The Brooklyn Nine

by Alan Gratz

  Snider cleared his throat. “Fourteen hundred.”

  “Eleven.”

  “Thirteen,” Snider said, falling into the negotiation more easily now.

  “Twelve hundred—and I’m afraid that’s as high as I can go.”

  “Done,” Snider said. Twelve hundred dollars! He’d sold the bat for twelve hundred dollars.

  McNamara visibly relaxed, then smiled. “He’s quite good at this, you know,” he said to Uncle Dave, who had come over to handle the payment.

  “His first find,” Dave said. “He’s a natural.”

  Snider stood with Mr. McNamara while Dave ran his credit card. It was gone. The bat he’d worked so hard to document, Babe Herman’s bat, wasn’t his anymore. The white-haired man put his hand on it again.

  “Oh, this was an extravagance,” he said, “but I had to buy it. For my father. He was there, you know. At the game where Herman ended up on third base with Fewster and Vance. He used to tell me stories about the Daffiness Boys when I was young.”

  “Are you going to give the bat to him, then?” Snider asked.

  “Oh no. He’s dead now. For the last few years he didn’t even remember who I was, but he remembered the Dodgers, the Robins, all those games he went to as a boy. It was the only thing we could really talk about, the only connection we still had.” He smiled sadly. “I suppose that’s all we ever have in the end. Stories about the people who are gone and a few mementos to remind us they were here.”

  McNamara settled up and said his good-byes, and Uncle Dave locked the front door and turned off the lights.

  “You did it,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  Uncle Dave opened the cash register and counted out one hundred and eighty dollars. “Your commission,” he said.

  Snider fanned out the money, not so much to count it as to look at it.

  “You wish you hadn’t sold it?” his uncle asked.

  “A little. Yeah.”

  “That happens. You became part of its story, if only for a few days. That’s not easy to let go of. But you didn’t have to sell it.”

  “I know,” Snider said. He put the money in his pocket and worked himself up on to his crutches. “But that guy should have it. That bat was a bigger part of his life. It meant more to him than it did to me.”

  “You mean like your old house meant a lot more to me and your dad than it does to you?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. Beat me over the head with it, why don’t you.”

  Uncle Dave raised his hands in surrender. “I’m just saying. All right. So, you think you can pull any more miracles out of that box?”

  “Nah. I’ve been over this stuff a hundred times. There’s a Sandy Koufax card worth maybe forty bucks, and this Jim Gilliam guy is worth like ten or fifteen, but there’s no special story for either one of them. This Brooklyn cap is vintage—worth maybe a few hundred dollars—but I don’t know who wore it or when. And I don’t know who’s going to want a photo of some Little League championship team from Long Island.”

  Uncle Dave pulled the tattered old brown baseball out of the box. “What about this?”

  Snider took the ball from him. “Well, it’s old. Like early eighteen hundreds old, based on the way it’s stitched. It was handmade too—you can see the holes poked through are uneven, and the leather flaps aren’t exactly the same size. And this piece—see underneath it?—there’s some wear inside the ball, like this is leather from a shoe or something. Maybe the person who made it was a tailor or a shoemaker or something. I don’t know. Only thing I know for sure is that somebody really loved this ball.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Look at it. It got used so much it fell apart, and every time it fell apart somebody repaired it again, over and over. They even carved their initial into it too—S.”

  Dave took the ball from Snider. “You couldn’t figure out anything else about it?”

  Snider shrugged. “I called the people who sold it. It was part of some guy’s estate, but he’s dead now, and there wasn’t anyone left who was related to him. If he knew what its deal was, where it came from, it died with him. But it had to have some kind of story. Why else would anybody keep a junky old ball like this around?”

  “Sentimental value,” Dave said.

  “Yeah. Which means it’s worthless, I guess.”

  “Not to the person who kept it all those years,” his uncle said. “And not to you. Here. You keep it. It’s yours.”

  “But it’s old. It has to be worth something.”

  “Okay. Give me ten bucks for it.”

  “Five,” Snider said.

  Uncle Dave laughed. “Deal. You drive a hard bargain, especially when you could have had it for free.” He made change for Snider from the till. “There. Now it’s official. You’re part of its history. ‘Purchased by Snider Flint in Brooklyn, New York, June 13, 2002.’ There’s just the small issue of a hundred-fifty-year gap in the provenance.” He grinned. “But from now on, you’ll know exactly what its story is, because you’ll be living it.”

