Ted & Me

by Dan Gutman

  It would be dangerous, of course. In my previous trips through time, I had been shot at, kidnapped, locked in a closet, tied to a chair, chased by a crazed batboy, and punched by a Pittsburgh Pirate fan. One time I landed in the middle of a war. Who knew what I might encounter this time?

  What if I got blown off course somehow and ended up in Pearl Harbor on Pearl Harbor Day, with bombs and torpedoes all around me? That would suck.

  There was one person I needed to talk to before I made my decision: Flip Valentini.

  I know, I should probably have talked to my dad about something so important. He does know a lot about baseball. Not as much as Flip, but he knows a lot. And he is my dad, after all. You’re supposed to go to your dad for advice. He was the one who got me interested in collecting baseball cards in the first place.

  But no, not my dad. All he cares about are two things, and the first one is the Yankees. The Yankees and Red Sox have always been big rivals, so he wouldn’t be happy to hear I was going to meet Ted Williams. He would probably try to talk me into going to see Joe DiMaggio or one of the great Yankees from that era instead.

  The other thing my dad cares about is money, which is kind of odd because he never seems to have any. He would probably ask me to have Ted Williams sign a bunch of autographs so he could sell them. My dad does stuff like that.

  I rode my bike over to Flip’s store. It’s in a strip mall on Shelbyville Road. The little bell jingled as I opened the door. Flip greeted me with a big smile when I walked inside. He seemed to have forgotten what I did at the Little League World Series. Or if he remembered, it didn’t bother him anymore.

  Flip’s Fan Club is jammed with all kinds of baseball cards, memorabilia, and junk. There was a lot of new stuff I hadn’t seen before. I picked up a Beatles bobblehead statue and Flip laughed.

  “I’m diversifyin’,” he explained. “Baby boomers wanna buy collectibles—junk they shoulda held on to when they were young.”

  “Not many kids collect cards anymore,” I said.

  Flip was holding a copy of Discover magazine.

  “Yo, Stosh, y’ever hear of a Dr. Anton Zeilinger?”

  “No.”

  “He’s an Austrian physicist,” Flip told me. “Says here that he destroyed bits of light and made perfect copies appear three feet away. Ha! He thinks we’ll be able to do teleportation between atoms in a few years and molecules within a decade.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I told him. “Everybody knows that’s impossible.”

  Flip chuckled and took off his reading glasses. He’s had a special interest in time travel ever since I took him back to 1948 with me. You see, Flip had been a pretty decent ballplayer himself when he was a teenager. But he got real good after I took him to 1948 and Satchel Paige taught him a few trick pitches. Flip ended up getting stuck back then and had to live his life all over again. The good part was that in his second chance at life, he made it into the majors.

  But that’s a story for another day.

  “What can I do ferya?” he asked me.

  “Flip, would you mind locking the door for a few minutes?” I asked.

  “Sure, Stosh,” Flip said. “Somethin’ wrong?”

  “I’ve got a secret,” I confided.

  “Do tell.”

  “Flip, the FBI knows,” I told him.

  “They know what?” he asked.

  “They know about me,” I explained. “They know what I can do with baseball cards. They sent one of their agents over to my house to talk to me.”

  Flip looked concerned.

  “How did they find out?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “The guy was all mysterious about it.”

  Flip sighed and took a sip from his coffee mug.

  “I was afraid this was gonna happen,” he told me. “What do they want from you?”

  “They want me to go on a mission.”

  “Jesus,” Flip said. “That’s bad news. The FBI shouldn’t be messin’ with kids. What kinda mission?”

  “They want me to go back to 1941 and warn President Roosevelt about the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

  “Are you kiddin’ me?” Flip said, getting out of his chair. He looked really angry.

  “I wish I was kidding.”

  Flip whistled and sat back down.

  “This is big, Stosh. Real big.”

  “The FBI guy told me that if the president knew about Pearl Harbor in advance, we would have been able to just blow those planes out of the sky,” I said. “Like it was a turkey shoot.”

