Abner & Me
Page 11
Everybody pretended like the incident never happened. We scored a run in the second inning, and Fuller’s team got two in the third. We tied it in the fourth, and they jumped ahead, scoring three runs in the fifth.
Fuller was still yelling things at me, but they were mostly of the “Stoshack, you suck!” variety. Totally unimaginative. That bonk on the head must have scrambled his brains a little, preventing him from thinking up his usual clever zingers.
We were down by three runs when we came up in the sixth inning, the last inning. But they were on their third pitcher, and this kid was not nearly as fast as the first two. Our guys started hitting the ball. Sean Phillips got a single to start things off, and Gabe Radley doubled him home. Then Kit Clement drove Gabe in and suddenly we were just one run down. You could feel the excitement on the bench. We had a rally going. Hitting is contagious.
Kit was on first. It was my turn to hit.
“You suck, Stoshack!” Bobby Fuller yelled at me from third base.
Man, what do you have to do to make somebody like you? Sometimes I feel like just saying to him, “Why don’t you like me? What did I ever do to you?” But then he’d know I cared. I really didn’t want him to know I cared.
I looked over to Flip Valentini, coaching at third. We both knew I would be swinging away. A hit would tie the game, and a homer would win it. I settled into the batter’s box and pumped my bat back and forth to get loose. I looked at strike one.
“You suck, Stoshack! You suck you suck you suck you suck…”
I didn’t want to hit the ball anywhere near Bobby Fuller. Not after what happened in the first inning. I just didn’t need that aggravation. Ball one came in.
If I could drop one in down the right-field line, it would tie the game, I thought. I shifted my left leg a little to try to hit the ball in that direction. The next pitch looked good, but I swung through it. Strike two.
The stance felt uncomfortable. I went back to my regular stance. One ball, two strikes. Got to protect the plate. I didn’t want to hear what Fuller would say if I struck out.
The next pitch was a little inside, but I felt I had to take a rip at it because the ump might call it strike three. I made contact, and hit a sharp grounder down the third-base line. I didn’t hit it hard by any means. Fuller dove for the ball, but he was an inch or two short. The ball skittered past him.
“Go! Go! Go!” everybody started screaming.
I was off with the crack of the bat. Now it was just a matter of how far I could make it. When I turned the corner at first, the ball was still rattling around the left-field corner. Kit scored easily to tie the game. I dug for second and didn’t even look for the coach’s sign. I was going for third.
“Slide! Slide! Slide!” everybody was screaming.
I slid into third, but I didn’t have to. The ball got past Fuller. The pitcher backed him up, and I stayed where I was.
I asked for time so I could brush the dirt off my pants and examine the situation. The game was tied now. If I could score from third, we’d win it. There was one out. Burton Ernie was up.
“You suck, Stoshack,” Fuller informed me.
“What is your problem, man?” I said, unable to restrain myself. “You should really think about getting some counseling or something. You’ve got problems.”
“You’re my problem, Stoshack.”
“Oh, give it a rest, Fuller.”
“You ain’t gonna score,” Fuller said. “No way you’re gonna score.”
“Okay, let’s go, Burton!” hollered Coach Valentini from the third-base coaching box. “Drive him in. You can do it!”
Burton got himself set in the batter’s box. The catcher went out to say a few words to his pitcher. Coach Valentini sidled over to me.
“Stosh,” he whispered in my ear, “loosen your belt.”
“Huh?” I must have misinterpreted what he said.
“I said loosen your belt. Take the buckle off.”
“Why?”
“Just do it!”
I opened up my belt buckle, and I didn’t figure out why until Burton swung at the first pitch and sent a high fly ball toward centerfield. It wasn’t deep, but it was deep enough for me to try to tag up. I scurried back to get my foot on the third-base bag. When the ball was caught, I broke for home.
I knew I was going to be sliding no matter what. I hit the dirt, and the catcher slapped the tag on me.
“Safe!” the ump hollered, and everybody on our bench came out to mob me.
“Hey look!” Burton shouted. He was pointing toward third base.
Bobby Fuller was standing there. And he was holding my belt in his hand.
“You done good, Stosh,” Flip said when he dropped me off at home. “I’m proud of you. You should be proud of yourself too.”
I was, come to think of it. I couldn’t wait to tell Mom that I had saved somebody’s life, even if it was that jerk Bobby Fuller, who didn’t deserve to live anyway.
