by Alan Gratz
“So, um, I think this bat might have belonged to Babe Herman, this guy who played for Brooklyn a long time ago.”
Dave filed some paperwork in a wooden file cabinet. “How do you figure that?” he asked.
“Well, it’s got his name stamped on it.”
Dave nodded but didn’t look up. “Could be a factory bat. One of those models they sell at the store so you can own the same bat as your favorite major leaguer. Nobody’s going to pay more than what you put on that sheet. Dig deeper.”
“Dig deeper,” Snider muttered under his breath. “Dig you a grave.”
“What’s that?” Dave asked from across the room.
“I’m digging away,” Snider covered. He turned back to the computer. There were lots of hits for baseball almanac sites and statistical pages, and a few mentions of Babe Herman on websites built by middle-aged dudes who got all teary-eyed about the good old days of baseball at Ebbets Field. More than once he read about Herman doubling into a double play, when he and two other Robins ended up all standing on third base at the same time. The guy sounded like an idiot, but these website guys loved him. Maybe the bat could be worth something to one of these jokers after all.
The best stuff about Herman and the Robins was written by a guy named John Kieran in the New York Times. From the looks of it he wrote about all kinds of New York sports from back in the day, but he seemed to really enjoy laying into the Robins. His stuff was hysterical: He’d start off with poetic stuff, then find some way to slam the team before the end of the first paragraph. The trouble was, that’s all Snider could read for free. The rest of the articles cost money to read, and there was no way he was doing that.
Besides, how would any of it prove Babe Herman had actually used this bat? He was about to give up when he read the first paragraph of a Kieran story that started off with a description of Babe Herman stepping up to the plate, talking about how he spit a huge glop of tobacco juice on his hands and rubbed it all over the bat’s handle. The brown stains! Snider sniffed the bat. Was that a faint tobacco smell? Maybe that stuff wasn’t pine tar, maybe it was tobacco—which was actually pretty gross. The question was, were they Babe Herman’s tobacco stains?
The article also said Herman knocked the dirt off his cleats with the bat, and Snider knew exactly what Kieran was talking about. He’d done that to his own cleats a thousand times playing on the Prospect Park fields, only his bat was graphite and indestructible. Well, except that it had melted with everything else in the fire. But smacking his shoes with it had never done any damage to it, not like it would have done to a wooden bat, and Herman would have had metal cleats that really chewed it up.
Snider stood and hopped until he was balanced on his one good leg, then took the wooden bat in hand and pretended to knock dirt off the bottom of his cast. The chewed-up part was perfectly placed.
Snider lost his balance and the bat slipped. It thwacked his cast and he yowled.
“Everything okay in there?” Uncle Dave asked. Snider noticed he didn’t exactly come running.
“Yeah, great,” Snider said. He winced and sat back down, leaning the bat against the counter.
The stamps on the handle were the next thing Snider had to figure out. Who would put postage stamps on a bat and drop it in a mailbox, and why? He did a couple of searches with Babe Herman and stamps, then just with stamps and bats, but got nothing useful either way—just more stuff about Babe Ruth and stamp collecting. But a stamp collector might be able to tell him something about the pieces on the bat, right? They put new stamps out every year. Maybe some stamp nut could tell him at least what year the bat was mailed.
Snider tried his uncle first, figuring he might know something since he owned an antiques store, but Dave shook his head.
“Not my thing,” he said through a mouthful of granola bar. “You need a philatelist.”
“A whatsit?”
“Stamp collector.”
No duh, Snider thought. Dave went to an old paper Rolodex file and pulled out a card. “Here’s the guy I send people to when they come in with stamps. He’s here in Brooklyn.”
Snider snagged a packing tube to carry the bat in and told Dave he was going out, checking the time on his phone to make sure he would get back in time to watch the Mets game that evening. A short subway ride later Snider was thunking his way down a sidewalk in Williamsburg, looking for the address of “Philo’s Philately.” He shuddered to think what his friends would say if they heard about this.
