Willie & Me (7 page)

There weren't any newsstands around, but there was the next best thing—a garbage can. You can almost always find a newspaper in a garbage can, especially back in the old days before they had recycling.

I spotted a can near the corner and went over to it. I rooted around until I found a copy of the
New York Times
. . . .

Okay, good. It was probably yesterday's paper. Everything was working out perfectly. After eleven trips, I was finally getting the hang of this time travel thing. Maybe my luck had finally changed.

I scanned the
Times
for a minute. It cost just five cents in 1951, I noticed. The first parking meters were being installed in Brooklyn. The heavyweight champion Joe Louis had signed a contract to fight Rocky Marciano. RCA was inviting the public to see an early test of color television. But I wasn't about to waste my time reading the paper. I wanted to get inside the ballpark.

Standing right next to it, I thought the Polo Grounds somehow looked different from the other times I had been there. I pulled on a door, but it was locked. I tried another one. No luck. I looked for a window I might be able to climb into. But it was a solid brick wall. It occurred to me that maybe I was in the
back
of the ballpark. I walked all the way around to the front and backed away from the wall until I saw this. . . .

What?! Yankee Stadium isn't even in Manhattan. It's in the
Bronx
. Everybody knows that. That's why the Yankees are called “The Bronx Bombers.” I needed to be in Manhattan. What was I doing
here
? Somehow, I had messed up, again.

Across the street, I spotted a guy in overalls pushing a big broom. He was on a walkway next to the river. I ran over to him.

“Excuse me,” I said in my most polite voice. “Can you tell me how to get to the Polo Grounds?”

The guy stopped sweeping and looked up at me with disgust.

“You from outta town?” he asked me. “Or just stupid?”

He turned around and pointed across the river. There was a ballpark on the other side, and a big hill behind it.

I didn't know that the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium were so close to each other.

Of
course
! Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds were right
next
to each other on either side of the Harlem River. I
knew
that. I had forgotten.

“I'm from out of town,” I said, running off. “Thanks, mister!”

“Fuhgetaboutit,” he mumbled.

One of the things I like about New York City is that it's easy to get around, because the streets are numbered. There was a small bridge that crossed
over the Harlem River into Manhattan. A little sign said it was the Macombs Dam Bridge, and it opened in 1895. That was the year Babe Ruth was born, I remembered. I jogged across the bridge.

It ended with a fork that led onto 155th Street. I walked two blocks north to 157th, and there it was. . . .

The Polo Grounds.

It wasn't a beautiful ballpark, like Wrigley Field, Shibe Park, and some of the other places I had visited. But
this
was the ballpark I remembered from my previous trips. I ran across the street and peered through the chain-link fence. The place looked empty.

I figured I would just hang out at the front gate until somebody showed up and the ticket booths opened. There was a lot of time to kill. I wished I had brought a portable video game system, or something to read. Waiting is boring.

That's when I remembered the little video camera that my grandmother had given me for my birthday. I had been planning to bring it along and shoot some video from 1951, but I must have left it on the desk in my room. Bummer!

I kept looking through the fence and thinking that
anybody
could sneak into this place. There were no surveillance cameras or anything. They really should have some security. Any lunatic could waltz right into the Polo Grounds and plant
a bomb, start a fire, or who knows what? I guess they didn't have to worry about terrorism and stuff like that back in 1951.

Eventually, I got tired of waiting. YOLO, right? You only live once. I dug my sneaker in and hopped the fence. If anybody stopped me, I figured, I would just play dumb and buy a ticket later. I had the money my mom had given me.

But nobody stopped me. Nobody was around. Not even the groundskeeper. I had the run of the place. It was like a ghost town. I hopped another fence inside and a few seconds later I was climbing over a short wall near the third-base line to get right on the field.

Have you ever been in a ballpark all by yourself? It's sort of an eerie, beautiful feeling. I felt like a neutron bomb had wiped out the human race, and I was the only living person left on Earth.

