by Dan Gutman
Late. Air. Nothing.
Strike three. End of game. Final score: 1–0.
The Dominican kids jumped all over each other. Every camera was pointed at them celebrating, not at us looking depressed. I dragged my Louisville Slugger back to the dugout. A few of the guys were crying.
It was all over so fast. I felt that I had snapped my fingers in the first inning, and now it was the ninth inning.
There would be no walk-off home run. No come-from-behind heroics. No miracle finish.
My dad once told me that Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
Well, it was over. We lost, and that was that.
2
A Mission
IT TOOK A FEW DAYS FOR LIFE TO RETURN TO NORMAL AFTER we got back from Williamsport. Me and the guys weren’t celebrities anymore. We had to go back to cleaning our rooms, mowing our lawns, doing our summer reading—boring stuff like that.
I was playing Nintendo in the living room a couple of days after we got home. My mom was paying the bills in the den. She was all worried because she’d read an article in a magazine that said it costs over $100,000 to send a kid to college for four years, and she doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of money.
“I don’t have to go to college,” I told her. “I’ll get a good job.”
“You’re going to college,” she insisted. “That’s how you’ll get a good job.”
My mom is a nurse, and she works in a hospital here in Louisville. My dad is currently unemployed. I was going to tell Mom that I could get a baseball scholarship to college. But after my performance in the Little League World Series, that didn’t seem very likely.
I looked up from my video game when I heard a car door slam in the driveway.
“You expecting anybody, Mom?” I asked.
We both got up to peek through the blinds. There was a guy getting out of the car. He looked like he was around 30 or so. Crew cut. He was wearing a black suit, black tie, and sunglasses; and he was carrying a black briefcase. His car was black too.
“He looks like an FBI agent,” I whispered.
My mother giggled.
“Do you really think he could be an FBI agent?”
“Nah, can’t be,” I told her. “FBI agents only dress like FBI agents on TV. I bet real FBI agents dress like normal people so nobody will know they’re FBI agents. This guy is probably selling insurance or something.”
The guy jogged up the front steps. He looked like he worked out every day. My mom ran to wipe her hands on a dish towel and started fussing with her hair like she was getting ready to go out on a date or something.
When the guy knocked on the door, I opened it. He had taken off his sunglasses.
“Excuse me,” the guy said politely. “Are you Joseph Stoshack?”
My mom stepped in front of me protectively. She blocked the doorway like she didn’t want this stranger coming into our house.
“Who wants to know?” she asked.
“Graham Pluto,” he replied. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
The guy was an FBI agent!
He flipped open his wallet and stuck his badge in our faces, just like they do on TV. It was a real badge too, not one of those phony plastic ones you can buy at a Halloween store. He looked serious.
Why would the FBI come to our house? We never did anything wrong.
Then it hit me. Flip had asked me to carry the flag at the Little League World Series, and I’d turned him down. I had committed an un-American act. I was totally unpatriotic, and stupid too. The FBI probably suspected that I was a terrorist.
“I’m really sorry!” I blurted out. “I didn’t mean it! Really. I won’t do it again.”
“Do what again?” my mom asked.
My mind was racing. This could ruin my whole life, I thought to myself. I’ll never get through airport security again. I’m probably on a no-fly list already. It will be on my permanent record. I might go to jail. Or be deported. They might send me to one of those countries that tortures people to make them talk. I would never see my parents again.
Flip must have tipped off the FBI about me not carrying the flag, I figured. Or maybe it was one of my teammates.
I felt like I might start to cry, but I fought against the tears.
“Did my son do something wrong?” Mom asked, tightening her hold on me.
“No, no, of course not!” Agent Pluto said, a tiny smile appearing above his square jaw for the first time. “May I come in, Mrs. Stoshack?”
“Of course.”
Mom ushered Agent Pluto in and offered him coffee, tea, a sandwich, Fig Newtons, and just about everything she had in the refrigerator. But he said he just wanted to talk for a few minutes.
We went to the living room. I sat on the couch next to my mom, who held my hand. Agent Pluto sat stiffly on the wing chair across from us.
“Let me get right to the point, Joseph,” he said. “We at the Bureau know about your…uh…shall we say…gift.”
I glanced at my mother, and she glanced back at me. Suddenly I felt hot. My forehead was sweaty.
“Gift?” Mom said innocently. “Did you get a birthday present that you didn’t tell me about, Joey?”
“No.”
“I’m really sorry,” my mother said, “but we don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Pluto.”
“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, Mrs. Stoshack,” Agent Pluto said. “Joseph, we know that you can travel through time using baseball cards.”
I exhaled. I must have been holding it in for a long time.
He was right. The jig was up. I can travel through time with baseball cards.
Here’s the story in a nutshell: Something must have happened to my brain when I was born. I remember picking up one of my dad’s old baseball cards. I couldn’t even read yet. After a few seconds, I felt this strange tingling sensation in the tips of my fingers. I dropped the card right away, but I was fascinated. When I picked the card up again, I held on to it, and the tingling sensation moved up my arm. It was a pleasant, buzzy feeling, but scary at the same time. I dropped the card again.