She was hunched over the computer in the kitchen when I walked in.
“Mom, you won’t believe what happened!” I bubbled. “I hit a line drive off Bobby Fuller’s head, and he might have died if I hadn’t given him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation just like you showed me. And then I scored the winning run because Flip told me to loosen my belt, and after I crossed the plate Bobby Fuller was standing there with my belt in his hand and it was so cool—”
“Joey,” Mom said, looking up from the screen, “did you know that President Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, and President Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln?”
“Huh?”
“I was looking at this website,” she continued. “Check this out. Lincoln took office in 1861 and Kennedy took office in 1961. There are fifteen letters in John Wilkes Booth and fifteen letters in Lee Harvey Oswald, the guy who shot Kennedy.”
“So?”
“There’s more. Booth ran from a theater to a warehouse, and Oswald ran from a warehouse to a theater. And get this. Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre and Kennedy was shot while he was riding in a Lincoln automobile, which is made by—are you ready for this—Ford!”
She looked up at me, that devilish gleam in her eye. “Doesn’t that strike you as curious?”
“No!” I said, backing away from her.
“What?” she said, all innocent.
“I am not going to go back and try to prevent the Kennedy assassination!”
“But Joey, it would be so simple,” Mom said. “All we have to do is get to the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas, Texas, on November 22nd, 1963. It won’t be like the Lincoln thing at all. There were plenty of photos taken that day. Please?”
“No!” I said. “And that’s final!”
Facts and Fictions
Everything in this book is true, except for the stuff I made up. It’s only fair to tell you which is which.
Abner Doubleday was a real person. He was born in 1819 and grew up in Cooperstown, New York, which is the main reason why the Baseball Hall of Fame is located there. While many people think of him as the inventor of baseball, historians agree it is a myth.
But Doubleday was an American hero. He graduated from West Point in 1842 and quickly advanced through the ranks of the United States Army. He aimed the first Union shot at Fort Sumter, which started the Civil War. He led troops in the battles of Antietam, South Mountain, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and, of course, Gettysburg.
At Gettysburg, Doubleday took command of First Corps after General John Reynolds was killed on the first day of fighting. But that night Doubleday was replaced when it was reported that his division ran from the battlefield at the first contact with Confederate forces. Even though it wasn’t true, he was demoted and ordered back to Washington.
Humiliated, Doubleday said he would leave the army if he was not reinstated. He wasn’t, so he did. He took a low-level desk job working for the government in Washington. That’s where he was when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Doubleday was n
ot at Ford’s Theatre on the night of Lincoln’s assassination. I made up that part. But all other facts about the assassination are accurate.
Doubleday died from Bright’s disease at age seventy-four on January 26, 1893, at his home in Mendham, New Jersey. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. But, believe it or not, a fragment of skin from his thigh is on display at The Baseball Reliquary in Monrovia, California, a very unusual museum! He and his wife, Mary, had no children.
Abner Doubleday wrote three books about his life, as well as a guidebook to Gettysburg. None of them mentioned baseball, and Doubleday never claimed to have invented the game. Stephen Jay Gould, the famous scientist and baseball fan, once wrote, “Abner Doubleday didn’t know a baseball from a kumquat.”
But a decade or so after Doubleday died, a committee was formed to determine who invented baseball. A man from Cooperstown, New York, named Abner Graves claimed that one day in 1839 his boyhood friend Abner Doubleday sketched out the game in the dirt with a stick. The committee liked the idea that an American hero had created “the national pastime,” and the Doubleday myth was born.
As it turned out, Abner Doubleday wasn’t even in Cooperstown in 1839. Abner Graves, the man who claimed Doubleday invented the game, eventually went insane. He murdered his wife, Minnie, and ended his life in a Colorado institution for the criminally insane.
But the Baseball Hall of Fame has exhibited a small display case with a battered old ball inside identified as the Abner Doubleday Baseball. After an explanation of the Doubleday story, the caption on the wall read, “In the hearts of those who love baseball, he is remembered as the lad in the pasture where the game was invented. Only cynics would need to know more.”
Nobody really knows who invented baseball. Most likely, it evolved from other ball and bat games that had been played for hundreds of years.
The Battle of Gettysburg and the scenes of the Civil War were described in this book as accurately as possible. In three days of fighting, the North and South combined lost more than 50,000 men (plus 5,000 horses and mules).
