Willie & Me

by Dan Gutman

  “Then they turned it around,” Dad said, picking up the story. “They won something like sixteen in a row.”

  “Thirty-seven of their last forty-four,” Kenny said. “Twelve of their last thirteen. And on the last day of the season, they tied the Dodgers and forced a three-game playoff for the pennant.”

  “And in the final game . . . the final inning,” Dad said, “Thomson hit the Shot Heard Round the World. Branca threw the pitch, that poor bum.”

  “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” both of them started chanting.

  I had heard that famous radio call of the home run myself. And I’d seen the video on YouTube.

  “How much do you want for the plaque?” my dad asked.

  Kenny looked it over, even pulling out a magnifying glass to examine both cards carefully.

  “I can let it go for a hundred and fifty,” he said.

  My dad whistled.

  “That’s way too much,” I whispered in his ear. “I don’t want you to spend—”

  “It’s your birthday,” he whispered back. “You only turn fourteen once. And besides, it’s a steal. Thomson and Branca cards from 1951 have got to be worth more than a hundred and fifty bucks.”

  Dad turned back to Kenny.

  “Mind if I ask why you’re selling this so cheap?”

  “The cards would be worth about a hundred each in mint condition,” Kenny told us. “But they’re creased and messed up a little at the edges. Also, they’re glued to the wood. The guy who did that was a real dope. That always hurts the value. Too bad he didn’t use photo corners. So anyway, they’re not worth much.”

  “We’ll think it over,” my dad said, preparing to roll away.

  “Tell you what,” Kenny said before we could get very far. “You seem like good guys, and it’s the kid’s birthday. For you, I’ll knock off ten percent. Make it a hundred and thirty-five. I shouldn’t be doing this, but you caught me in a good mood.”

  My dad didn’t think it over very long.

  “We’ll take it,” he said.

  “Dad! That’s too much money!”

  “Hey,” Kenny said, “tell you what I’m gonna do. I’ll give the plaque to ya for free if you can answer this question. Ya ready? When Thomson hit the Shot Heard Round the World, who was the on-deck batter? I’ll give you one guess.”

  My dad looked at me blankly. He didn’t know. I tried to think back and remember that documentary I saw on TV. But for the life of me, I couldn’t come up with the name.

  “I give up,” I finally said.

  “Willie Mays!” said Kenny. “Mays was in the on-deck circle when Thomson hit that homer.”

  “Yes!” I shouted, hitting my forehead. “I knew that!”

  “Well, here’s something you probably don’t know,” Kenny said as he handed me the plaque. “The Giants cheated. There’s no way a team could come back from thirteen games behind that late in the season. They won the pennant by cheating.”

  “Ah, that’s just sour grapes,” my dad said as he fished out his wallet and pulled out a bunch of bills. “You’re a Dodger fan. It’s been more than sixty years. Get over it.”

  “It’s true, man,” Kenny said. “They cheated. They won the pennant that year under false pretenses.”

  He was still calling the Giants cheaters as I rolled Dad away. I put the plaque in the big pocket in the back of his wheelchair. I tried to think of a place I could hang it on my wall, alongside some of the other baseball memorabilia I had been accumulating.

  We looked at a few more booths at the show, but my dad seemed like he was dragging, so I suggested we hit the road. He gets tired easily.

  “How much did that Kenny guy say the Thomson and Branca cards would be worth if they were autographed?” Dad asked me in the car as he drove me home.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “I bet it would be a lot,” Dad told me. “A couple of thousand, at least. If only there was a way. . . .”

  His voice trailed off. I looked at him. He was watching the road. But I knew what he was thinking.

  “No!” I told him. “I am not going to go back to 1951 just to get Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca to sign their baseball cards.”

  “I didn’t say a word!” Dad protested.

  “But you were thinking it!”

  “Well, yeah, I was thinking it,” Dad admitted. “It would be an easy score. You just go back, get the autographs, and split. Boom. Done. A thousand bucks easy.”