I kept experimenting in my room, and then one day I decided not to drop the card. As I held on to it, the tingling sensation moved across my body. I closed my eyes. I felt myself getting lighter, like I was being lifted up off my bed.
And then I was gone. Poof! When I opened my eyes, I was in another place, another time, another year.
A baseball card, I discovered, was like a plane ticket to me. It would take me to the year on the card.
I started going on adventures to the past. I met famous players like Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Roberto Clemente. But those are stories for another day.
At first, nobody else knew that I had this power. Then my mom had found out, of course. I told my dad, who lives in an apartment on the other side of Louisville. I ended up telling Flip too. Only a few other people knew. But now this FBI agent knew. And if he knew, how many other people in the government knew? Maybe hundreds. The information must be in a database somewhere.
“How did you find out that Joey can travel through time with baseball cards?” my mother asked Agent Pluto.
“It’s our job to find things out, Mrs. Stoshack,” he said. “Gathering intelligence is what we do.”
“If you’re so good at finding stuff out,” I asked, “then how come you didn’t know about 9/11 before it happened?”
“Joey!” Mom scolded me. “It wasn’t his fault. He was probably in high school when 9/11 happened.”
“It’s a fair question, Mrs. Stoshack,” Agent Pluto said, “and I’ll answer it. Joseph, the FBI is not infallible, unfortunately. We make mistakes. Sometimes bad mistakes. And yes, I was in school on 9/11—in New York City. I was in science class. I remember it very clearly. It was horrible. In fact, that was the reason I joined the Bureau in the first place. I wanted to help prevent another 9/11.”
“So why are you here today?” my mother asked
. “Why is the FBI interested in my son?”
Agent Pluto leaned forward in the chair and clasped his hands together. He lowered his voice slightly, as if there was somebody in the next room. My Uncle Wilbur was home, but he was upstairs sleeping.
“Time travel is a subject that has been of interest to our government for a long time,” Agent Pluto said slowly. “We’ve spent a lot of money, and a lot of time, researching it.”
“I’m not sure I like where this is going,” my mother said.
“Please hear me out, Mrs. Stoshack. You can imagine how time travel could be used to our country’s benefit. If we made a serious mistake sometime in the past, we might be able to correct it. Or we could go back and revise the historical record, just like you can revise a document on a computer. If there was something that happened in the past that we didn’t like or approve of, maybe we could go back in time and do something so that thing never happened in the first place. Do you see? Time traveling could be a very valuable tool.”
“In other words, you want my son to change history for you,” my mother said, a worried look on her face.
“Not for me,” Agent Pluto replied. “For America. You see, despite all the effort we’ve put into time-travel research, nothing productive has come out of it. Even our top scientists had come to the conclusion that time travel was a physical impossibility. Until now, of course.”
He was looking at me.
“So you want me to go back in time?” I asked. “What do you want me to do, kill Hitler or something?”
“That’s not a bad idea, Joseph,” Agent Pluto said, chuckling.
“My son is not going to kill anyone,” my mother said sternly. “Not even Hitler.”
“Of course not,” Agent Pluto said, smiling again. “The FBI would never send a child—or an adult—to assassinate anyone. We don’t do those sorts of things.”
“I got it,” I said excitedly. “You want me to prevent an assassination, right? Is it John F. Kennedy? Or Abraham Lincoln?”
“Neither,” Agent Pluto said. “It’s bigger than that.”
“Bigger?” I asked. “What could be bigger than preventing the assassination of the president?”
Agent Pluto looked me in the eyes.
“I’ll try not to bore you, Joseph,” he said. “But I need to give you a little history. In the spring of 1938, Hitler and the Nazis took over Austria. The next year they conquered Czechoslovakia and Poland, and World War II was on. In 1940, they swept over Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France. The Nazis controlled most of continental Europe. They were bombing England. They had teamed up with Italy and Japan. Joseph, do you know what happened on December 7th, 1941?”
I thought for a minute. It didn’t ring a bell. Agent Pluto opened his briefcase.
“Pearl Harbor,” my mother said.
“That’s right,” he said, taking a newspaper article out of his briefcase and handing it to me.
I had learned a little bit about Pearl Harbor in Social Studies. It was an American naval base in Hawaii, and it was attacked by Japan on that day. The next day America declared war on Japan, and we were in World War II.
“Wait a minute,” Mom said, holding my hand tighter. “Are you expecting my little boy to prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor?”
“I’m not that little, Mom,” I protested.
“Not prevent it, no,” Agent Pluto corrected her. “You see, Joseph, it was a surprise attack. Nobody knew it was coming. If the president, Franklin Roosevelt, knew that Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th, we could have been ready and waiting for them. We would have blown those planes out of the sky like it was a turkey shoot.”
I went to give the newspaper article back to Agent Pluto, but he told me to keep it.