  Snider ran his fingers over the rough seams of the ball and brushed the carved letter S with his thumb—an S for Snider now.

  “I wonder what happened to the guy who made this?” Uncle Dave turned off the last of the lights. “There’s no telling. Come on—there’s a Mets game on TV, and I think I know where the remote is.”

  Author Notes

  First Inning

  Alexander Cartwright, considered by many today to be the father of modern baseball, was a bookseller and volunteer fireman, and his Knickerbocker Volunteer Fire Department gave its name to the baseball club Cartwright helped found. For their new sport, the Knickerbockers borrowed rules from older ball games like “town ball,” “three-out, all-out,” and “one old cat,” and added some new rules of their own—like standard distances between the bases, foul territory, and, most importantly, no more throwing the ball at runners (“soaking” them) to get them out! In 1849 Cartwright left New York and, like so many other people, headed for California to try and get rich in the gold rush. He introduced the Knickerbocker baseball rules to towns and players all along the way, becoming a sort of Johnny Appleseed of America’s game.

  Second Inning

  Contrary to popular belief, Abner Doubleday, who makes an appearance this inning as a real Union general, did not invent the game of baseball in a cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York. That myth was most likely started by sports-star-turned-sporting-goods-manufacturer Albert G. Spalding, who was desperate to convince the world that baseball was an American invention with no ties to older games or other countries. Despite zero evidence that Doubleday had ever even seen a baseball, much less invented the game, the idea was presented as fact, a Hall of Fame was built in Cooperstown, and the myth persists to this day.

  Third Inning

  As professional baseball became the national pastime, Mike “King” Kelly became one of its first great stars. A true show-man, Kelly really did travel with a Japanese manservant and a pet monkey, and he is thought to be the first ballplayer to give autographs and the first to sell the rights to his name and image for product advertising. The song “Slide, Kelly, Slide” became a nationwide hit when it was released on a phonograph cylinder by Edison Studios, and after his playing career Kelly traded in on his fame to star on the vaudeville stage. In many ways, though, Kelly’s story is as sad as that of the slugger in “Casey at the Bat.” Heavy drinking cut short Kelly’s playing career and his life. Already washed out of professional baseball, Kelly died when he was just thirty-six years old.

  The title of this story comes from the subtitle of Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic,” which was published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888.

  Fourth Inning

  Hall of Famer Cyclone Joe Williams (later known as Smokey Joe Williams) was perhaps the greatest pitcher of his era, black or white, even though he never played a day in the majors. As far as I know, Cyclone Joe
never tried to pass himself off as a Native American, but one black man during that time did. In 1901, Baltimore Orioles manager John McGraw tried to sign black second baseman Charlie Grant to a major league contract as an American Indian named Chief Tokohama. McGraw and Grant were busted before “Tokohama” could ever play a game, and baseball’s color barrier remained unbroken for another forty-six years.

  Fifth Inning

  The 1920s were the heyday of wordy, “purple prose” sports writing, and John Kieran was one of its most famous figures. Kieran wrote for the New York Times sports section for almost thirty years, filling his sports columns with references to Latin, law, poetry, nature, and the works of William Shakespeare. In the hours before ball games, Kieran could be found visiting museums, zoos, parks, and libraries, and he had a habit of writing his articles in advance of the actual games. While I can’t say that Kieran ever really conspired to fix a numbers game, he certainly seems like the kind of man who would have appreciated the effort.

  One of Kieran’s favorite subjects had to have been Babe Herman, who led the league in errors, put lit cigars in his pockets, twice stopped to watch long home runs while running the base paths only to be passed by the hitter and called out, and really did double into a double play. A teammate of Babe Herman said, “He wore a glove for one reason: Because it was a league custom.” Years later during World War II when many of the younger players were called to military service, Herman was brought out of retirement to play for the Dodgers. He singled in his first at bat but tripped over first base and was almost thrown out. The Brooklyn fans gave him a standing ovation.