  But it wouldn’t be easy. I knew that from experience. It was never easy. Something always happened.

  “I won’t do it, Dad,” I said. And that was the end of it.

  This is what my dad always does. He comes up with these get-rich-quick schemes that involve me traveling back in time so he can make money. One time, he scraped together five thousand dollars so I could deposit it in a bank in 1932, and he could make a fortune on the interest.

  There’s probably nothing illegal about that, but it just doesn’t seem right. It feels dishonest. In my mind, if I’m going to use my power to go back in time, I’m going to do it for a good reason. Maybe help somebody who needs it or right some wrong. I wouldn’t do it just to make money.

  On the other hand, he is my dad. And I know he has money problems. It would be pretty cool to buy something for a hundred and thirty-five dollars and then turn around and sell it for thousands.

  We drove in silence for a few minutes, but I could tell he was still thinking about how much money we could make if the Thomson and Branca cards were signed.

  “That’s how rich people get richer, you know,” he told me as he pulled up to the house. “They figure out an advantage, and then they use their advantage. That’s what separates the really successful people from the rest of us bums. You think Bill Gates never bent the rules a little to get ahead? Or Donald Trump? Or that guy who started Facebook, what’s his name?”

  “Mark Zuckerberg,” I said.

  “Yeah, that guy. Look, the plaque is yours to keep. It’s your birthday present, Joe. You can do what you want with it. But think about it. That’s all I ask.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  MY BIRTHDAY PARTY WAS THAT NIGHT. WELL, IT WASN’T really a “party.” I haven’t had a birthday party since I was nine years old. But my mom and my uncle Wilbur, who lives with us, invited a few guys on my team over for pizza and cake.

  After I blew out the candles, Mom totally surprised me with a present that my grandmother had sent me—a little video camera. The thing isn’t much bigger than a cell phone, but it has a lens that lets you zoom in on objects that are really far away and fill the whole screen with them. Very cool. I had never really been into movies or photography, but I thought it might be fun to shoot some videos and put them up on YouTube or something.

  Eventually, everybody went home, leaving me alone in the living room eating birthday cake with my uncle Wilbur, who is very old and sick. Actually, he wouldn’t be alive at all if not for me. It’s true. What happened was that when Uncle Wilbur was a boy back in 1919, he caught influenza and was probably going to die. Millions of people died in that epidemic. As it turned out, I was traveling back to 1919 to see Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Chicago White Sox. I was taking flu medicine myself at the time, and I had it with me when I bumped into my great uncle at the ballpark. They didn’t have any medicine to treat the flu back then. So I gave him mine, and when I got back to the present day, Uncle Wilbur was alive. He recovered because of the flu medicine I gave him.

  But that’s a story for another day, too.

  Uncle Wilbur is not a huge baseball fan like me, but I showed him the plaque my dad had given me as a birthday present.

  “Did you ever hear of Bobby Thomson?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he replied. “He hit the Shot Heard Round the World. It was 1951. Dodgers and Giants. I remember. Everybody who was alive back then remembers. But it wasn’t Thomson who I remember so much. It was t
he other guy, Ralph Branca.”

  “What about him?”

  “That one lousy pitch ruined Branca’s life,” he told me. “The guy had a decent career. He was a good pitcher. Big guy. But for the rest of his life, the only thing anybody knew about him was that he threw that one lousy pitch. He lost the pennant for the Dodgers. He was the all-time biggest goat in baseball history. Ya couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy. Everybody did.”

  After we cleaned up the paper plates and stuff, I went upstairs. I wasn’t tired yet, so I started leafing through a few of my old baseball books. That guy Kenny at the card show pretty much had his facts right. The Giants had been having a terrible season, and then they turned it around in the last few weeks and caught the Dodgers on the last day. They won the pennant when Bobby Thomson hit the homer off Ralph Branca in the final game of the three-game playoff. It happened at the Polo Grounds in New York, a ballpark I knew well.

