Mickey & Me

by Dan Gutman

  In the second inning, the Peaches put runners on second and third with two outs. But the runner on second was taking a very long lead, so Mickey called for a pitchout and picked her off.

  Chicks 6, Peaches 0.

  The innings went by and Connie Wisniewski was cruising. The Peaches were baffled by her pitches, which appeared to rise and curve at the same time.

  After each side was retired, there was some sort of promotion for the crowd. In the second inning, the Milwaukee Fire Department drove their new pumper out on the field, to the applause of the fans. In the third inning, there was a dog obedience demonstration. Two random fans were awarded a bag of groceries and an electric roaster in the fourth inning. Through it all, vendors circulated around the stands, selling not just hot dogs but also war bonds, to support the troops fighting overseas.

  By the fourth inning, the sun was gone and the lights—not nearly as bright as the outdoor lights I had seen in the twenty-first century—were turned on. Swarms of insects that had been buzzing around the field took turns flying suicide missions into the hot bulbs.

  The Peaches had squeezed out a couple of runs by that time, so the score was 6-2 when the Chicks came to bat in the bottom of the fourth. Mickey was swinging a bat in the on-deck circle.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the public address announcer said, “an important news bulletin has just come over the wires from Europe.”

  Everyone in the ballpark—even the hot dog vendors—stopped what they were doing.

  “We have just received word that the Allies have captured the city of Rome. I repeat, the capital of Italy has fallen to the Allies! On to Berlin and Tokyo!”

  A roar swept across the crowd. People were hugging each other and throwing their hats in the air.

  I didn’t know that much about World War II, but I did know we fought against Germany, Italy, and Japan. I knew that the war ended when we dropped atomic bombs on Japan. If Rome had been defeated and the D day invasion had begun, that meant we were winning the war.

  Everybody in the Chicks dugout was happy about the news. Then I noticed Mickey in the on-deck circle. She wasn’t swinging her bat back and forth anymore. She was just standing there, as if she was frozen.

  Then I remembered. Her husband was fighting in Italy. His rhyme had stuck in my head—“When the Allies take Rome, I’m coming home.” After being apart for two years, Mickey and her husband would finally be together again.

  One by one, the other Chicks noticed Mickey, standing like a statue in the on-deck circle. I waited for a big smile to break out across her face, but it didn’t come. She looked very serious, like she was deep in thought.

  “Didja hear that, Mick?” Tiby Eisen bubbled, running out of the dugout to give her a hug. “Tom’s coming home!”

  Mickey hugged Tiby for a few seconds. Then she spit and wiped her hands on her dress as she went up to home plate.

  “I heard it,” she said. “Let’s play ball.”

  The Chicks were silent, shooting puzzled looks and shrugged shoulders at each other.

  “What’s with her?” I asked Merle.

  “Beats me.”

  After she grounded to short and sat back on the bench, nobody said a word to Mickey. She didn’t look like she wanted to talk about it. It was like the announcement had never been made.

  Dolores Klosowski went back to peeling her potatoes. Max Carey went back to flashing signs and barking encouragement. I went back to flirting with Merle.

  Then in the top of the fifth inning, Connie Wisniewski’s fastball must have lost a few miles per hour, because the Peaches suddenly started hitting. After a pair of singles, a passed ball, and a triple, the score was 6-5, and the Peaches looked like they were about to break the game wide open. They had runners at second and third with their cleanup batter—a lefty—strolling to the plate.

  “Two outs, girls!” shouted Max Carey. “We need an out, bad.”

  Mickey asked the umpire for time out, and she came rushing to the dugout.

  “You okay, Mick?” Carey asked her.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Flip me one of those potatoes, will you, Stosh?”

  I grabbed a potato out of the bucket on the ground near the end of the Chicks bench and tossed it to her.

  “Why do you need a potato at a time like this?” Carey asked.

  “You’ll see,” Mickey said, slipping the potato inside her chest protector and going back behind the plate.

  Connie looked in for the sign. The batter pumped her bat back and forth slowly. The infielders got ready. The runners danced off second and third.

