Abner & Me (2 page)

COACH VALENTINI GATHERED THE TEAM AROUND HIM IN
the dugout. When we were younger, one of the moms or dads would provide snacks after the game. But the coach decided that we were too big for that. He handed each of us a pack of baseball cards to take home with us.

Flip Valentini doesn't
have
to coach our team. He does it for the fun of it. Flip doesn't have to work at all. But he runs Flip's Fan Club, the local baseball-card shop where a lot of us hang out. I doubt that he makes much money doing it. Coaching us and running the store is Flip's idea of being retired. He loves baseball and always tells us he was a pretty decent pitcher in his day. Of course, that was a long time ago. He must be seventy years old now. Maybe older.

Some of the guys were complaining that Bobby
Fuller had cheated, and that's why we didn't win the game. But the coach just put a finger to his lips to quiet them down. I knew he didn't like complainers, so I didn't even tell him what Fuller had done.

“Fuhgetaboutit,” Flip told us as he ran his bony hand through his white hair. “Y'know, when I was growin' up in Brooklyn, my team was the Dodgers. ‘Dem Bums,' we called 'em. They were a great team, like youse guys. But they lost every stinkin' year to the Yankees in the Series. Every October it was always the same story. Wait till next year, wait till next year. But the Bums never gave up. They was always battlin'.”

“And I bet they eventually won the World Series, right, Coach?” asked our second baseman, Gabe Radley. We had all heard enough of Flip's old baseball stories to know where he was going.

“You're darn tootin' they did!” Flip said. “They finally beat them Yanks in '55 and brought Brooklyn the only Series we ever won. And then, two years later, the Dodgers said they were gonna up and leave Brooklyn. They moved to California and became the Los Angeles Dodgers. Big league baseball was gone from Brooklyn, forever. Fuhgetaboutit.”

Flip was shaking his head sadly, like the whole thing had happened yesterday.

“What's that got to do with us, Coach?” our right fielder, Burton Ernie, asked. “Are we moving to California?”

Burton is not the brightest bulb in the box. He puts two and two together and comes up with five. Burton's real last name is Johnson, but everybody calls him Burton Ernie because he probably still watches
Sesame Street
. Honestly, I can't imagine how he made it past sixth grade.

“No, you lunkhead! The point is, youse kids should never give up neither. We'll get 'em next time, boys. And we play these creeps again next Thursday, so be ready to battle. Next time
we'll
whup them for sure. Right, Stosh?”

“Right, Coach!” I said.

Flip Valentini cracks me up. He's pretty cool for an old guy. It's hard to imagine him being young, but Flip told us that when he was a kid, he and his friends played a game of flipping baseball cards against a wall. Whoever flipped a card closest to the wall got to keep all the cards. That's how he got the nickname “Flip.” We used to be called the Yellow Jackets, but then Flip decided to sponsor us. He liked owning the team so much, he decided to coach us too.

Flip also said he and his friends used to take baseball cards and stick them into the spokes of their bike wheels with clothespins so they would make a sound like a motorcycle.

Can you believe that? Throwing your baseball cards at a wall? Mangling them in your bike spokes? Man, I keep my cards in clear plastic pages that fit into loose-leaf binders. If anybody tried to stick my cards into the spokes of a bike, I'd go crazy.

Those were just different times, I guess.

I've been a card collector for a long time. Baseball, football, hockey, basketball. My dad got me started when I was little. That was before he and my mom split up. Dad still gives me cards sometimes. But mostly I get cards from Flip. I either buy them at his store or he hands them out after our games.

I don't see my own dad very much, so Flip is almost like a father to me.

“Do you guys all have rides home?” Flip asked.

I usually rode my bike home after our games, but my mom had told me she was going to get off work early enough to catch the last few innings and drive me home. She still hadn't shown up, so Flip said he'd be happy to drop me off.

Flip was one of the few people who knew my big secret. What happened was that Flip's landlord had doubled his rent, and Flip told us he was going to have to close the store. That would have been tragic. So I got him some money.

You see, Flip had told me that Shoeless Joe Jackson's autograph was worth half a million dollars, so I went back to 1919 and got Shoeless Joe to sign two pieces of paper for me. I gave them to Flip as a present. At first he thought the autographs were faked, but I convinced him that they were real and that I could really travel through time with baseball cards.

Flip sold one of the autographs, and that saved
the store from going out of business. Flip was always nice to me, but ever since that happened, he would do anything for me.