The stamp shop was on the top floor of a two-story walk-up that put his iffy crutch skills to the test, and Snider wondered, not for the first time that day, if any of this was even worth it. At the top of the stairs he paused to catch his breath, then rang the bell.
Philo—if that was really the dude’s name—was a small, wiry man with thick glasses, a tall, thin neck, and a balding head. Everything about him was brown too—he had brown eyes, brown hair, brown corduroy pants, a brown collared shirt, and a brown sweater. He raised a suspicious eyebrow at Snider, the same kind of look Snider had seen on the faces of countless adults who wondered what kind of trouble a fourteen-year-old boy was about to bring them. Snider was tempted to just turn around and forget about it, but he’d already come all this way.
“Yes?”
“My name is Snider Flint. I’m David Flint’s nephew. He sent me with a question about philly—philata—with a question about some stamps.”
Uncle Dave’s name worked like a magical key, and the brown man opened the door wide for Snider. “Ah. Mr. Flint has sent a great deal of business my way. Philo Cohen,” he said by way of introduction. “How can I be of assistance?”
The inside of Philo’s Philately was as brown as its owner, filled with dark wood chairs and tables and stained brown bookcases filled with brown-covered books. There was nothing brown about the insides of the display cases throughout the room, though. They were filled with every color of the rainbow, all in tiny inch-tall works of art.
“Sorry,” Snider said when he realized he hadn’t answered Philo’s question.
“Not at all. Postage stamps are my passion, and too often I forget how dazzling they can be when one is not surrounded by them all the time.”
“Ah, yeah. Right.”
“Now, how may I help, Master Flint?”
Snider put the packing tube on a table and withdrew the baseball bat. Philo arched an eyebrow, but understood when Snider turned the handle to reveal the postage stamp fragments.
“Intriguing,” said Philo. He beckoned Snider to bring the bat over to another table with a lamp and a magnifying glass on swinging arms.
“Why on earth would someone put postage stamps on a baseball bat?”
“No idea,” Snider said. “And I know they’re kind of torn up, but I was hoping you could at least tell me what year they came out.”
Philo studied the bat handle under a powerful magnifying glass.
“Snider is an interesting name,” Philo said.
“What?”
“Your first name. Is it a family name?”
“Yeah. It’s like the last name of a whole other side of my family.”
“Aha!”
“Aha?”
Philo pointed to one of the stamps under the glass with a pair of tweezers. “This one will be the thirteen-cent Harrison.” He chuckled. “A makeup stamp. Postmaster New was a Benjamin Harrison man. Resented Woodrow Wilson getting a seventeen-cent stamp the year before.”
“Yeah, I can see how he would hate that,” Snider said, not really having any idea what the guy was talking about.
“And here, this one . . . torn, but obviously a two-cent Sesquicentennial Exposition stamp. You can even see the gum breakers here on the back where it’s peeled up a bit—”
“That’s great,” Snider said. “But can you tell me what year the stamps came out?”
Philo Cohen stood. “Well, a sesquicentennial is one hundred and fifty years. That means this stamp was printed for the one hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the United States.”
Snider glanced around for a calculator.
“1926,” Philo said.
“1926? You’re sure?”
Philo selected a brown volume off the shelf, flipped through a few pages, and turned it so Snider could see it. There, under the exciting heading “Postage Stamps of the United States First Issued in 1926” were full-color pictures that matched the torn pieces of the two stamps still clinging to the bat.
“Hey, that’s great!” Snider said. “Can I get a copy of that page?”
Philo bowed slightly. “I’m happy to oblige. If you’ll wait just a moment.”
While the philatelist went to a photocopier in his office, Snider peered through the magnifying glass at the stamps. He turned the bat to see the stamp fragments better and saw again the illegible handwritten address. Under a bright light and a magnifying glass it wasn’t so illegible.
“Spalding, Chicago, Illinois?”
Philo returned from his office. “What’s that?”