  “Come on, Connie babe!” Mickey hollered. “Put it in here.”

  Mickey’s sign must have been for a pitchout. As soon as Connie let go of the ball, Mickey jumped to the left of the plate. The pitchout was right where she wanted it. She grabbed it and whipped it to third.

  Or, I thought she whipped it to third, anyway. What she had actually done was catch the ball, take the potato out from behind her chest protector, and whip the potato to third.

  Not that anybody in the ballpark knew that at the time. It looked like a baseball.

  Doris Tetzlaff, playing third, reached for the pickoff throw, but it was way too high. The potato sailed into left field.

  Mickey Maguire behind the plate.

  The runner on third base saw the errant pickoff, clapped her hands gleefully, and trotted home with what she thought was the tying run.

  Mickey, however, was standing in front of the plate with the ball in her hand. She calmly tagged out the runner, who had a look on her face like she had seen a ghost.

  “Yer out!” cried the umpire. Then he stopped. “Hold everything! What’d she throw?”

  One of the Peaches ran out to left field to retrieve the unidentified flying object.

  “It’s a potato!” she screamed, jogging back to show the evidence to the umpire.

  “So what?” Mickey said. “It’s not my fault if she’s so dumb she can’t tell the difference between a baseball and a potato.”

  “You can’t throw a potato!” the umpire yelled at Mickey.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s against the rules!”

  “Show me where it says in the rule book that throwing a potato is illegal,” Mickey challenged.

  “A potato is a foreign object!”

  “It is not,” Mickey claimed. “It’s from Idaho!”

  In seconds, both teams were crowding around home plate, yelling, kicking dirt at the umpire, and shoving each other. Fruit and vegetables of all sorts were thrown on the field by the fans, who, for the most part, considered the potato incident amusing. I grabbed a few more potatoes out of the bucket and tossed them to the fans in the front row for the fun of it.

  It took fifteen minutes before the ump was able to restore order. In the end, he ruled that Mickey had interfered with play, and the runner was safe at home.

  At the end of five innings, it was Chicks 6, Peaches 6.

  9

  The All-American Girl

  NEITHER TEAM SCORED OVER THE NEXT THREE INNINGS, and it was still a tie game when the Chicks came to bat in the bottom of the ninth. I had been playing patty-cake with some little kids in the stands, but returned to the dugout in time to watch the game.

  Chicks first baseman Dolores Klosowski was the leadoff batter. She was a lefty, and the Peach defense shifted to the right accordingly.

  With the count at 2-2, Dolores slapped a grounder to the left side of the infield. The third baseman bobbled the ball for a moment. Dolores, seeing she had a chance to make it to first safely, lunged for the bag as the first baseman reached for the throw.

  Her left foot slipped as she touched first, and Dolores tried to brace herself with her other leg. But she was moving too fast. I could see her leg was bent at a weird angle as she tumbled in a heap just past first base. There was a sick-sounding crack.

  “Safe!” called the ump.

  “Owwwww!” Dolores cried, writhing on the ground, holding he
r leg.

  We all rushed out of the Chicks dugout behind Max Carey, who had picked up the first aid kit the instant Dolores hit the dirt.

  “Give her room!” he screamed. “Call a doctor! Her leg may be broken.”

  Dolores was on her side, tears and makeup streaming down her face. The umpire looked on with sympathy.

  “If it’s dislocated, I know how to snap it back in place,” Connie volunteered.

  “Touch that leg and you’re dead!” Dolores shouted through the pain.

  “Get a stretcher,” Max Carey ordered, “and an ambulance. That bone is broken.”

  The Chicks carried Dolores back to the locker room. The ump gave Carey a five-minute injury time-out. In the distance, an ambulance siren was already wailing. A couple of the girls held Dolores’s hands and tried to comfort her.

  “Who’s gonna play first base in the tenth inning?” Mickey asked Max Carey.

  “If we can score a run,” he replied, “we won’t need a first baseman. There won’t be a tenth inning.”

  “Yeah, but we need a pinch runner for Dolores right now.”