  Flip leaned back and gazed off into space for a moment. It looked like he was thinking about a distant memory.

  “Smart,” he said. “Obviously. You’d save a lotta lives. If there hadn’t been a Pearl Harbor, it woulda changed everything.”

  “Do you remember that day, Flip?” I asked him. “December 7th, 1941?”

  “Sure,” he said, still with that faraway look. “I was a kid. ’Bout your age, I guess. Heard about it on the radio. It was a Sunday morning. My next-door neighbor was stationed in Hawaii. Joey Albanese. Good guy. He used to play ball with me and my friends. I never even hearda Pearl Harbor until that day. None of us had. And then it happened. Joey got killed with all the others. They never found his body. It was 9/11 for my generation.”

  I had never seen Flip cry, not even when we lost a really tough game. But I could see that his eyes were watery when he remembered his friend. Suddenly, a plan popped into my brain.

  “Hey, I can save your friend Joey’s life, Flip!” I said excitedly. “I can go back to 1941 and prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor. Then when I get back here, maybe Joey will still be alive! I can bring him back to life! What do you think?”

  Flip looked at me for a long time and then got that faraway look in his eyes again.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t do it, Stosh.”

  4

  Kill Three Birds with One Stone

  I NEVER EXPECTED TO HEAR FLIP DISCOURAGE ME FROM doing what I do with baseball cards. He never had any reservations before. Flip had always been my biggest supporter.

  “Leave well enough alone, Stosh,” he told me. “Pearl Harbor’s over. It’s history. Let it go. In the long run, things worked out okay.”

  “Are you saying the attack on Pearl Harbor was a good thing?” I asked him.

  “Yeah…sorta,” Flip said. “Look, a lotta people didn’t want us to get into that war, Stosh. If we hadn’t been attacked, we never woulda jumped in. We woulda stood on the sideline and let the rest of the world knock their brains out.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I asked. “It sounds like a good thing to me.”

  “Stosh, if we hadn’t entered the war, we probably wouldn’t have built the atomic bomb. If he hadn’t built the A-bomb, the Nazis woulda eventually. You could bet on that. And Hitler woulda used it too, to win the war. He woulda conquered the world. That’s why Pearl Harbor was so important. It got us in the war. And that’s why we won it.”

  “But you don’t know all that stuff for sure,” I said.

  “Course not,” Flip said. “Nobody knows nothin’ for sure. I’m just spitballin’. But if you came in here looking for a 1941 card to use, I can’t give you one. My conscience won’t let me.”

  “I didn’t come here to get a card, Flip,” I told him. “The FBI guy already gave me one.”

  “Who’s on it?” Flip asked.

  “Ted Williams,” I replied. “Can you give me a crash course on him? Just so I know what I’m getting into?”

  Flip smiled a little.

  “Stosh, I think I can sum up Ted Williams with one word,” Flip said. “And that word is…‘jerk.’”

  “He was a jerk?”

  “A real jerk,” Flip said. “Williams had anger problems. He was always gettin’ into beefs with everybody: players, managers, reporters, fans. He would throw bats, tear out the plumbing, punch the water cooler, knock out the lights. He’d spit at people. Go look it up i
f ya don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “But could that guy hit a baseball!” Flip shook his head in wonder. “Probably the greatest pure hitter ever. Oh, Cobb hit for a higher average. And Ruth had more power. But overall, nobody was better than Williams. If you ask me, he was the greatest hitter ever.”

  Flip reached under the counter, pulled out a thick book, and flipped through the pages until he found the section on Ted Williams. Flip loves statistics. He put his reading glasses back on.

  “Look at this,” Flip said. “Lifetime average, .344. Career homers, 521. He won the batting title six times, and the last time when he was forty years old. Oldest guy ever to do that. He won the Triple Crown twice, and the MVP twice. He led the American League in slugging percentage nine times, total bases six times, runs scored six times, and walks eight times. And get this—he only struck out 709 times in his whole career. Ya know how many times Reggie Jackson struck out?”

