Roberto & Me

by Dan Gutman

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “La Noche Vieja is one of the biggest nights of the year in Puerto Rico,” she told me. “Mr. Clemente left his wife and three young sons that night to help the earthquake victims. He was not looking for publicity or fame. It was a mission of mercy. In Spanish—as you should know, Tito—the word ‘clemente’ means ‘merciful.’”

  I felt like it was time for me to go. I thanked Señorita Molina for giving me the chance to bring up my grade.

  But after I left the classroom, I stopped dead in my tracks in the hallway. An idea popped into my head.

  I could stop it!

  I could go back in time and make sure Roberto Clemente didn’t get on that plane.

  I could save his life.

  3

  Just Do It

  I GUESS I NEED TO DO A LITTLE EXPLAINING. ONE DAY, WHEN I was a little kid, maybe eight or nine years old, I picked up one of my dad’s baseball cards. He used to have a huge collection, and his cards were all over the house. It drove my mom crazy. In fact, that was one of the reasons they got divorced.

  Anyway, I picked up this card that was on the table. It was an old card. I don’t even remember who was on it. I was staring at this card, and, suddenly, I felt this strange tingling sensation in my fingertips. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. And as I continued to hold the card, the tingling sensation became stronger and moved up my arm. It was almost like bugs crawling over me.

  I kind of freaked out, you know? So I dropped the card, and the tingling sensation stopped right away.

  But I was intrigued. I started experimenting with other baseball cards. Each time, I was a little less fearful and held on to the card for a few seconds longer.

  Finally, one day I was lucky enough to stumble on a Honus Wagner T-206—the most valuable baseball card in the world—and I decided not to drop it. I didn’t let go of the card. The tingling sensation moved up my arm, across my body, and down my legs, getting more and more powerful until I felt like I was vibrating from head to toe. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. Actually, it felt kind of good.

  And then, suddenly, I felt myself disappearing. It was almost as if every molecule that made up my body was being digitally deleted and emailed wirelessly to another location. Very strange.

  When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in my house in Louisville, Kentucky, anymore. I was in the year 1909…with Honus Wagner.

  But that’s a story for another day.

  The point is, I discovered that I have the unique ability to travel through time with the help of a baseball card. For me, a card is like a plane ticket. It takes me to the year on the card.

  Since that day, I’ve been on a number of trips through time. I got to meet Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, and a bunch of other famous players. I always bring a pack of new cards with me, because that’s my ticket home, back to my time.

  Maybe I was being a little overambitious, thinking I could travel back in time, change history, and save Roberto Clemente’s life. I mean, I had tried to change history before. My coach, Flip, once told me about this guy named Ray Chapman, who played for the Cleveland Indians. He was the only guy in major-league history to die from getting hit by a pitched ball. I’d figured I would go back to 1920 and save Chapman’s life. It should have been simple. But I messed up, and it didn’t work. Other times I’d tried to save the reputations of Shoeless Joe Jackson and Jim Thorpe. That didn’t work either. I’d even tried to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. That was a disaster.

  Come to think of it, I don’t think I have ever been successful with any of my missions. I wasn’t even able to see if Babe Ruth really called his famous “called shot” home run or see how fast Satchel Paige could throw a fastball.

  But those are stories for another day too. The thing is, I’ve got this power, this gift. Nobody else in the world has it, as far as I know.

  If you could do something that nobody else in the world could do, you would want to do it, right? What a waste it would be to have a special power like that and not use it. I had to at least try to save Roberto Clemente’s life.

  How hard could it be to prevent a guy from getting on a plane that’s doomed to crash? Probably not as hard as it would be to convince my mom to let me go.

  You see, time travel is dangerous stuff. It has been for me, anyway. The time I went back to 1919 to help Shoeless Joe Jackson, a bunch of gangsters kidnapped me, tied me to a chair, and almost shot me. Another time, I took my mother back to 1863 with me, and we landed in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg, with bullets whizzing by our heads. That was interesting. So I have to be careful about bringing up new time travel trips to my mother.