“He grabbed ya, didn't he?” Flip asked after I'd buckled my seat belt.

“Huh?”

“Bobby Fuller at third base,” Flip said. “He must've done somethin' to stop ya from scorin'.”

“How did you know, Coach?”

“It took you about an hour to get to the plate!”

“He held on to my belt,” I admitted.

Flip threw his head back and laughed. “That Fuller kid is nuts, but I gotta admit it, he's smart. You got to use your noodle to beat guys like that.”

It
was
pretty clever, come to think of it.

“So,” Flip said, “you doin' any time travelin' recently?”

“I've been playing it cool,” I said. “My mom doesn't exactly approve. She thinks it's too dangerous.”

“She's right,” Flip said. “It is. She's only lookin' out fer ya, Stosh.”

It had been a little while since my last “trip.” I had already been looking through my baseball card collection, thinking about which player I might go visit next.

“Hey Flip,” I said as he pulled up to my house, “if you could travel through time with a baseball card and you could watch anybody in history play, who would you visit? Joe DiMaggio? Ted Williams? Roger Maris?”

Flip pulled up the emergency brake and scratched his head. “That's a toughie,” he said. “I seen all those guys play, so it wouldn't be such a big deal. When I was young, I saw all the greats from the 1940s and 1950s.”

He wrinkled up his forehead for a moment, and then he brightened.

“There've been a lotta great players over the years,” he finally said, “but there
is
one guy I'd really like to meet.”

“Who's that?” I asked.

“Abner Doubleday.”

“Abner Doubleday?”

I had heard the name. I'd seen it in baseball books, and every so often I'd hear some TV announcer say something like, “Old Abner Doubleday must be turning over in his grave after that bonehead play.” But I didn't know who he was.

“Abner Doubleday,” Flip continued, “was the guy who invented the game of baseball.

“Oh…”

“Or so they say,” Flip quickly added. “Some people say he did, and other people say he didn't.”

“Why don't they know for sure?” I asked.

“The story goes that Doubleday grew up in Cooperstown, New York—yeah, where the Baseball Hall of Fame is today. And one day—this is 1840 or somethin' like that—he sketched out a baseball diamond in the dirt with a stick outside the local barber shop. He put nine players on each team, three outs,
three strikes, yadda yadda yadda, and told the kids how to play this new game. But he never put it on paper and never copyrighted it or nothin'.”

“So how did anybody find out?”

“Well, that's the thing. It wasn't till long after Doubleday was dead that one of those kids came forward and said that was the first baseball game. Maybe he was lyin', or maybe he was tellin' the truth. Nobody'll ever know for sure if Doubleday invented baseball or not. That's who
I'd
like to talk to, old Abner Doubleday.”

“I could find out!” I said excitedly. “I could go back in time and find out! Maybe I could even watch baseball get invented! How cool would that be?”

Flip snorted. “Only one problem, Stosh,” he said. “There's no such thing as an Abner Doubleday baseball card. They didn't even
have
baseball cards back then. End of story.”

“Oh,” I said, getting out of the car. “Bummer.”

“Yeah, I guess we'll never know who invented baseball,” Flip said. “Too bad, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey Stosh,” Flip said before he pulled away from the curb. “Don't let Fuller get you down. We'll figure out a way to beat him next week.”

“Okay, Coach.”

WHEN I GOT HOME
,
I KNEW RIGHT AWAY WHY MOM
hadn't made it to my game. She was fast asleep on the couch in the living room.

My mother is a nurse in the emergency room at Louisville Hospital. That's in Kentucky, by the way. Mom works really long and crazy hours. Sometimes she's so exhausted at the end of the day that she just sacks out, still wearing her nurse's uniform.

It's hard on Mom because she has to take care of me and my great-great-uncle Wilbur too. He was sitting across from the couch in his wheelchair. Uncle Wilbur was also sleeping when I came in, but he opened his eyes when I clicked the screen door shut. He smiled at me and gave me the shush sign so I wouldn't wake Mom.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Uncle Wilbur is alive thanks to me.

What happened was that when I went back to 1919 to meet Shoeless Joe Jackson, I also tracked down Uncle Wilbur when he was a kid. Mom had told me that he died from a disease called influenza when he was a boy. I gave him some of the flu medicine I had brought with me, and when I returned to the present day, Uncle Wilbur was
alive
. The medicine I gave him in 1919 saved his life. It was the most amazing thing.