“The address. It just says, ‘Spalding, Chicago, Illinois.’”
“You’d be surprised at how diligent the U.S. Postal Service is about delivering to even the vaguest of addresses,” Philo told him, “and people were far less careful about those things in the past, from what I’ve seen on vintage envelopes.”
“But who is Spalding? I know I’ve seen that name just recently.”
“If I may?” Philo said, turning the bat slightly. There, clear as day under the magnifying glass, was written in the bat’s baseball diamond logo: “Trade Mark Spalding No. 200, Oil Temp. Made in U.S.A.”
So the bat had been mailed back to its maker in 1926, and Snider was pretty sure Babe Herman had used the bat himself. So why had he sent it back to the bat company? And how could Snider prove it was Herman who sent it?
Snider thanked Philo and escaped before the philatelist could tell him the story of every single postage stamp on the premises. But instead of heading back to Fulton Street Antiques and Collectibles, Snider took the subway to Grand Army Plaza to hit the Brooklyn Public Library. John Kieran had steered him right the first time, and he wanted to go back and see what else the writer could tell him. With a year now—1926, Babe Herman’s rookie year—a librarian was able to help Snider find everything John Kieran had written about the Brooklyn Nine for the entire year. Then he had to sit at a huge microfiche machine and scroll through every New York Times for that year until he got to the articles he wanted—but at least it was free. Still, it would have driven him nuts if Kieran wasn’t as funny as the guys on ESPN.
Snider read for almost an hour until he found it, the last piece of the puzzle about Babe Herman’s bat. It was so perfect he almost shouted out loud. In an interview with John Kieran just a few days after the infamous double/double play, Babe Herman told the reporter with a completely straight face that he didn’t blame himself, or his teammates, or even the umpires. He blamed his bat. It had to be flawed—that was the only answer to his recent struggles. The bat was defective, he figured, and that very day he had marched down to the post office and mailed the cursed thing back to the fellows who’d made it.
3
Uncle Dave munched on a carrot while he read through the photocopied pages Snider had laid out.
“Is it good enough?”
“You mean, does it prove this was really Babe Herman’s bat? Yeah, I’d say so.”
Snider nodded with what he hoped wasn’t too much enthusiasm.
Uncle Dave examined the bat. “Better than that, you’ve proven this bat was used on a particular day, in a particular game. A famous game, no less. A provenance like this without an eyewitness is practically impossible. This is really impressive, Snider.”
“What do you think it’s worth?”
Uncle Dave took a bite out of his carrot.
“I don’t know. Say . . . twelve hundred dollars?”
“Twelve. Hundred. Dollars!?”
“Just an educated guess, really. Collectible value is all about what the market will bear.”
Snider pulled a calculator over and did the math. His commission on $1,200 would be $180. That was six tickets in the upper deck box seats at Shea Stadium. He rubbed his hands together.
“Okay, so now what?”
“Now we wait and see if someone’s looking for a Babe Herman bat. We’ll put it on display here in the shop and we’ll list it online.”
Snider’s heart sank as he looked around the cluttered shop. Most of this stuff had been here as long as he could remember.
“So what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“Go back to the box. See what you can do with everything else. That baseball has to have a story.”
Uncle Dave went to the computer to list the bat and Snider slumped on his stool. There had to be some way of finding a buyer quicker than just putting the thing up in the front window or waiting for someone to type “Babe Herman bat” into a search engine. He tossed up the ratty old ball from the box and caught it. He didn’t know the ball’s story, but the bat had a story. The trick was just figuring out who cared enough about that story to buy it.
Those fan sites. That’s who cared enough to buy it—whoever took the time to post those websites Snider had found when he first searched online for info about Babe Herman and the Brooklyn Robins. When Dave was finished at the computer Snider hopped over and found the sites again. A couple of them hadn’t been updated in a while, but one had a photo gallery with new pics added in the last six months, and it even had a forum where people could discuss their memories. There were very few posts—most of them by the host. That was the guy Snider wanted.
