Willie & Me (5 page)

“You might not be in this hospital bed either,” I pointed out.

“Hey, if it weren't for you, Stosh, I might not be in
any
bed,” Flip said. “I might be in a casket. If you ask me, I say give Branca another chance to live his life over again, just like you did for me.”

Flip closed his eyes again. I could tell he was tired.

At that point, I decided I would do it.

T
HE NEXT STEP WOULD BE TO BREAK THE NEWS TO MY
mother. Mom's a bit, you could say,
overprotective
. So I had to be careful how I handled things. I waited until she was in a good mood. It was after dinner the next day. I washed the dishes while she dried. She told me a funny story about something that happened at work that day, but I wasn't really paying attention.

“Mom,” I said right out, “I want to go on another trip.”

She stopped wiping the dish in her hands.

“You mean . . .”

“Yeah,” I said. “
That
kind of trip.”

I told her all about the Shot Heard Round the World and about my visit from Ralph Branca. I said the reason I wanted to go back to 1951 was to help him out.

As expected, Mom wasn't too crazy about the idea. She gave me all her usual objections: I might get lost in New York. I might get stuck in 1951. I might get hurt, and the medical care wasn't as good in the old days. On and on like that. She softened a bit when I told her that Flip said helping Branca was the right thing to do. I promised not to go on a school night, and she made me promise to take some food, Band-Aids, and an umbrella with me.

“Okay, okay,” she finally agreed. “You can go. But be
careful
.”

Well, that was a relief. I really wasn't sure she was going to give me her blessing, because every time I've gone on a trip so far, something has gone wrong. I've landed in the wrong place, or the wrong time. I've found myself in the middle of a war zone, with bullets flying around my head. I've been chased down the street by a maniac with a baseball bat. I've been kidnapped by gamblers, locked in a closet, and stuck inside a fighter plane that crash-landed.

Of course, I didn't tell my mother about
all
the bad stuff that has happened to me while traveling through time. If she knew, she would never let me go
anywhere
.

But this time, I decided,
nothing
was going to go wrong. This time, I was going to be ready for
anything
. Because I was going to do my research.

After school the next day, I rode my bike over to the Louisville Free Public Library on York Street. It's easy to look stuff up online, I know, and I do that a
lot. But I also like to go into the stacks in the library and get lost in the books.

First, I wanted to find out what October 1951 would be like. The reference librarian showed me a book that listed important events that happened throughout history. The Korean War had started the year before, and it was raging. In July 1951, it was announced that the transistor had been invented, and it revolutionized electronics. You could go to a gas station and buy a gallon for nineteen cents, believe it or not. It was a different world.

The Catcher in the Rye
came out that year. Patti Page was singing “Tennessee Waltz.”
The King and I
was a hit on Broadway. In the movies, people were watching
A Streetcar Named Desire
,
The African Queen, An American in Paris
,
and
Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man
. Hardly anybody had a TV back then, but the people who did were watching
I Love Lucy
,
The Jack Benny Show
,
What's My Line
, and
Bozo the Clown.

All that stuff was good to know, but more importantly, I needed to know exactly when, where, and how Bobby Thomson was going to hit that home run off Ralph Branca. It didn't take long to find all the details. There are entire books written about that game.

It took place on Wednesday, October 3, at the Polo Grounds in New York City. I had been there before. I met Jim Thorpe at the Polo Grounds in 1913 and Ray Chapman in 1920. I even remembered the cross
streets—West 155th Street and Eighth Avenue. It was near a river, I recalled.

As I read about the end of the game, I tried to picture it in my head so I would be ready when I got there. It was the bottom of the ninth inning. The Brooklyn Dodgers were leading the New York Giants 4–1, and the Giants were getting their “last licks.”

Don Newcombe was pitching for the Dodgers. Alvin Dark singled to right field to start things off. Then Don Mueller hit another single, sending Dark to third. Runners on first and third. Monte Irvin fouled out to first. One out.

The next batter, Whitey Lockman, hit a double to left, scoring Dark. The score was 4–2 now. When Mueller slid into third base safely, he twisted his ankle so badly that he had to be carried off-field. A pinch runner was brought in—Clint Hartung.

There were runners on second and third, with the tying run at second and the winning run at the plate. That's when Bobby Thomson came up. Willie Mays was on deck.

At that point, Don Newcombe was taken out of the game and Ralph Branca came in to relieve him. This was the big moment. Branca threw his first pitch right over the plate and Thomson looked at it. Strike one.

It was Branca's second pitch that turned into the Shot Heard Round the World. All accounts said the pitch was high and inside. Thomson had no business swinging at it. But somehow, he managed to
get around on the ball and tomahawk it down the left field line. It landed in the lower deck that hung slightly over the field, and that was it.