  The greatest hitter ever.

  “I give up.”

  “2,597!”

  “How did he do in 1941,” I asked. “That was the year of Pearl Harbor.”

  “It was his greatest season,” Flip told me. “That was the year he hit .400. Or .406 to be exact.”

  He dug up a newspaper article from a drawer and handed it to me. The headline read: “Batting Mark of .4057 for Williams.”

  “Nobody’s done it since then, y’know,” Flip continued. “Williams was the last guy to hit .400. That’s more than seventy years ago. And he still didn’t win the MVP that year. That’s how much everybody hated him.”

  Flip closed the book with a thud.

  “Why do you think the FBI picked Ted Williams?” I asked. “They could have picked any ballplayer from 1941.”

  “I think I know why,” Flip said, pulling out a photo from a file. “Williams was a military guy. A fighter pilot in the marines. In fact, he served in two wars: World War II and Korea. Altogether, he gave up almost five years of his baseball career to serve his country.”

  “Five years?” I asked. “And you said he hit 521 homers? How could he hit that many homers when he missed so many games?”

  “That’s how good he was,” Flip said.

  Ted Williams was a fighter pilot in the marines.

  “How many homers do you think he would have hit if he hadn’t been in the military for those five years?” I asked.

  “That’s the million-dollar question,” Flip said, his eyes flashing. “I’ll tell you this much. Williams enlisted when he was 24 years old. When Mickey Mantle was 24, he hit 52 homers. When Willie Mays was 24, he hit 51. When Jimmie Foxx was 24, he hit 58. So it’s a good bet that Williams woulda hit 50 or more that year, and the next few years too. Ruth hit 714 in his career. With five more seasons and a little luck, Williams could have beaten that. ’Course, we’ll never know for sure….”

  Flip looked up at me, and I looked back at him. We were both thinking the same thing. I could go back in time and talk Ted Williams out of joining the military. If he had those seasons back, he would have hit a lot more homers, maybe enough to beat Babe Ruth.

  “Flip,” I said, “I’m gonna do it.”

  Flip wrinkled his forehead as he put the book away.

  “I don’t like this, Stosh,” he said. “Williams had a great career, one of the greatest ever. What’s done is done. You don’t need to change history.”

  “But I can make his career even greater,” I told Flip, “and I can warn the president about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Plus, I can save your friend. That’s killing three birds with one stone.”

  “What if you get killed, Stosh?” Flip said, shaking his head. “Like I told you, you’re the son I never had.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I assured him. “I’ll be fine.”

  5

  The Point of No Return

  I COULD SAVE ALL THOSE LIVES BY WARNING PRESIDENT Roosevelt about the attack on Pearl Harbor. And if the war happened anyway, America and its allies probably would have won it with or without Ted Williams, I figured. One man doesn’t win a war. So it probably wouldn’t matter to the war effort if I were to talk Williams into staying home and playing baseball. He would hit lots more homers in his career and maybe even more than Babe Ruth.

  But on the bike ride home from Flip’s store, I began to have second thoughts about the mission. I hate when that happens. You decide to do something, and then you start thinking about it. And the more you think about it, the more you think of all the reasons why you shouldn’t do it.

  What if Flip was right? What if preventing Pearl Harbor would keep America out of the war and the Nazis built an atomic bomb before we did? They would take over the world. And it would all be my fault.

  Plus, Flip told me that Ted Williams was a jerk that spit on people. Why would I want to help a guy like that get even more famous than he already was?

  As I rode my bike home, my mind kept going back and forth.

  It might be dangerous, I thought.

  But the FBI asked me to do it.

  I might get stuck in 1941 forever, I thought.

  But I could become a national hero.

  I might get killed, I thought.

  But I’d get to meet Ted Williams.

  My brain was being pushed and pulled in all different directions.

  When I got home, my mother was still at work. Good. I wouldn’t have to get into a big debate with her over the whole thing. And if I did decide to go on the mission, my mom wouldn’t be around to nag me about bringing along lunch, an umbrella, a first aid kit, or any junk like that.