  I looked up Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca in The Baseball Encyclopedia, this thick reference book that has the statistics on every player who ever made a major league appearance. Neither of them were superstars. Thomson had a lifetime batting average of .270, and he only reached .300 one year. He never hit more than thirty-two homers in a season. He was good, but not great. Branca had an 88–68 lifetime record, and he topped twenty wins in just one season. Neither of those guys had Hall of Fame numbers. But because of that one lousy pitch in 1951, they were famous.

  I opened up my laptop and did a Google search for both of them. All I had to type was “Ralph B” and Branca came up as the third listing. There were two and a half million results. It wasn’t so easy with Bobby Thomson because there are lots of Thomsons out there, some of them spelled with a P in the middle.

  I went to Google Images and searched for “Ralph Branca.” There were lots of photos of him. He was a handsome guy, with jet-black hair, bushy dark eyebrows, and a big nose. One of the pictures grabbed my attention, and it was repeated over and over again. It was a photo of Branca taken minutes after he gave up the Shot Heard Round the World.

  He still has his uniform on and he’s sitting on the steps of the Dodger clubhouse with his elbows on his knees and his hands together, almost like he’s praying. His head is bent way down. You can’t see his face, but you don’t have to. The guy was obviously crushed. He had just experienced the worst moment of his life. He was only twenty-five years old. But he probably knew right then that he would be remembered for throwing that one lousy pitch—and nothing else—forever.

  It was the worst moment in Ralph Branca’s life.

  I picked up the plaque that my dad had given me and looked at the two cards through a magnifying glass. I wondered what it must have been like for Thomson and Branca—two regular guys who became famous for what happened in one split second of their lives. One swing of the bat. Thomson became a hero and Branca became a loser. If it hadn’t been for that one swing of the bat, they both would have just faded into obscurity like the thousands of other regular guys who played over the years. I guess you never know when a moment in your lifetime might come that will totally change everything.

  I must have been sleepier than I thought. At some point I lay back on my bed and closed my eyes. Still holding the plaque and thinking about the Shot Heard Round the World, I dozed off.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I heard a noise. I never heard the window open or the floor creaking. But even in my sleep, I instinctively knew that someone had broken into my room. I bolted upright in my bed and saw the vague outline of a figure in the shadows about ten feet away. It was too dark to make out any of his features. The only light was from my little night-light by the door.

  “What the—”

  I grabbed for the first solid object I could find—the wooden plaque that my father had given me for my birthday. I jumped out of bed and swung the plaque as hard as I could at the guy in my room. I tried to smash it into his face.

  “Oww!” the guy said. “Stop it! What are you, crazy?”

  The guy was bigger than me—maybe six three and two hundred pounds. He grabbed the plaque and ripped it out of my hands. I was defenseless.

  “Don’t hurt me!” I begged. “Take my money! Take whatever you want!”

  “I don’t want your money!” the guy said, handing the plaque back to me. “I just want to talk. Man, you’ve got a good swing there!”

  My eyes were starting to adjust to the light. Now I could see he was wearing a baseball uniform. It said “Brooklyn” across the front in that old-fashioned style of lettering. He had a Saint Christopher medal around his neck.

  “Joey, is everything okay?” my mom called from downstairs. “What’s that noise?”

  “Shhhhh!” I said to the guy in the Dodger uniform. Then I called downstairs, “I just had a dream, Mom. I fell out of bed.”

  “Are you okay? Do you need me to come upstairs?” she hollered.

  “No! It’s all good.”

  I realized my heart was beating really fast. The guy in the Dodger uniform was standing in front of me, his hands in the air as if I were pointing a gun at him. He didn’t look threatening.

  “Who are you?” I asked him, lowering my voice.

  “Is your name Joe Stoshack?” the guy whispered. “They call you Stosh?”

  “Yeah.”

  He brought his hands down and stuck one out to shake. “I’m Ralph Branca,” he said.

  Ralph Branca

  I sat back on my bed.