Snider wrote an e-mail introducing himself and giving a little background on the bat. He didn’t want to go too overboard, though, in case the guy wasn’t interested, and he didn’t want it to sound like spam either. He read over the e-mail one more time, then hit SEND and went back to the box of baseball memorabilia. All morning long he tried every angle he could think of to find out more about the hat, the photo, the beauty guide, and particularly the baseball. Nothing. He even got the phone number of the Atlanta auction company Uncle Dave had bought the lot from and called to see if they could put him in touch with the original owner. They couldn’t. The box had been part of an estate sale: Some man named Walker who had no close relations for Snider to call.
It was crazy to think the guy who ran the Brooklyn Robins site would e-mail him back that day—or ever—but Snider kept checking. Why not? He didn’t have anything better to do. But it was more than that now. He’d come all this way and he wanted to see it out, to finish it.
And a hundred eighty bucks wouldn’t be too bad either.
Snider was reading about how early baseballs were made when the e-mail alert chimed and he clicked over to find a response from the man with the Robins site. He was interested! He wanted to see the bat! His name was Brian McNamara, he was a teacher in New Jersey, and he wanted to come to Brooklyn later tonight—but it would be after the store was already closed. Snider called Uncle Dave in and showed him the e-mail.
“Tell him I’ll keep the store open, and you’ll be here to talk to him.”
“Me?”
“Sure. It’s your commission, right? This is your deal. That means you make the sale.”
“What do I do? What do I say?”
“Tell him everything you told me. Show him all the research you collected on the bat. If he’s interested, negotiate a price. Start at one thousand five hundred dollars, though. He’ll want to haggle. And I know you know how to haggle.”
Uncle Dave went back to work and Snider hit REPLY, but his hands hovered over the keyboard. He suddenly wasn’t so sure he wanted to sell the thing, which was stupid. It was just a dumb old bat, right?
Mr. McNamara was a white-haired man, older than Uncle Dave but not grandfatherly, with a neatly trimmed white beard and an easygoing smile. True to his word, Uncle Dave sat back and watched while Snider laid out his research
for the man. At first Snider was nervous and stumbled over the points he had spent all afternoon preparing, but McNamara listened patiently.
“May I hold it?” he asked when Snider was finished.
Snider looked to his uncle to see if it was all right, but all Dave did was smile.
“Sure, I guess,” Snider said.
McNamara took the bat in his hands as though he were weighing it. He ran his hands down the length of it, pausing to feel the indentions where the Spalding logo had been burned on. He felt the chewed-up end, examined the torn postage stamps, smelled the handle, and Snider felt another pang at maybe parting with it.
“Can you imagine?” he said. “The very same bat Babe Herman used to hit that double off the wall in right center. They say he was such an incredible hitter that they had to put a fence on top of the right field wall at Ebbets to keep him from putting out the windows of the building across the street. I don’t remember the fence, but then I didn’t get to see many games at Ebbets before the Dodgers left town. My father took me to the very last game they ever played there in 1957. I was very young, but I can still remember the grown men and women weeping around me at the end.”
Snider had a hard time picturing a stadium full of adults crying about a baseball team leaving town, but he didn’t say anything.
“The provenance was your work, I take it?” the man asked Snider.
“Yes sir.”
“It’s a fabulous piece of detective work. How much are you asking?”
“One—one thousand five hundred dollars,” Snider said, his voice cracking. He’d meant to be so much firmer about that, but the weird feeling he had about not wanting to sell it made him stumble.
The older man set the bat back on the counter and stared at it. Snider could tell he wanted it. But did he want it more than Snider did? How much would this guy pay for a piece of history, a mere piece of wood that had value far beyond the material used to make it?
“I’ll give you one thousand dollars,” the man said.
One thousand dollars! It wasn’t what they had wanted to get, but a thousand dollars was a lot of money. Snider looked back at his uncle, but Dave just shrugged at him, as if to say: “It’s your deal.”