  I grabbed a snack and tiptoed upstairs, trying to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake my uncle Wilbur. He’s really old and naps a lot of the time.

  The baseball card that Agent Pluto gave me was on my bed. I didn’t pick it up. Not yet. I knew what would happen once I picked it up.

  Rummaging through the drawer of my night table, I found a new pack of baseball cards and put it in my pocket—just in case. They would be my ticket home.

  I still hadn’t made up my mind. I looked at the Williams card, turning it over with a pencil to look at the back. It was probably very rare. The FBI must have paid a lot of money for it. Agent Pluto never asked for it back, so I had to assume it was mine to keep. Maybe Flip could appraise it for me. Maybe he would even buy it off me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something moving in the hallway. It was Uncle Wilbur in his wheelchair. He stopped in the doorway.

  “A penny for your thoughts, Joey,” he said.

  Uncle Wilbur and I didn’t have a lot in common. But we did have a special bond. I saved his life once.

  What happened was that I went back to 1919 to meet Shoeless Joe Jackson. I had the flu that day, and I brought my medicine with me. As it happened, I bumped into my great-great-uncle Wilbur. Well, he wasn’t Uncle Wilbur yet. He was just a kid in 1919, and he was sick with the flu. They didn’t have flu medicine in those days, and millions of people died in an epidemic that year. Uncle Wilbur would have been one of them, but I gave him my flu medicine. And when I got back to my own time, I was astonished to find Uncle Wilbur was alive—an old man who had survived the flu epidemic of 1919. He owed his whole life to me.

  “Oh,” I said while he sat in the doorway. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “It looked like you were thinking about something pretty hard,” he said.

  I told him the whole story about the FBI agent coming over to talk about Pearl Harbor and how Flip had advised me not to go.

  “What do you think I should do?” I asked.

  Uncle Wilbur thought it over for a minute, and then he wheeled himself closer to my bed.

  “I’ve been around for nearly a century, Joey,” he told me, “and in my whole life, I have only one regret.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When I was a teenager, a few years older than you,” he said, “there was this girl I liked. Well, I loved her, to tell you the truth. Beauti
ful girl. Cammy, her name was. Cammy Provorny. Her dad was a lawyer. She didn’t know I was in love with her. I never said a word. I thought a girl like that would never be interested in me. She was out of my league, y’know? And I was scared to ask her to go on a date. I didn’t want her to laugh in my face. I didn’t want to have to see her after she turned me down. So I never did anything about it.”

  “That’s sad,” I said.

  “And to this day, Joey, every day I think about Cammy Provorny. I think about how my life might have been different if I had simply asked her to go for a walk with me. Maybe we would have hit it off. We might have gotten married. We might have raised a family, and I might have had a son like you. You never know.”

  “And you never got married to anybody?” I asked.

  “I never met another girl that made me feel the way Cammy did,” Uncle Wilbur said. “You only live once, Joey. That’s all I’m saying. And you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take. You know who said that?”

  “Uh…Michael Jordan?” I guessed.

  “Wayne Gretzky.”

  Uncle Wilbur rolled back out of the room. I closed the door behind him and sat back down on my bed.

  I don’t want to be a sad old man someday, looking back on my life and wondering what might have happened if I had done things differently. I don’t want to have regrets.

  I picked up the Williams card. It was in a clear plastic holder. I squeezed the holder in the middle and the card slipped out, fluttering onto the floor. I leaned over and picked it up.

  Nothing happened at first. It never does. I closed my eyes and thought about Ted Williams. Maybe he was a jerk. Maybe he was a nice guy. But I wouldn’t know from some old book or someone’s old memories. I would find out on my own.

  It didn’t take long, maybe a minute or two. There was a gentle buzzy feeling in my fingertips. It was sort of like a cat purring. It felt nice.

  After a short time, the feeling started to move. Up my arm. Across my shoulder. Down my back. There was a whooshing sound in my ears, as if air was passing through my head.