Mickey & Me

by Dan Gutman

  Mickey & Me

  A Baseball Card Adventure

  Dan Gutman

  Dedication

  Dedicated to Nina,

  my all-American girl

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1

  The Last Request

  2

  Benchwarmer

  3

  Boys and Girls

  4

  Slip Me a Mickey

  5

  Chicks and Chickens

  6

  A Real Chicken

  7

  A Strike for Freedom

  8

  Trick Play

  9

  The All-American Girl

  10

  Pinch Runner

  11

  Play Like Men, Look Like Girls

  12

  First Date

  13

  Alone at Last

  14

  Hooray for War

  15

  News

  16

  Heading Home

  17

  Enemies and a Friend

  18

  Home

  Facts and Fictions

  Permissions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Dan Gutman

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  WITH A BASEBALL CARD IN MY HAND, I AM THE MOST powerful person in the world. With a card in my hand, I can do something the president of the United States can’t do, the most intelligent genius on the planet can’t do, the best athlete in the universe can’t do.

  I can travel through time.

  Joe Stoshack

  1

  The Last Request

  “YOUR FATHER HAS BEEN IN A CAR ACCIDENT.”

  I almost didn’t hear the words. Or, if I heard them, I chose not to believe them.

  “Did you hear me, Joey? I said your father has been in a car accident.”

  She used to call him “your dad.” After they got divorced a few years ago, she switched to calling him “your father.” My mom’s voice came over the phone with a seriousness and urgency that I wasn’t used to hearing.

  Before the phone rang, I had been rushing to put on my Little League uniform. Running late, I was trying to jam my legs into my pants with my spikes on. I stopped.

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “He’s alive,” Mom replied. “That’s all they told me.”

  “Was he drunk?” Dad always liked his beer, sometimes a little too much, I thought.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it his fault?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was he wearing a seat belt? You know the way he hates—”

  “I don’t know,” my mother replied, cutting me off in mid-sentence. “Joey, listen to me carefully. I need to go pick up Aunt Liz and your cousin Samantha. I’ll take them to the University of Louisville Hospital. You know where that is. I need you to ride your bike over there. I’ll meet you at the emergency room waiting area. Have you got that?”

  “I got it.”

  “Repeat it back to me.”

  “I got it, Mom.”

  “Take your baseball glove and stuff with you. You can go straight to your game.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be at the hospital as soon as I can.”

  When I hung up the phone, it was like I was in a trance. My game that afternoon—probably our most important game of the season—didn’t matter much anymore. It’s funny how something can seem so important, and then something else comes along that turns your whole world upside down and you feel silly for being worried about the first thing. Just a silly baseball game.

  I never expected my dad to live forever, of course. But he wasn’t even forty years old! For the first time in my life, the thought seriously crossed my mind that he could die and I would have no father.

  Mechanically, I finished putting on my Yellow Jackets uniform jersey, went downstairs, locked up the house, and hopped on my bike. The University of Louisville Hospital was two miles away. I didn’t bother taking my bat or glove with me. There was no way I could play ball today.

  The emergency room at the hospital had no bike rack. I dropped my bike on the grass by the front door and ran inside. My mother wasn’t there yet. When I told the lady at the reception desk that my dad’s name was Bill Stoshack, she directed me to Room 114 down the hall. It took a few minutes to find it.

  “Your father is a very lucky man,” I was told by a tall doctor in blue scrubs.

  Dad didn’t look very lucky to me. He was unconscious and had tubes running in and out of him, and all kinds of machines were beeping around the bed. His face was banged up and bandaged so I could barely recognize him.

  “Is he gonna be okay?” I asked. I felt tears welling up in my eyes but fought them off.

  “We hope so,” the doctor said. “We won’t know with certainty for a couple of days, after the swelling goes down.”

  My father was not drunk. But the driver of the car that hit him was, according to the doctor. It had been a horrific head-on crash a few blocks from where my dad worked as a machine operator in downtown Louisville. Several other cars had been involved in the collision, and a bunch of people were hurt.

  “We believe your father had a subdural hematoma,” the doctor told me. “It’s a blood clot between the skull and the brain. If he hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, he would be dead for sure.”

  That was a shock to me. My dad always hated the seat belt law. He said it took away people’s freedom.

  An emergency operation had already been performed to drain fluid from inside my dad’s skull, the doctor told me. There could be other problems. Dad was being given painkillers and drugs through an IV tube. A male nurse came into the room.

  “He has been going in and out of consciousness,” the doctor told us both as he made his way toward the door. “Don’t be alarmed if he wakes up and says something that doesn’t make sense. That’s just the drugs talking. I need to check on some other patients, but I’ll be back shortly.”

  I pulled up a chair next to the bed and leaned my head close to Dad’s until I could hear him breathing softly.

  “He’ll be in good hands here,” the nurse told me. I ignored him. What else was he going to say—It looks like your father is going to die any minute?