A newspaper report from the New-York Tribune on the Battle of Gettysburg
Baseball during the Civil War
The day after the Union Army chased Robert E. Lee and his men out of Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant beat the Confederates at Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Civil War had reached its turning point. Lee’s army was staggered, the Confederacy was divided, and the Mississippi River was opened up. Yet they would hold on for two more years before Lee surrendered.
Four months after the Battle of Gettysburg, President Lincoln went to the battlefield. He delivered his famous Gettysburg Address, dedicating a national soldiers’ cemetery at the north end of Cemetery Ridge.
When the Civil War finally ended, more than 600,000 Americans had died. That is more than the combined totals of deaths in all our other wars.
A great many of those Americans were boys. Although Willie, Little John, Alexander, Rufus, and Joshua were fictional characters, as many as 420,000 men under the age of eighteen served. In fact, more than 100,000 Union soldiers were younger than fifteen years old.
There is no evidence that any baseball was played during the three-day Battle of Gettysburg. I made that up. But baseball was played behind the lines at many Civil War battlefields. In fact, the war played a large role in spreading the new game across the country. There are even stories of games that were played between Union and Confederate soldiers.
Frederick Fairfax, a soldier in the 5th Ohio infantry, wrote this in a letter home dated April 3, 1862:
It is astonishing how indifferent a person can become to danger. The report of musketry is heard but a very little distance from us, yet over there on the other side of the road is most of our company playing bat ball and perhaps in less than half an hour they may be called to play a ball game of a more serious nature.
The gory scene with Stosh and his mother in the hospital tent pretty much told it like it was. Seventy-five percent of all operations performed by Civil War doctors were amputations.
Joe Stoshack, his mother, his father, and Flip Valentini are fictional characters. Time travel does not exist.
At least not yet.
Read More!
The Civil War was one of the most important and fascinating parts of American history. If you’d like to read other stories about it, I recommend:
Banks, Sara Harrell. Abraham’s Battle: A Novel of Gettysburg. New York: Atheneum Books, 1999.
Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. No Man’s Land: A Young Soldier’s Story. New York: Blue Sky Press, 1999.
Crisp, Marty. Private Captain: A Story of Gettysburg. New York: Philomel Books, 2001.
Denenberg, Barry. When Will This Cruel War Be Over?: The Civil War Diary of Emma Simpson New York: Scholastic, 1996..
Ernst, Kathleen. Retreat from Gettysburg. Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Books, 2000.
Gauch, Patricia Lee. Thunder at Gettysburg. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975.
Hunt, Irene. Across Five Aprils. Chicago: Follett, 1964.
Murphy, Jim. The Journal of James Edmond Pease: A Civil War Union Soldier. New York: Scholastic, 1998.
Osborne, Mary Pope. My Brother’s Keeper: Virginia’s Diary. New York: Scholastic, 2000.
Paulsen, Gary. Soldier’s Heart: A Novel of the Civil War. New York: Delacorte, 1998.
Wisler, G. Clifton. The Drummer Boy of Vicksburg. New York: Lodestar Books, 1997.
Permissions
This author would like to acknowledge the following for use of photographs: National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY: 30. Library of Congress: 35, 53, 57, 131, 136, 162.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to David Kelly of the Library of Congress, Ryan Chamberlain of the Society for American Baseball Research, Bill Burdick at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Barry “Magnet” Aguado of the New York Mutuals, and Nina Wallace.
About the Author
DAN GUTMAN is the author of many books for young readers, including the seven award-winning Baseball Card Adventures and the hugely popular My Weird School series. He lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey, with his wife, Nina, and their two children, Sam and Emma.
You can visit him online at www.dangutman.com
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Also by Dan Gutman
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Ms. Hannah Is Bananas!
Miss Small Is off the Wall!
Mr. Hynde Is Out of His Mind!
Mrs. Cooney Is Loony!
Ms. LaGrange Is Strange!
Miss Lazar Is Bizarre!
Mr. Docker Is Off His Rocker!
Mrs. Kormel Is Not Normal!
Ms. Todd Is Odd!
Mrs. Patty Is Batty!
Miss Holly Is Too Jolly!
Baseball Card Adventures:
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Copyright
ABNER & ME. Copyright © 2005 by Dan Gutman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the
text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061973208
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