  I finished my homework and went downstairs. Mom was at the kitchen table, paying bills and doing some paperwork. There was music coming from the radio she keeps next to the sink.

  “What is that horrible sound?” I asked.

  I make fun of my mother because she listens to this awful oldies music from the sixties. The “classics,” she calls them.

  “That’s Jimi Hendrix,” Mom said. “‘Purple Haze’!”

  “Ugh, how can you listen to that?” I said, covering my ears. “It’s not music! It’s just noise.”

  My mom laughed, because my grandparents used to say the same thing to her when she was a little girl.

  “Hendrix was a genius,” my mother told me for the hundredth time. “And like a lot of geniuses, he died young. He died of a drug overdose in 1970, when he was just 27. Such a tragedy.”

  She gave me the perfect opening.

  “Mom,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “speaking of people who died young, does the name Roberto Clemente mean anything to you?”

  My mother knew that Clemente was a ballplayer, but that was about it. She’s not a huge baseball fan. I told her a little bit about Clemente and how he died in a plane crash while trying to deliver medicine and supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.

  “That’s so sad,” she said.

  “Mom, I was thinking,” I said, “maybe I can do something about it. I don’t have to get on the plane or anything. All I have to do is find Roberto and make sure he doesn’t get on the plane. If I can do that, he won’t die. I’ll be real careful. And it will be educational. It will be…”

  I figured I would be in for a tough battle. My mother is a little on the overprotective side. You know—I’m an only child and she’s a single parent and all. If anything ever happened to me, she would be all alone.

  But she surprised me. It took her about a millisecond to make up her mind.

  “Do it,” she said simply.

  “Really?”

  “Do it,” she repeated. “Joey, do you know why I became a nurse?”

  “Because you’re into blood and gore and guts?” I guessed.

  “No, to help people,” she said. “I could have chosen a career that paid more money or would have been fewer hours. Less blood and gore and guts. But I wanted to do something good for the world. I hope that when you grow up, you’ll use the skills you have to help other people in some way. You should have a cause. Everyone should. So, by all means, I approve. Go save Roberto Clemente. Just be careful.”

  I thought about what my mother said. I confess, when I first started traveling through time, all I really wanted to do was meet famous baseball players. It was just a joyride. But when I saw how dangerous it was, I decided to do it only if I had a real mission to accomplish. I wasn’t about to risk my life just to see some guy hit a famous home run. That’s what video is for. And now I had come around to thinking I would only travel through time if I could do some good, right some wrong, help somebody. And if I could save Roberto Clemente’s life—well, the world would be a better place. Because if he had 40 or 50 more years to help people, he could have accomplished so much more.

  “Do you want to come with me?” I asked my mom.

  “It’s tempting,” she said, “but g
oing back in time once was enough for me.”

  Now for the next part of my mission, which should be the easy part: All I had to do was get a Roberto Clemente baseball card.

  4

  The Great One

  FLIP’S FAN CLUB IS IN A STRIP MALL ON SHELBYVILLE ROAD. It’s the place to go in Louisville if you want sports cards and memorabilia. Coach Valentini opened the store after he retired. Flip is the kind of guy who can never sit around and do nothing all day. He has to be busy all the time. That’s the way I want to be when I retire someday.

  The bell on the door jangled when I walked in. Flip’s is a tiny little place, with cards and stuff jammed all over. Flip is not what you’d call a neat freak. And I doubt that the store makes much money for him. Not many kids are serious card collectors like me. But running the store gives Flip something to do when he’s not coaching our team. Baseball has always been his life.

  Flip was reading the newspaper when I came in. He’s really old, and it shows. The little hair he has is pure white, and some of it grows out of his ears and nose. Me and the other guys on our team always tell him that he should trim that stuff because it grosses us out, but Flip says he hardly has any hair so he’s not going to cut off what he’s still got left.