  Max Carey looked around the locker room. He had used all his players. His gaze fell on me.

  “Hey, Josephine,” he said. “Can you run fast?”

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “You know how to slide?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I want you to go in there and run for Dolores.”

  “What are you, crazy?” I said, backing into the corner. “I’m a guy.”

  “So what?” Mickey said. “You don’t have to hit. You don’t have to play the field. Just run the bases. Don’t worry, we’ll drive you in.”

  “Th-this is ridiculous!” I stammered. “Everyone will know right away I’m not a girl.”

  “No they won’t,” Mickey insisted. “I’ve got an extra uniform. We’re about the same size. With a cap on—”

  “I’m not putting on a dress!” I protested.

  “It’s not a dress,” Connie informed me. “It’s a skirt.”

  I wasn’t sure what was the difference between a dress and a skirt. But I knew they were both worn by women, and there was no way I was going to put on women’s clothes.

  “Male bagpipers wear skirts all the time,” Doris Tetzlaff pointed out.

  “I don’t play bagpipes!” I shouted.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” Tiby said. “Look, you already dressed up like a chicken. What’s the big deal?”

  “We don’t have anyone else,” Max Carey said. “If we don’t produce a pinch runner in three minutes, we have to forfeit the game, girls.”

  All of them looked at me, with big eyes and pleading puppy dog faces.

  “I won’t do it!” I insisted. “And that’s final!”

  “Come on, be a man about it,” Mickey pleaded. “Put on the skirt.”

  That’s when they grabbed me. The entire team—with the exception of Dolores Klosowski, who was being loaded into an ambulance—attacked me. I was helpless. They were all over me, pulling off the chicken suit and ripping off my shirt and pants.

  “Help!” I screamed. “Give me back my clothes!”

  “We should really shave his legs!” Ziggy hollered. “He’s pretty hairy.”

  “No time for that!” Mickey replied.

  Once they had me down to my underwear, four of the Chicks held my arms and legs while the rest of them put the dress or skirt or whatever it was on me. I struggled to get free, but they were too strong. Tiby and Teeny put a pair of cleats on my feet, and Ziggy stuffed a couple of balled-up pairs of sweat socks in the front of the uniform.

  “There,” Mickey declared as she put a Chicks cap on my head. “Nobody will know you’re a guy.”

  “You look spiffy, sugar!” Merle said.

  “This is embarrassing,” I whined.

  “I don’t know,” Tiby said, looking me up and down. “I think he needs a little makeup.”

  “No makeup!” I shouted. “Even guys who play bagpipes don’t wear makeup!”

  “Lipstick at the very least,” Tiby decided.

  “No!”

  They grabbed me again before I could make a run for it. Five or six of them pinned me to the floor while Tiby ran to get her makeup case.

  “It’s a five-dollar fine if you get caught without lipstick on,” Mickey said. “You don’t want to get fined, do you?”

  This was all my stupid cousin’s fault. If she hadn’t slipped the Mickey Maguire card in place of my Mickey Mantle card, this never would have happened. I could be partying with Mickey Mantle right now instead of being tortured and humiliated by these lunatic girls.

  “Will you stop wriggling around?” Tiby said as she painted my lips. “I’m gonna smear it all over your face!”

  “Stop dillydallying!” shouted Max Carey, who was on his way to the dugout to confer with the umpire. “Step on it, girls!”

  When they were done with my makeover, they let me off the floor.

  “You look like a real all-American girl now,” Mickey said as she led me to the dugout, like a prisoner on his way to jail.

  “Pinch running for Klosowski,” boomed the public address announcer, “Josephine Stoshack.”

  Max Carey looked me up and down, then shook his head.

  “Pathetic,” he grumbled. “Simply pathetic.”

  It took the whole team to push me out of the dugout and onto the field.

  10

  Pinch Runner

  I’VE HAD A FEW HUMILIATING EXPERIENCES IN MY LIFE. Like the time my pants fell down while we were climbing the ropes in gym class. And then there was the time I claimed I could balance on one edge of a canoe on Hopkins Pond. But this, by far, topped them all.

