the wrong side of the sofa while he watched the games. Danny was convinced he was the reason the Sluggers were sixteen games out of first place.
The rookie pitcher had a great fastball, and a curve-ball that made left-handers look as if they were swinging a candy cane, but he had blown a game just a week before when Danny accidentally left the window open in the bathroom while he was brushing his teeth. How could he have been so dumb? He knew it would jinx Canova, and it did!
Canova's curveball hadn't curved, his fastball hadn't popped, and the young pitcher was taken out after just a few innings, with the Sluggers trailing 11–3. Finchley Biggins, the Sluggers' manager, blamed Canova's performance on a stomach virus, but Danny knew better.
“Never leave a window open when a right-hander is on the mound,” Danny thought as he crossed Highland Avenue. Just six more blocks to go. Danny was not especially big for his age, with knobby knees and thin arms and a round, open face. Now he was scampering along on his short legs, hurtling himself through the busy street, a blur of red and white—the Sluggers' colors, of course—past families out for a summer stroll, teenagers holding hands, workmen carrying crates of fruit into the local shops.
And then suddenly, Danny stopped. Danny stopped so suddenly, in fact, that his baseball cap fell right off his head.
“The hot dogs!” Danny said, loudly enough to get a few stares from a group of elderly ladies.
Danny turned around and raced back the way he had come. It only took him a couple of minutes to reach Willie at his usual spot.
“Two hot dogs with everything!” Danny said as he neared the food stand.
“Hey, Danny, is there a game this afternoon?” asked the hot-dog man, who by now had learned Danny's routine. “You want extra sauerkraut on top for good luck?”
“No, Willie, not when a rookie is pitching,” Danny explained. “Then you need extra onions.”
“Hmm, I didn't know that,” Willie said, fishing a second hot dog out of the murky water and smothering it with a little bit of sauerkraut and gobs of brown onion goop. “What would happen if I put mustard on it?”
“Mustard's cool. That won't jinx them,” Danny said. He would have to eat the hot dogs on the run or he'd definitely miss the first pitch, and Danny Gurkin never missed the first pitch.
Danny paid and rushed up narrow Chorloff Street, where he lived on the fourth floor of a six-story redbrick building. It was 4:03. Danny took the steps two at a time and burst into his apartment to find his older brother, Max, and his mother sitting on the couch, already set to watch the game. Danny sat down just in time to see Canova deliver.
The pitch was a ball way up over the batter's head, but that wasn't important. At least Danny had made it.
The Curse of the Poisoned Pretzel
In the history of baseball, no team had tormented its fans with more gut-wrenching defeats and wasted promise than the Sluggers. And in the history of rooting for baseball, no fans had been more devoted than Sluggers fans. Every bad bounce, every lopsided trade, every bitter loss, all were stamped onto the hearts of Sluggers fans—decade after frustrating decade—until misfortune became a part of them. Any of them could reel off a l
ist of the team's most famous failures. There were the Phantom Strikeout of 1907, the Snowed-Out Summer of 1934, the Triple-Play Tragedy of 1967. The first had broken the heart of Danny's great-grandfather Zechariah Gurkin, the second had crushed the spirit of his grandpa Ebenezer, and the third still brought tears to the eyes of Danny's parents, Harold and Lydia.
In fact, in the 108 years since an immigrant bubble-gum tycoon named Manchester E. Boddlebrooks founded the team, the Sluggers had won only one championship, and that was in their very first year. Even that glorious season, as Danny or any other Sluggers fan could tell you, was tainted by tragedy.
It all started in the smoky clubhouse after the Sluggers won the World Series. At the time, all the players wore baggy wool pants and very small caps on their heads, and the gentlemen in the stands wore fancy top hats and had pointy mustaches that curled up at the ends like bicycle handlebars. Nobody realized how silly they looked because it was so many years ago.