  I took Dad’s hand in mine. It was totally limp. He didn’t squeeze my fingers at all, the way he usually did. But he opened his eyes.

  “You okay, Dad?”

  “Butch,” he said quietly. He always called me Butch. “C’mere…. I need…to…tell…you…something.”

  I leaned closer.

  “Mickey…Mantle,” he whispered.

  “Is your father a baseball fan?” the nurse asked.

  “Yankee fan,” I corrected him. “He loves the Yanks. What about Mickey Mantle, Dad?”

  “His…card,” Dad said. He was struggling to get each word out. “The…rookie…card.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. Mickey Mantle’s 1951 rookie card was the most valuable card printed since World War II. It was worth more than $75,000. My dad had started me collecting baseball cards when I was little, and he taught me just about everything I knew about the hobby.

  “Why is he telling you this?” asked the nurse.

  “What about the Mantle rookie card, Dad?”

  “I…have…one.”

  “You have one? Where did you get it?”

  “Shhhh, listen,” he said. “I…hid it. Under…the…floorboard. Left side…of…your…bed. Under…the…rug.”

  I realized immediately why he was telling me about the Mantle
card. He thought he was going to die. My father never had much money. The Mantle card was going to be my inheritance.

  “You’re going to be fine, Dad,” I assured him. “Fifty years from now you can give me that card.”

  “No,” Dad croaked. “Write…this…down.”

  He looked very frail and weak, but he was summoning up the strength to speak. I grabbed a pen and pad from the drawer next to the bed.

  “Go ahead, Dad.”

  “World Series. 1951. Game Two. Fifth inning. Willie Mays hit a soft fly ball to centerfield. DiMaggio caught it.”

  “So?” I asked, jotting down the information.

  “Mantle was running over…to back up DiMaggio…. His right cleat got caught…on a drain cover. Mickey collapsed…like he’d been shot. They carried him off on a stretcher.”

  “Why did they have a drain in the middle of the outfield?” I asked. “That seems pretty stupid.”

  Dad shook his head, as if to say he had something more important to discuss.

  “Before the accident, Mickey was the fastest player in the game. He could run to first base in three seconds. After, he was never the same. His legs were shot. Who knows how good he would have been if he hadn’t stepped on that stupid drain? Who knows how many homers he would have hit, how many records he would have broken?”

  I put the pen down. I had an idea of where Dad was heading.

  “And you want me—”

  “To stop him,” Dad said, completing the sentence. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, Butch. Go back to 1951. You can warn him. Should be easy. You know how. You’re the only one who can do it. That’s why I gave you the card.”

  “Mickey collapsed like he’d been shot.

  They carried him off on a stretcher.”

  Dad closed his eyes. He had used all his strength to say what he had to say.

  “He’s hallucinating,” the nurse told me. “It sounds like he thinks you can travel through time.”

  “Ha-ha-ha.” I laughed. “That’s ridiculous.”

  In fact, I could travel through time…with baseball cards.

  Ever since I was about five years old, I noticed that baseball cards had an effect on me that they didn’t seem to have on other kids. When I picked up a card—particularly an old card—I felt a strange feeling in my fingertips. It was a tingling sensation, a gentle buzz that reminded me of the feeling you get when you brush a finger against a vibrating guitar string.

  I discovered that if I held the card long enough, this tingling sensation would travel up my arm, across my body, and the next thing I knew, I would find myself in 1909, 1947, 1932, or whatever year was on the baseball card. The card, somehow, had transported me to another time and another place. I would always end up somewhere near the player on the front of the card.

  This was my little secret. I had hardly told anybody about it.

  My mom always says everybody has a “special gift.” Some people are great musicians or brilliant mathematicians. Some people can fly planes or save people trapped in burning buildings. My special gift was that I could use baseball cards to travel through time.

  Dad opened his eyes.

  “And get yourself a haircut,” he murmured, closing his eyes again. “You look like a girl.”

  “He needs to rest,” the nurse told me, escorting me to the door.

  It seemed kind of silly, going back to 1951 to warn Mickey Mantle about some dumb drain cover hidden in the outfield of Yankee Stadium. But as I looked at my dad lying on the hospital bed, I had the feeling that this might be the last thing he would ever ask me to do. So I would try to fulfill his request.

  Unfortunately, as it often happens in the imperfect science of time travel, things don’t always turn out as you expect them to.

  2

  Benchwarmer

  MY MOTHER AND MY AUNT WERE HURRYING DOWN THE hallway as I left my father’s room. Mom kissed me on my forehead.

  “How is he?” asked Aunt Liz, my father’s older sister.

  “He’s sleeping,” I reported. “But I talked with him. I think he’s gonna be okay. He has a subdural hemasomething or other.”

  “Hematoma,” said Mom, who is a nurse and knows stuff like that.