  “Hey, Stosh,” he said when I came in, “I was just readin’ an article about quantum physics.”

  “That’s funny, Flip,” I said.

  “No, for real,” he replied. “They figured out how to teleport a photon almost 90 miles.”

  “What’s a photon?” I asked.

  “How should I know?” Flip said. “Somethin’ to do with dark energy and traversable wormholes, it says here. A bunch of mumbo jumbo, if you ask me. But it says that if humans ever figure out how to travel through time, when we disappear, there’ll be a rush of air into the vacuum left behind. Yeah, and it says that papers are gonna fly around, and moisture will condense out of the air into clouds.”

  “I better watch out,” I told him. “I don’t want it to rain in my living room.”

  Flip laughed. Besides my mom and dad, he’s one of the few people who knows about my “special gift.”

  “What can I do fer ya today, Stosh? Or are ya just here for my scintillatin’ company and good looks?”

  “I’m looking for a Roberto Clemente card, Flip,” I told him. “You don’t have one, do you?”

  “Ah,” he said, “Clemente. The Great One, they used to call him. Plannin’ a little trip to New Year’s Eve, 1972, I’m guessing?”

  “Well, it doesn’t have to be that exact date,” I said. “As long as I can get to Roberto before he gets on that plane that killed him. I’m gonna try to talk him out of going and save his life.”

  “A noble mission,” Flip told me. “A tip of the hat to you, my boy. Hey, here’s a trivia question about Clemente: Why did he choose the number 21 for his uniform?”

  “No clue,” I replied.

  “Because there are 21 letters in his full name: Roberto Clemente Walker. You could look it up.”

  Flip pulled out one of his thick baseball books and started flipping through the pages until he found the entry for Roberto Clemente.

  “Look at Clemente just as a hitter,” Flip told me. “He won the National League batting title four times. Four times! When he died, only ten other players in history had reached 3,000 hits. He played in 14 World Series games and got a hit in each one. Nobody with more than 12 World Series games can say that. And even though Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Hank Aaron were way more famous, Clemente had a higher lifetime batting average than any of ’em.”

  “I know he was a great hitter,” I said.

  “He was even better defensively,” Flip told me. “He won 12 straight Gold Glove Awards.”

  “Okay, so the guy could play the field,” I said.

  “Plus, he was a 12-time All-Star,” Flip continued. “He was the 1966 National League Most Valuable Player and the 1971 World Series MVP, and he led the Pirates to two World Championships: in 1960 and 1971. Stosh, Clemente may have been the best all-around player in the game since Honus Wagner. He was also on the Pirates, of course.”

  I had no idea how great he was.

  Pittsburgh Pirates

  “Did you ever see him play?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Flip said, “plenty of times. I used to drive an hour and a half to Crosley Field in Cincinnati just to see him when the Pirates came to play the Reds. Late sixties, early seventies. But the thing with Clemente was this, Stosh: He was more than just statistics. It wasn’t just numbers with the guy. He played with a passion and intensity that nobody else had. I mean, there was somethin’ almost…royal about him.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to put into words,” he said. “You’d have to see it with your own eyes. Oh, yeah, I guess you will see it with your own eyes, won’t ya?”

  “Hopefully,” I said. “That is, if you have a Clemente card.”

  Flip closed the book and started rooting around the store. He had to look in every drawer, cabinet, and file. Fortunately, there weren’t any other customers around.

  “Hmmm, this is interesting,” Flip said as he leafed through a dog-eared file. “Did you know that seven major-league players died in plane crashes?”

  Flip loves this baseball trivia stuff. I think he’d be happy if he just spent the whole day learning more trivia. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Soon I would have to be heading home for dinner.