Boddlebrooks wasn't just any bubble-gum tycoon. He was the type of bubble-gum tycoon people noticed. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds and had big, bushy sideburns and a kind smile. More than anything else, Boddlebrooks loved baseball, and he loved owning the Sluggers. He handed out gum and sweets to the players after most games, and on weekends he even let them come to his mansion outside town. The mansion was painted all red, the color of Boddlebrooks's most popular flavor of gum, Winning-Streak Watermelon. It had a fountain in the back that spouted bubble-gum-flavored soda and a giant hot-air balloon that looked like the biggest bubble ever blown.
Everyone loved Boddlebrooks. Everyone, that is, except his younger brother, Skidmore.
Skidmore C. Boddlebrooks was thin and wiry. He always wore a black overcoat and hats that were slightly too big for him, so his eyes were hidden in shadow. In fact, nobody could ever remember seeing Skidmore Boddlebrooks's eyes at all. He gave everyone the creeps.
Why Skidmore hated his brother so much was anybody's guess, but most people thought it had something to do with the fact that he was violently allergic to bubble gum. Skidmore saw his brother's sweet, chewable candies as a personal insult. The fame and riches the gum brought Manchester made it even worse.
On the night the Sluggers won the championship, as Manchester and all his players were celebrating in the clubhouse, Skidmore crept up to his brother and pulled something out from beneath his jacket.
“Here, try this,” Skidmore said, revealing an enormous doughy concoction. “It's a new snack food I've been working on. I call it a pretzel.”
Now, Manchester was an educated man with a passion for junk food, so he was well aware that the pretzel had been invented more than a thousand years before by a lonely European monk named Ralph who had a lot of time on his hands. But he didn't want to embarrass his brother by pointing that out, and he had to admit, he had never seen a pretzel like the one Skidmore had concocted, as big as a man's face and oozing with mustard.
Years later, Skidmore's creation would become the standard ballpark pretzel, sold by screaming teenage vendors in every ballpark around the country. Every ballpark except one, that is. Out of respect, no pretzel has ever been sold at a Sluggers game because of what happened next.
“Hmm, what a strange idea,” said Boddlebrooks, his eyes twinkling with excitement at the Sluggers' great victory.
But no sooner had he taken a bubble-gum-tycoon-sized bite out of the pretzel than Boddlebrooks raised his hands to his mouth, turned purple, and fell over dead, his enormous body crashing down on young Lou Smegny, the Sluggers' lanky star shortstop, who never played another game.
The incident came to be known as the Curse of the Poisoned Pretzel, though nobody could ever actually prove that the pretzel was poisoned. Police ruled that Manchester had simply choked on the bread. Skidmore insisted that he felt terrible about the tragedy and would make his pretzels even doughier in the future. But the rumors started almost at once. And they grew louder when Skidmore inherited the Sluggers and the rest of his bachelor brother's fortune.
No matter how Skidmore tried to win people over, nobody ever forgave him for giving his brother the suspicious snack. The Curse followed Skidmore wherever he went, and it certainly rubbed off on his team. From the moment Manchester Boddlebrooks choked on the world's first ballpark pretzel, the Sluggers began a string of failures never before seen by any team in any sport.
Over the next 107 years, the world saw the invention of the car and the plane and the radio and the television. Nations rose and fell. Man cured polio and created the Internet and even sent rockets into space. All this came to pass, but not once did the Sluggers win another championship.
Rooting for the Sluggers was like praying for peace on earth. It was a noble and worthy cause, but one nobody really believed would come to anything soon. In fact, a century of suffering had produced a collection of traits by which really serious Sluggers fans could be identified. Jittery and nervous and used to disappointment, Sluggers fans walked with their heads down, their eyes hidden behind the bills of their baseball caps. The older fans had sad eyes and faces made gray by a thousand ninth-inning collapses. Still, to be a Sluggers fan you also had to have hope, a conviction that someday the Sluggers would win again and the sun would shine and everything would be right with the world.
Someday they would win.
Just not today.
Nothing's Working
As Danny and his family sat in a row on the sofa watching the game, Canova threw another ball. And another. And another. The first Oakland Ogres player trotted to first base.