  “You gotta be kidding me! The real Ralph Branca?” I asked. “The guy who gave up the home run to Bobby Thomson?”

  Branca sighed and rolled his eyes, like he was sick of hearing that. He did look like the guy I had seen in the photos. Dark hair. Bushy eyebrows. Big nose. But I couldn’t be positive.

  “Nobody remembers that I won twenty-one games when I was just twenty-one years old,” he told me. “Nobody remembers that I had seventy-five wins when I was just twenty-five. All they remember is that I threw that stinking pitch to Thomson. Ah, forget it.”

  “Am I dreaming?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe I am.”

  “I just dozed off, and when I woke up you were here,” I told him.

  “And I was just warming up in the bullpen, and the next thing I knew I was here,” he replied.

  I remembered that something like this happened once before. A long time ago. It was my first experience with time travel. I went to sleep and in the middle of the night I woke up to find the great Honus Wagner sitting in my bedroom. That really freaked me out.

  “Do you know what year it is?” I asked Branca.

  “Of course,” he replied. “It’s 1953. Why?”

  I went over to my desk, picked up my calendar, and handed it to him. He sat on my bed with a thud.

  “That means it works,” he said softly.

  “What works?” I asked. “Hey, how did you know my name? Is this some kind of a scam?”

  “A friend of mine told me about a kid named Joe Stoshack who could travel through time and take people with him,” Branca said. “With baseball cards.”

  A friend of his? What friend? Only a few people in the whole world knew about my special power. My parents. Flip Valentini. My cousin Samantha, who of course had to go and tell her best friend, Chelsea McCormack. Bobby Fuller . . .

  “What friend?” I asked.

  “A guy on my team.”

  “What guy?”

  “Jackie Robinson,” he said.

  Of course! For a school project, I had traveled back to 1947 and met Jackie Robinson. I was there the day he broke the color barrier. Jackie played on the Dodgers, too. He must have told Branca about me. And I had a feeling that I knew why Branca wanted to talk to me.

  “You might have heard this, but a couple of years ago,” he said, “we had this game against the Giants. It was a big game, a really big game. We had a two-run lead. And they brought me in to close it out in the ninth inning. And I—”

  “
I know all about it,” I told him. I didn’t want him to have to tell the painful story one more time.

  “So I was wondering . . . if maybe you could . . . y’know . . .”

  “Make it not happen?” I guessed.

  “Yeah,” Branca replied, lowering his head. “Make it not happen. Do something so it didn’t happen. Make it go away.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” I told him honestly.

  It wasn’t just that I was reluctant to help the guy out. I had tried to go back in time and change history before. I tried to prevent the Black Sox Scandal from happening and save Shoeless Joe Jackson’s reputation. I tried to warn President Roosevelt that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. I tried to prevent Ray Chapman and Roberto Clemente from getting killed tragically. Each time, I had failed. Maybe history just doesn’t want to be changed. History wants to be left alone.

  “I just thought that maybe you could go back and . . . I don’t know, change things,” Branca said softly. “I’m tired of being introduced as the guy who gave up that home run. I can’t walk down my own street without somebody reminding me about that pitch. At home at night, I have nightmares about it. That one pitch ruined my life. No matter what I do until the day I die, that’s all anyone’s going to remember about me.”

  He looked so sad, almost desperate.

  “If you rob a bank, they throw you in jail, and at some point you get paroled,” Branca told me. “Sometimes even murderers get out of jail. But I’ll never be forgiven for what I did. Do you understand what I’m saying? I want another chance. Can you help me?”

  I thought it over.

  “Will you sign this baseball card for me?” I asked, handing him the plaque.

  “Sure, kid, anything.”

  I got a pen from my desk drawer, and Branca signed the card.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I told him. I wasn’t sure I would be able to help Branca out, but I didn’t want the poor guy to have a miserable life forever, either.

  “Thanks, Stosh,” he said, shaking my hand again. “So, how do I get out of here?”