  I jogged out to first base, pulling my cap down low in hopes that it wouldn’t be so obvious that I was a guy. Mickey was coaching first base. Max Carey had come out of the dugout to coach third.

  “Okay, listen carefully,” Mickey instructed. “There are no outs. If the ball is hit in the air, you’ve got to return to first. On the ground, you’ve got to go.”

  “I know all that—”

  “Not so low!” Mickey warned me. “They’ll hear you!”

  “I know all that,” I repeated, raising my voice to sound like a girl. “I’ve been in Little League for five years.”

  “Wait!” Mickey whispered as she peered into the dugout. “Max is giving you the steal sign.”

  “What?” I complained. “Max isn’t even in the dugout. I don’t want to steal. I thought you said you guys would drive me in.”

  “No time to argue. Max is the manager. He’s relaying the signs from third. He’s trying to stay out of a double play situation. You’re stealing on the first pitch. If you make it safely, watch the dugout. If Tiby flips her pigtails, that means you steal third. Got it?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I replied. “Tiby is the one with glasses and blond hair, right?”

  “Yeah. And if you see her sign, you let Max know by touching the hem of your skirt.”

  “What’s a hem?”

  “The bottom part.”

  “Okay.”

  This was complicated. Until this season, the “steal” sign of my Little League team was when one of the coaches shouted “Steal!”

  Betty Whiting, the Chicks right fielder, was up. I took a few short steps off first base, keeping an eye on the pitcher. She was watching me out of the corner of her eye. I wanted to get a good jump, but I had to be careful not to get too far off first or I’d get picked off.

  “Strike her out!” the catcher hollered. “No batter. No batter.”

  The pitcher went into her windup and I took off. Betty swung and missed, which served to prevent the catcher from charging forward to make the throw to second.

  I dug my cleats into the hard infield dirt, pumping my legs as fast as I could move them. The Peaches shortstop was coming over to take the throw. The stupid skirt was getting in the way of my legs as I ran. Five feet from the bag, I hit the dirt, hooking my toe
around the right side of the base just like Coach Tropiano had taught me. I held a hand to my head to prevent my cap from flying off. The shortstop caught the ball on a hop and slapped the tag on my leg.

  “Safe!” called the umpire, who had run out from behind the plate.

  The players in the Chicks dugout were on their feet, screaming for me. I got up and dusted the dirt off my skirt.

  “Way to go, Josephine!” Mickey hollered.

  “Thatagirl!”

  Standing on second base, I took a moment to catch my breath and make sure the shortstop threw the ball back to the pitcher. I didn’t want her to pull the old “hidden ball” trick on me.

  “You must be new,” the shortstop said to me.

  “Yeah,” I said in a fake high voice. “This is my first game.”

  “Say, a bunch of us are going dancing tonight,” she said. “Wanna come?”

  “I can’t,” I replied. “I’m…uh…getting my hair done.” Girls are always getting their hair done, I figured.

  “Really? Are you getting a perm? You’d look good with a perm.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “a perm.”

  I didn’t know what a perm was, but I seemed to remember my mom got one once. She came home and her hair was all curly. She looked like Little Orphan Annie.

  “Josephine!” Max Carey shouted from the third-base coaching box. “Stop squawking and get your head in the game!”

  I looked to the dugout. Tiby was frantically flipping her pigtails. That meant Max wanted me to steal third! I touched the hem of my skirt to let him know I had seen the sign.

  “Good luck with your perm.” The shortstop giggled. I had the feeling that she had only been trying to distract me by talking about my hair.

  By stealing second base, I had made it so that the Peaches could not get a double play or even a force-out on a ground ball. There was no pressure to steal third on the next pitch, so I just watched Betty take it for a called strike two. She swung and missed at the next one. One out.

  Ziggy was up next. I didn’t know if she was a good hitter, but she was waving her bat around menacingly. She watched two pitches out of the strike zone. I figured if I stayed close to second base, the Peaches pitcher might not think I was a threat to steal third and she wouldn’t pay such close attention to me.