I ran out to second base and spun around slowly to see the Polo Grounds as a panorama. I pinched myself to make sure it was real. Here I was, standing in a place that didn't exist anymore. I knew the Polo Grounds had been torn down in the 1960s. In my time, there was an apartment building complex on the site. For that matter, Yankee Stadium had been torn down, too. But that was just a few years ago. Neither of these great ballparks was with us anymore. Probably most of the buildings from 1951 had been torn down a long time ago.

At the Polo Grounds, the center-field wall was nearly twice as far as the foul lines.

The Polo Grounds was pretty much the way I remembered it from my previous trips. It's shaped like a giant horseshoe, with the open end at center field. It was actually possible to hit a home run that traveled only 260 feet down the foul lines, and yet you could blast a shot 450 feet to center field that would be a fly ball out. It didn't seem fair.

There was a huge sign over the scoreboard—an ad for Chesterfield with a giant cigarette on it.
REGULAR
&
KING-SIZE
, it said.
A HIT
!

So much history had taken place on this field.
And I'm not just talking about all the famous baseball and football games that were played here. I had read somewhere on the internet that the hot dog was invented in the Polo Grounds in 1900. That's right. Some sausage salesman ran out of plates during a game, so he started wrapping his sausages in rolls. For all I know, that could be one of those urban legends. You never know how much truth there is to these stories.

I do know
this
: In 1908, a guy named Jack Norworth was riding the New York subway when he saw an ad for a Giants game at the Polo Grounds. Norworth had never been to a baseball game in his life. But the ad inspired him to write a little song you may have heard of—“Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

That's a true story. You can look it up if you don't believe me.

I jogged over to the batter's box and took a couple of pretend swings. This was the exact spot, I remembered, where Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians was standing when a fastball from Carl Mays shattered his skull. Chapman died a few hours later. It was the only time in baseball history when a batter was killed by a pitched ball. Of course, that was in 1920, before they had batting helmets.

I looked toward the outfield. Everything was green—the grass, the wall, even the seats were painted green. A green background, I knew, makes it easier for batters to see the ball.

The upper deck stuck out about ten feet over the
lower deck. On the wall out in left field was the number 315.
That's where Thomson is going to hit the Shot Heard Round the World
, I remembered from my research.

The left and right field lines were
really
short. I could probably hit a ball
that
far. But on the wall out in center field was the number 483.
Four hundred and eighty-three feet.
That's a
long
way to hit a baseball. It looked like center field went on forever.

I remembered a photo of Willie Mays making a spectacular on-the-run, over-the-shoulder catch out there during the 1954 World Series. It was so famous that it came to be called “the Catch.”

I can't imagine how Willie ever caught up with that ball.

I jogged out to center field to re-create Willie's famous play. A few feet to the left of where he caught the ball, above the center field wall, were two bronze plaques. I went over to see what they said. One was in honor of a guy named Eddie Grant. I had never heard of him, but the plaque said he played for the Giants, and he was the first major league player to be killed fighting in World War I. The other plaque was a monument to the Hall of Fame Giant pitcher Christy Mathewson. I had met him when I went to visit Jim Thorpe in 1913. It read . . .

THE GREATEST PITCHER OF HIS ERA AND ONE OF THE FINEST SPORTSMEN OF ALL TIME. FOR HIS MODE OF LIFE AND CONDUCT AT ALL TIMES, HE STOOD FORTH AS AN EXAMPLE TO HIS FELLOW PLAYERS.

Directly above the plaque was a row of seven windows. There were wire screens covering them, I suppose to prevent a home-run shot from shattering the glass. I couldn't imagine anyone hitting a ball that far, but you never know.

I had to go to the bathroom, and I figured there must be one behind those windows. There was a staircase near the big scoreboard. It looked like the stairs led up behind the windows, so I climbed up two flights of steps.