  “There was Clemente, of course,” Flip continued, “and Thurman Munson, the Yankee catcher. His plane crashed in 1979. Cory Lidle, also with the Yankees, in 2006. Ken Hubbs, the second baseman of the Cubs, in 1964. Two guys died in 1956: Charlie Peete of the Cardinals and Tom Gastall of the Orioles. I remember them. And way back in 1925, the Cincinnati pitcher Marvin Goodwin died in a small plane crash. Well, I guess it had to be a small plane. They didn’t have any big planes back then. I mean, the Wright brothers only flew in their airplane in, what, 1903 or something?”

  “So, do you think you might have a Clemente card?” I asked, trying to get Flip back on the subject.

  “Hey, look at this, Stosh,” Flip said excitedly. “Two of these guys were teammates! Clemente and Munson both played winter ball in Puerto Rico for the San Juan Senators one year. And they both died in plane crashes. Ain’t that somethin’?”

  It was something, but it wasn’t something that would help me get a Roberto Clemente card. Flip and I just about turned the store upside down. He even looked in his safe, where he keeps his more valuable cards. No Clemente. It was almost as if Flip had a card for every player in the history of baseball except for Roberto Clemente.

  He did come across a newspaper clipping about the plane crash that killed Clemente and said I could have it. I stuck it in my backpack. If I ever did find Clemente, I would be able to show him the clipping and hopefully talk him out of getting on the plane.

  “Gee, I’m sorry, Stosh,” Flip finally said. “It looks like I can’t help you on this one after all.”

  “It’s okay, Flip.”

  Well, we tried, anyway. Maybe I could find a Clemente card somewhere else. They aren’t that rare. I’d just have to keep my eyes open.

  5

  The Card

  EBAY! OF COURSE!

  As I rode my bike home from Flip’s, I figured I’d see if I could find a Roberto Clemente card on eBay. I get a lot of cool stuff that way. One time I got a 1951 Bobby Thomson card on eBay for 11 cents. Sweet!

  When I got on the computer, there was an email from my dad:

  STILL COMING OVER TODAY AT 5?

  Shoot! I forgot! Mom was working until midnight, and I was supposed to have dinner with my dad. I looked at the clock. Quarter to five. eBay would have to wait. I rushed back out the door and rode my bike over to Dad’s place.

  My dad lives in a little apartment on the other side of Louisville. I see him once or twice a week. It’s not any big “custody” arrangement. We just kind of worked it ou
t together.

  Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to go see my father. But then, sometimes I wish I didn’t have to see my mom. They’re parents, right? I bet sometimes they’d rather not see me either.

  When I was little, my dad taught me how to play ball, and he got me into card collecting too. But a while back, he was involved in a car crash that left him paralyzed. So playing ball is out. We pretty much watch TV, eat pizza, and play video games together. Stuff he can do. It’s okay. He loves video games almost as much as he loves baseball.

  “What’s the word on the street, Butch?” my dad asked when I came to the door. He always calls me Butch.

  We covered the usual ground—school, Mom, girls, and stuff like that—until we got around to the thing we talk about the most: baseball. He told me that his boyhood hero was Thurman Munson, who was a catcher for the Yankees in the seventies. I remembered that Munson was one of those seven players who died in plane crashes. My dad had no idea that Clemente and Munson were teammates for a season in Puerto Rico. I like telling him something about baseball that he doesn’t know.

  “Did you ever see Roberto Clemente play?” I asked.

  It seems like when you mention Clemente to grown-ups, they go on and on about how great he was or what a humanitarian he was. But not my dad.

  “Oh, yeah, I saw him play a lot when I was a little kid,” he told me. “I hated Clemente.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “’Cause I’m a Yankee fan,” he replied.

  Dad told me that one of his first memories was watching the Yankees play the Pirates in the 1960 World Series. Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were on the Yankees back then, and the Yanks were favored to wipe the floor with the Pirates. But after six games, the two teams were all tied up. The winner of Game 7 would be the World Champion.