  Sixth Inning

  The All-American Girls Softball League was founded in 1943 by Chicago Cubs owner Phillip Wrigley, who wanted a women’s league that would play in major league stadiums while the men’s teams were on the road. The league played a cross between softball and baseball until the end of the 1945 season, when the name was changed to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and overhand pitching and smaller ball sizes were adopted. Almost 200,000 fans turned out during the first season to watch the women play ball, and even though Wrigley’s dream of women playing to packed major league stadiums never did happen, the league lived on in small Midwestern towns until 1954, when the A AGPBL played its last skirted season.

  All the major characters in this story besides Kat—from the players to the coach to the ball girl—were real people.

  Seventh Inning

  Duck and Cover was an educational film shown to American schoolkids, and, at least at the time I write this, can be seen in its entirety on both Wikipedia and YouTube. Years later, people argued that ducking and covering would provide little real help in the event of a nuclear attack, and that the film did nothing but heighten kids’ fears. That didn’t stop the film from being shown over and over again to students from the late 1940s all the way, incredibly, to the 1980s.

  Eighth Inning

  As of the beginning of the 2008 season, there have been only seventeen official perfect games in the history of Major League Baseball. More people have orbited the moon than thrown perfect games in the majors, and no pitcher has ever thrown more than one. The ninth inning of Michael’s perfect game in my story is loosely based on the ninth inning of the perfect game thrown by Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1965. I’ve tried to evoke the poetry of Dodgers radio announcer Vin Scully’s call of that game in my story, including a nod to my favorite line from his broadcast: “I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world.” The brief but thrilling transcript of Scully’s ninth-inning call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game can be found online.

  Ninth Inning

  In 2006, a Babe Herman Pro Model Signature Bat was sold to a collector at auction for $1,508. Tobacco stains and cleat marks proved it had been used in games, but there is no way to know if it was the same bat Herman used to hit into the famous double/double play. Oddly, the bat does bear the remnants of three postage stamps on the barrel, and faint, illegible writing that may be the address of Spalding, the bat’s manufacturer. How or why the bat was mailed back to the factory no one knows.

  Extra Innings

  The story of the Gratzes is not nearly as exciting as the story of the Schneiders and Flints, but my own family history played a part for me in the writing of this novel.

  Our family’s American journey began in 1861, when nineteen-year-old Louis Alexander Gratz, a German Jew, landed in New York City with ten dollars in his pockets and no knowledge of English. A few months later he volunteered to fight in the Civil War, and less than a year after arriving in America, Louis Gratz was an officer in the Union Army. Louis, the main character in “The Red-Legged Devil” is named in his honor.

  Though Louis Gratz never changed his last name, he did, like some immigrant Jews, convert to Christianity to better fit in. Louis covered his tracks so well, in fact, that my family didn’t even know we had Jewish ancestors until my grandfather began to research our family history more than a hundred years later!

  To help research the Seventh Inning, I interviewed my father, who was a boy in 1957. He remembers duck and cover drills and collecting baseball cards when he was a kid. I was able to draw on my own childhood for the Eighth Inning, when I played youth baseball and worshipped movies like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  By 2002, I had grown up and moved away from home and had a family of my own, but still not a day goes by during baseball season that I don’t talk to my father on the phone about some terrific hit, some great defensive play, or the sad state of the fantasy baseball team we share. Baseball, more than any other sport, has a magical way of connecting fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren, and ancestors back down the line. For that reason and many more, The Brooklyn Nine is, at long last, dedicated to my mom and dad.

  Special Thanks

  I owe a great debt of thanks for The Brooklyn Nine to editor extraordinaire Liz Waniewski—not to be confused with Grand Rapids Chicks pitcher Connie Wisniewski, although I more than once typed “Liz” instead of “Connie” in that inning. Editorial thanks are also due to Brad Anderson, who got his first big-league at bats against me, and Robyn Meshulam, who led the team in assists. And thanks as always to copy editor Regina Castillo, who of course bats cleanup.

  In an age when information is a commodity, we’re incredibly lucky to still have libraries where all that wonderful knowledge is free for the asking, and I am indebted to the libraries of Emory University, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Appalachian State University for the bulk of the research I did on this book. I routinely cleared out their baseball and American history shelves for this project, and any mistakes that remain are my own.

  And thanks of course to my wife, Wendi, and my daughter, Jo, who put up with my surly editing moods, my closed office door, and baseball on TV every night, and special thanks to all the Gratzes, past and present; I am just another chapter in your story.