“So you want me to go back in time and warn President Roosevelt that Pearl Harbor is going to be attacked?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Agent Pluto said. “Joseph, do you have any idea how many lives would have been saved if our government had known in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941?”
“No…”
Agent Pluto took a calculator out of his briefcase and started punching buttons.
“First of all,” he said, “more than 2,400 American soldiers were killed at Pearl Harbor that day. If the attack had been prevented, we probably would not have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few years later. Those bombs killed approximately 200,000 people. Furthermore, it’s very possible that America would have never even entered the war if there had been no Pearl Harbor. And do you know how many American soldiers died in World War II? 416,000.”
“Wow” was all I could say.
“You can change the world, Joseph,” Agent Pluto said, looking at me seriously. He punched the final numbers into the calculator and held it up for me. “You can save…618,400 lives.”
He let that sink in for a moment.
“But isn’t it going to be dangerous?” my mother asked. “I mean, what if Joey changes some little thing in the past, and it sets in motion a series of events that change things for the worse? What if he, uh, steps on a twig or something in 1941, and as a result millions of people died? I’ve read about that sort of thing in science fiction books.”
Agent Pluto smiled.
“So have I,” he said. “Joseph would have to be very careful. We would pick and choose what parts of the past he would change. That’s why we’ve chosen a very simple two-part task for Joseph to complete. One: get to President Roosevelt. Two: warn him about Pearl Harbor. That’s it. Then come right back home. And avoid stepping on any twigs along the way.”
Up until now I had mostly traveled back in time because I was a baseball fan. I wanted to see if Babe Ruth really called his famous “called-shot” home run. I wanted to see if Satchel Paige could throw 100 miles per hour.
I looked at my mom.
“How much would Joseph be paid for this…mission?” she asked.
A look of disappointment passed over Agent Pluto’s face.
“Mom!” I exclaimed.
“We’re not wealthy, Joseph,” she said. “If you’re the only person in the world who can do this, and you’re going to risk your life for your country, you should get something out of it. That’s only fair. This could pay for your college education.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Stoshack, but we’re not offering any money. Budgets…cutbacks…you understand.”
“So you expect my son to save hundreds of thousands of lives and change the world to suit your purposes,” my mom said, “but you’re not willing to pay him a dime?”
“He gets to help his country in a way nobody else can,” Agent Pluto said. “That’s the payment. It’s an honor to be asked to serve your country.”
“I don’t know,” my mother said doubtfully. “He’s just a boy.”
“Joseph won’t be working alone,” said Agent Pluto. “Of course there would be adult supervision.”
“Who?” I asked.
He reached into his briefcase again and pulled out a card that was in a clear plastic holder.
“I’m a big baseball fan myself,” Agent Pluto told me as he put the card on the coffee table. “Love the game. I’ll go see minor-league games, high school games, even Little League games if I’m in the mood.”
I didn’t pick the card up. I knew what would happen if I did.
It was black-and-white and larger than a regular baseball card. It was almost the size of a postcard. And it was autographed.
“Ted Williams?” I asked.
He put the card on the coffee table.
I didn’t know a whole lot about Williams. He was a great hitter, of course. Everybody knows that. He played for the Red Sox. He’s in the Hall of Fame. That’s about it.
“You could have chosen any player from that era,” my mother said. “What’s so special about Ted Williams?”
“We’ve done extensive personality research on the players from decades past,” Agent Pluto to
ld us. “We have reason to believe that of all the players in the Major Leagues, Ted Williams would be most likely to help Joseph carry out this mission.”
Agent Pluto stood up, pulled out his wallet, and removed a business card. He handed it to my mother.
“I don’t expect you folks to make a snap decision about this,” he said. “I understand the risks that are involved. But think it over. Call me and let me know what you decide to do. And this is top secret, obviously. Not a word about this to anybody.”
“What if we say no?” my mom asked. “Will this go on Joseph’s permanent record?”
“Of course not,” Agent Pluto said simply. “There are no repercussions. We just thought that, if Joseph is traveling through time anyway, he might want to do something to help his country.”
Mom and I walked him to the front door. He put his sunglasses on. When I opened the door, he turned to face me.
“Joseph,” he said, “I told you that I joined the FBI to prevent another 9/11. Pearl Harbor was the first 9/11. In just two hours on that day, 21 American ships were sunk or damaged. Over 300 planes were destroyed. And besides those 2,400 soldiers who were killed, more than 1,200 were wounded. A lot of those guys were teenagers, not much older than you. Keep that in mind when you make your decision.”
“I will,” I said.
“And, Joseph,” he added before leaving, “this is just my opinion, but you really should have carried that flag in the World Series.”
3
Flip
I LET OUT A DEEP BREATH WHEN THE FBI AGENT LEFT THE house.
So I had a decision to make. Should I use my power to go back to 1941 and warn the president about Pearl Harbor, save the lives of all those people, and change history forever? Or should I say no?
Up until now I pretty much went back in time for me. I wanted to meet Ruth, Paige, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Jackie Robinson, and all those other players. This time I would be doing it for my country.