Now Uncle Wilbur is really old. He doesn't do much besides sit around and watch sports on TV.

“Did you win your game?” he whispered.

“Nah,” I said. “Tied. I hit a triple, though. I would have tagged up to score the winning run, but the third baseman grabbed my belt and held me back for a second.”

“You shoulda beat the crap outta him,” Uncle Wilbur said. “That's what I woulda done.”

I guess I'm just not the crap-beating type.

Mom opened her eyes. When she saw me standing there in my uniform, she quickly looked at her watch and slapped her forehead.

“Joey!” she said. “I missed your game! Oh, I'm so sorry! I meant to come. I just sat down on the couch to rest for a minute and—”

“It's okay, Mom. Coach Valentini gave me a ride home.”

“I'll fix dinner,” she said.

“Why, is it broken?” I said to make her laugh, and I went up to my room to change clothes.

As I was peeling off my sweaty uniform, I started thinking about Abner Doubleday. It would be so cool to go back in time to meet him and find out whether or not he really invented baseball.

But how could I do it? Doubleday wasn't a baseball player. There weren't any cards of him. And even if he
had
been a player, there wouldn't have been any cards of him. The first baseball cards, I knew, were printed in 1887. If Doubleday invented baseball around 1840 at the age of, say, twenty, then he had to be over sixty years old in 1887. Too old to play pro baseball.

Mom called me down for dinner, and I told her I would be right there.

There was another reason why there probably couldn't be an Abner Doubleday card, it occurred to me. Baseball cards have photographs on them. It was very possible that photography hadn't even been invented in Doubleday's time.

As Coach Valentini says, end of story.

A
photograph
. An idea started to form in my head.

There used to be an old lady named Amanda Young who lived next door to us. One day she showed me an old photo she had of Honus Wagner, the Pittsburgh Pirate star. I tried to use the photo to send her back to 1909 to meet Honus Wagner. I don't know if it worked, but I will say this—I never saw Amanda Young again. Neither did anyone else. She just vanished off the face of the earth. The
Louisville police are still looking for her.

If I could send Miss Young back through time using a photograph, maybe I could use a photograph of Abner Doubleday to send myself back in time too.

That is, if a photo of Abner Doubleday even existed.

It was certainly worth a shot. There was no harm in trying.

Mom shouted that dinner was getting cold, so I washed my hands and joined her and Uncle Wilbur in the kitchen.

Mom always likes to talk about our day as we eat, no matter how boring it was. I told them about my game. Uncle Wilbur told us about some silly talk show he watches where people argue all the time and start punching each other. Mom told us that one of the patients at the hospital almost died, and they had to give her CPR. That stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

I didn't mention Abner Doubleday. Even if I could find a photograph of him, there was no way Mom was going to let me go meet the guy. She never really approved of my time-travel “foolishness,” even after I saved Uncle Wilbur's life. She thinks it's too dangerous.

My mother is a bit of a wimp, if you ask me. She's really tiny, not even five feet tall. I can even pick her up. She worries about every little thing. I think it's because she's so small that she's easily intimidated.
I would bet that if she was bigger, she wouldn't be so overprotective of me. That's my theory, anyway.

In fact, Mom doesn't know the half of it. I almost got killed a few times. If I had ever let Mom know about any of the stuff that happened to me during my time travels, I'd be grounded forever.

But I just tell her the only thing that ever happens is that I get some history lessons. It's
educational
, I always tell her. She loves that stuff.

Still, she's suspicious. I'm sure that if I told her I was going to go back to the nineteenth century to ask Abner Doubleday if he really invented baseball, she'd say no.

I had some math and social studies homework to do, so I excused myself from the table and went upstairs. Most of the stuff was easy, but I had to go online to look up a few things for social studies. Some kids I knew sent me instant messages, and I shot a few back to them.

Abner Doubleday was still in my head. Just for the heck of it, I surfed over to the website for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. My dad had been to Cooperstown when he was a kid, but I've never been there.

I noticed there was a button that allowed you to send an e-mail to the Hall of Fame. I sat there for a long time, holding the cursor over that button. Finally, I decided to click it. This is what I typed…

I added my home address and hit the
SEND
button. A few of my instant message buddies were trying to reach me again, but before I could write back I heard my mom calling.

“What is it?” I hollered.

“Joey!” Mom yelled upstairs, “Your father is on the phone.”