Danny moaned.
Max slammed his fist.
Mrs. Gurkin left the room.
Nothing worked. Canova walked the first three batters. The bases were loaded.
“What have I done wrong?” thought Danny. “I ate the hot dogs. I got here in time for the first pitch. I didn't step on a single crack in the sidewalk the entire way home! Why are they losing?”
Danny mulled over all his superstitions to see where he had slipped up. Slowly, his eyes began to focus on Max, who was reclining on the sofa with one leg thrown over the top cushions, his head lolling on the armrest like one of those bobble-head dolls they sometimes gave out at Sluggers games. Max already had begun to thumb through a car magazine, and he was listening to music in a headphone in just one ear.
“What?” said Max defensively, meeting Danny's stare.
“Pay attention to the game! Don't you see what's happening?” Danny spat. Older brothers could be so annoying. No ability to focus. Ever since Max had turned sixteen, he had become a liability.
Max had once been as into the Sluggers as Danny was. But these days he sometimes didn't even watch the games and spent half his time talking on the phone in his room. He had even begun to forget the names of some of the less important players, an embarrassment to any true Sluggers fan. Danny had read about people's brain cells dying as they got older, and it seemed the only explanation for Max.
“I'm not going to stare straight ahead at the TV for three hours just so I don't jinx the Sluggers,” Max said. “They're in last place anyway.”
“If you don't show them that you care, how are they gonna win?” said Danny.
“Danny, they can't even see me. They're on TV. I could be fast asleep for all they know!” Max said.
“No duh, Max. I know they can't see you. But they can sense you,” said Danny. “If you don't try, they're never going to win!”
Canova gave up a couple of hits in quick succession, and the Sluggers were down 3–0. Max rolled his eyes at Danny and reached for the phone. The team didn't have a chance. As Max chatted away to one of his friends, Danny tried everything to counter his brother's bad vibes—sitting upside down on the couch with his feet up against the wall, standing close to the screen and sucking in his stomach like a belly dancer, crossing his legs and holding his fingers together in little circles like a yoga master.
It was no use.
By the seventh inning, the score was 8–1.
In the eighth, the camera panned down the line in the Sluggers' dugout, and most of the players seemed to have lost interest themselves. Two were reading magazines, and the third baseman, Chuck Sidewinder, was writing a letter. The manager, Finchley Biggins, was taking out his contact lenses and putting them in a little green dish that he had rested on his knee. He evidently didn't want to watch.
Danny's mother popped her head back in the room from time to time to see the score, but in the end she gave up. Max left the room too, leaving Danny to mourn in front of the television set alone. Another loss, another game out of first place.
Danny watched every pitch until the final out.
A Day at the Park
It had been a dismal summer, and now school was only two weeks away. Danny had spent most evenings watching the Sluggers, and most evenings they had lost. That was baseball's best and worst quality—it went on and on. Football was just on the weekends, and basketball a few times a week, but baseball was a constant companion, 162 games a year. It stayed with you and wouldn't leave you alone, day after day, season after season, gnawing at you until it twisted into every cranny of your brain. At least, that was how Danny felt. It gave him a headache.
During the day Danny found relief from the Sluggers by hanging out, shooting hoops, and shagging flies with Lucas Masterly and Molly Fitch.
On the morning after Sid Canova's collapse, Danny walked down to the basketball courts in Quincy Park, a few blocks from his house. On the way, he passed Willie the Hot Dog Man on the corner of Highland and Renseller. Willie was doling out an extra-long bratwurst to the long-haired guy from the video rental store down the street, music blaring from a small radio he had propped up with a couple of stale buns.
“Hey, Danny, I'm sorry about the game.” Willie grinned as Danny approached. “Not enough onions? What do you think?”
Danny knew Willie didn't really believe in all of his superstitions, but he was polite enough to pretend, partly because Danny bought a lot of hot dogs with everything. He must have been Willie's best customer.
“Nah, it was my brother's fault,” Danny said, recounting Max's crimes in vivid detail.