One of the books in the library had a photograph that was taken the instant Thomson hit the ball. You could even see it in the air.

The Shot Heard Round the World

The Giants won the game 5–4, and the National League pennant, of course. New York went crazy. Two people at the Polo Grounds were so shocked that they suffered heart attacks.

So that's what I would be dealing with. That's the situation I would have to undo. Hit the reset button. I would have to come up with
some
way to change history, for Ralph Branca's sake.

The next day, my mom surprised me by giving me an envelope with thirty dollars in it—in 1951 money. She said she knew a guy who collected old money, and she thought I might need some. Uncle Wilbur, who is just about my size, gave me an old pair of his pants, shoes, and a shirt so I would fit in with what guys wore back in 1951. If I showed up wearing Nikes and a T-shirt that said just about
anything
on it, people would be suspicious. I was going to be prepared this time.

I decided to make my trip the following night, Friday. On Thursday, I sat up in bed reading Ralph Branca's autobiography,
A Moment in Time
, which I had checked out of the library. It was interesting to read about the relationship between Ralph and Bobby. For years after the Shot Heard Round the World, the two men barely spoke. Then later, they got to know each other and realized they could make money from the historic event they had shared. In fact, on the fiftieth anniversary of “the Shot,” they each earned $220,000 by autographing bats, balls, photos, and jerseys.

Wow, that's a lot of money for signing your name.

I dozed off reading the book. I was as ready as I would ever be. Nothing could go wrong.

Until something did.

In the middle of the night, I heard a noise. Yes,
again
. Somebody was in my room. I figured it was Branca again. He was probably angry that I hadn't changed history yet.

“Ralph?” I whispered. “Mr. Branca?”

“No,” said a man's voice.

I strained to see him. He wasn't wearing a Dodgers uniform. He was wearing a
Giants
uniform.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Bobby Thomson.”

“You
gotta
be kidding me!”

I sat up in bed and flipped on the light at my bedside so I could see him better. He was a tall man with dark hair, and his eyes were wide apart.

Bobby Thomson

“Is your name Joe Stoshack?” Bobby finally asked. “The kid who can travel through time with baseball cards?”

“How do
you
know who I am?” I said. “How did you find out about me?”

“Word gets around, Joe,” Bobby said. “People talk.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I want to ask you a favor.”

“What is it?”

He pulled my desk chair up to the side of my bed.

“I hit a home run back in 1951,” he whispered. “You might have heard about it. It was a pretty big one.”

“I know all about it,” I replied. “They call it the Shot Heard Round the World.”

“Yeah. I understand that Ralph Branca was here.”

I nodded. I had a feeling about what he was going to say.

“And Branca asked you to go back in time and do something—I don't know what—to prevent me from hitting that homer.”

“Um-hmm,” I said.

“Well, I'm asking you
not
to do that,” Bobby said.

That's exactly what I thought he was going to say. I didn't know how to respond.

“Look,” Bobby continued. “I'm not a star. They'll never vote me into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Other than that one swing, that one home run, I'm just an ordinary player. But that homer was the greatest
thing that ever happened to me. It made me famous. It put me on the map, and I got a feeling it's gonna help put my kids and grandkids through college. Please don't interfere with what happened naturally. Just let it be. What's done is done.”

He looked sad, almost as sad as Ralph Branca had looked when he was in my room a few nights earlier.

“I . . . I don't know, Mr. Thomson,” I told him.

Now I was confused. I had decided I was going to go back and help Branca the next night. But Thomson was asking me
not
to help Branca.

The expression on Bobby's face seemed more serious.

“Joe,” he said, “everybody likes to win. I like to win. You don't get to the top in professional baseball, or any other business, unless you're a pretty tough cookie. My team likes to win, too, and that was a great victory for me and the guys. I play with some competitive people. If you do anything to mess things up for us . . .”

“Are you threatening me?” I asked.

“Let me put it this way,” Bobby said, looking me straight in the eye. “Winning that game for the Giants was the greatest moment of my life. I'm not going to let you take it away from me. That's all I'm gonna say.”

He had given me something to think about, that's for sure. I was torn. Maybe I should go back to 1951 to help Ralph and prevent Bobby from hitting the home run. Maybe I should help Bobby and just leave
things alone. Or maybe I should do something so that
neither
of them would be a hero or a goat.

But if I did that,
both
of them would turn out to be nobodies. All that money they would eventually earn signing autographs together would vanish. I would be stealing money from
both
of them. I would be ruining
both
of their lives.