  Aunt Liz hugged my mom, whose face was emotionless. I knew she had mixed feelings toward Dad. They had never really gotten along very well when they were married. But I always thought she still felt something for him. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have come to the hospital at all.

  To be perfectly honest about it, Dad and I didn’t always have the greatest relationship in the world either. He was an angry man, and he seemed to think he’d had more than his share of bad luck. Maybe he had. But in the last year or so—since I turned thirteen—we had begun feeling more comfortable around each other.

  “We dropped your cousin Samantha off at the Little League field,” Mom told me. “Can you bring her over to our house after your game and keep an eye on her tonight?”

  “You mean I have to baby-sit?” I whined. “You said you were going to bring her to the hospital with you.”

  “We decided that Samantha is too young,” Aunt Liz explained. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for her to see Uncle Bill laid out in a hospital bed.”

  “Okay,” I grumbled. I didn’t particularly want to take care of my annoying nine-year-old cousin, but this was an emergency.

  “I’ll be home as soon as I can,” Mom said. “But depending on your father’s condition, we may stay with him in the hospital tonight. There are leftovers in the fridge for dinner. Don’t pick up the phone or open the door. I don’t care who it is. You’re the man of the house. Be a good boy.”

  “I will, Mom.”

  “And get a hit, okay?” she said, messing up my hair with her fingers.

  “I’ll try.”

  I didn’t tell my mother that I had decided not to play that day.

  Louisville, Kentucky, is a big baseball town and has been for a long time. There was a major-league team here from 1876 until 1899. In fact, the National League was founded in Louisville, and the Louisville Slugger baseball bat was invented here. Today we have a big museum filled with bats used by the greatest players in baseball history.

  But I wasn’t thinking about bats, even as I rode my bike past the six-story-high baseball bat outside the Louisville Slugger Museum. I was thinking about my dad.

  He could be dying right now, I thought. Maybe I should ride back to the hospital to be with him. It could be my last time to see him. Then again, he might be fine in a couple of days. And I had agreed to take my cousin home with me after the game.

  When I skidded up to Dunn Field, our game was already in progress. In fact, I had missed three innings. According to the scoreboard, we were three runs behind Warehouse Video, the only team in the league that we never seemed to be able to beat. Because they had lost to a few of the weaker teams, we were ahead of them in the standings by one game. But if they beat us, Warehouse and the Yellow Jackets would be tied for first place.

  “Where were you?”

  Coach Tropiano came running over to me as soon as my kickstand touched the ground. He was a short man, only about five feet seven and not much taller than me. “We tried calling your house! We tried calling your mother at work!”

  “My dad was in a car wreck,” I explained. “We were at the hospital.”

  “Is he okay?” the coach asked, putting an arm on my shoulder. I think he had been going to yell at me for being late until he heard about my dad.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I hope so.”

  “Will you be able to play, Joe?”

  “I don’t think I can, Coach.”

  I could tell he was disappointed, even though he was doing his best not to show it. One of the other coaches had gotten into trouble recently for yelling at a kid, so all the coaches were being extra careful to be sensitive and stuff.

  The coach told me to take a seat on the bench. Our team was in the field, so the only kid on the ben
ch was Robert Greene. He couldn’t hit, throw, field, or run, but he did have one thing going for him—his mother was on the city council. Coach Tropiano usually put Robert in right field in late innings, where he could do the least damage. According to the league rules, every player has to play at least one inning or come to bat once in every game.

  Robert was picking his nose and wiping the result on the inside brim of his cap. Our team had signs for stealing, bunting, and swinging away, but I didn’t think that was one of them.

  “Where’s your glove, Stosh?” Robert asked me.

  “Didn’t bring it,” I told him. “I’m not playing.”

  “You hurt?”

  “Nah, my dad’s in the hospital.”

  “That sucks,” Robert said, and then resumed mining for nose gold.

  I turned around to scan the bleachers. When I made eye contact with Cousin Samantha, she stuck out her tongue and wiggled her fingers in her ears at me.

  The crack of a bat got my attention. One of the Warehouse Video players hit a long drive to left field. It sailed over Andrew Bakewell’s head and bounced off the fence on one hop. The kid who hit the ball was fast, and he was tearing around the bases.

  “Cutoff man!” I screamed, getting up off the bench. “Relay!”

  Andrew chased down the ball and whipped it to Christian Dark, our shortstop and probably the best defensive player in the league.

  By that time, the kid was rounding third and his coach was waving him home. Louie Borzone, our catcher, got into position for the play at the plate.

  “Slide, Brendan!” somebody yelled from the bleachers.

  Christian set himself and fired the ball home. Louie Borzone snared it on a hop just before the runner arrived. He braced himself for the collision and let the Brendan kid crash into him. Louie was the bigger of the two, and the Warehouse Video guy couldn’t knock him over. Louie held the ball, and the ump called the kid out.