Comeback of the Home Run Kid
Read Comeback of the Home Run Kid Online
Authors: Matt Christopher
To our mother, Cay Christopher, in loving memory
Copyright © 2006 by Matt Christopher Royalties, Inc.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10017
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
First eBook Edition: December 2009
Matt Christopher
®
is a registered trademark of
Matt Christopher Royalties, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-316-09378-1
Contents
The #1 Sports Series for Kids: Matt Christopher
®
I
've got it! I've got it!”
Sylvester Coddmyer the Third backpedaled from the pitcher's mound. He and his friend Duane Francis were playing a game of
pitch, hit, and catch. Duane had just hit a high fly ball toward shortstop. Sylvester was trying to get under it.
“You're going to miss!” Duane called, laughing.
Syl kept moving. If he'd learned one thing from playing on the Hooper Junior High Redbirds baseball team, it was never to
give up.
He crossed from the grassy infield to the sandy base path. Head craned back, he searched the sky, found the ball, and realized
it was going to fall behind him. Eye still on the ball, he took one more step back.
Suddenly, his left foot wrenched sideways. He gave a sharp cry of pain and fell in a heap. The baseball thudded down next
to him and rolled away.
“Syl! Are you all right?” Duane ran up, his face full of concern.
“My ankle!” Syl gasped. “It hurts really bad. I think you better find someone to help me.”
Duane scanned the park. His expression went from concern to outright panic. “There's no one around anywhere!”
“My mom's home,” Sylvester said. “Can you go get her?”
Duane took off at a dead run in the direction of the Coddmyers' house. Syl lay back
on the grass and tried to ignore the pain in his ankle.
“Sylvester!”
A tall blond man wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap and sweats suddenly came into view. Syl blinked in surprise. Hadn't
Duane just said there wasn't anyone else in the park?
“That was a bad fall,” the man said. He gestured toward Syl's foot. “We should take a look.”
Syl hesitated for a moment. But his ankle was really throbbing now and the tightly laced cleat wasn't making it feel any better.
So he nodded.
The man carefully took off the cleat and peeled back the sock. He gave a low whistle.
Sylvester sat up and looked at his ankle. It was as puffy as a marshmallow and turning black-and-blue. Suddenly queasy, he
lay back
down, closed his eyes, and took some deep breaths.
“Is it broken?” he whispered. A broken ankle, he knew, could take a long time to heal. School had just let out — and summer
baseball was only a few weeks away. If his ankle was broken, his whole vacation would be ruined!
“I think it's just sprained,” the man replied, “but you'll need an X-ray to be sure. For now, we need to get it elevated.”
The man grabbed Syl's baseball glove and tucked it underneath the injured ankle. Syl bit his lip, trying not to cry out in
pain.
The man sat back on his heels. “It's going to hurt for a while. Even after the swelling goes down and the bruises disappear,
that ankle's going to feel pretty weak. You'll have to work hard to strengthen it again. And even then, it might give you
some pain.”
Syl swallowed hard. “So much for summer
baseball.” He squeezed his eyes shut but a tear slipped out anyway.
The man was silent. Then he said, “Maybe not. If you want, I could work with you to get you ready to play.”
Sylvester's eyes flew open. He stared at the man. Something about this situation —a mysterious man showing up out of nowhere
and offering to help him with his game — was eerily familiar.
S
ylvester Coddmyer the Third's baseball career had started two seasons ago. Back then, he hadn't been a very good player. In
fact, he almost didn't make the team that first year.
Then he met a man named George Baruth. With Mr. Baruth's encouragement and advice, his fielding and hitting improved — a lot.
To his own and everyone else's amazement, he began making miraculous catches and hitting nothing but homers every time he
came up to bat! His home run streak was so remarkable that some people offered to
pay him to publish his story in their magazine. But Sylvester turned them down. Money didn't matter to him; he was just happy
to be playing the game he loved.
When this past season started, he assumed he'd be just as good a player as he'd been the previous year. Instead, he floundered.
His coach, Stan Corbin, had no choice but to bench him. Sylvester spent the first few games watching from the dugout and feeling
like a complete loser.
Then a man who called himself Cheeko entered the picture. Sylvester believed that Cheeko was Mr. Baruth's friend. So when
Cheeko gave him some pointers to improve his game, Syl listened. Following that advice, Syl started leaning into pitches to
get a free trip to first base. He pretended he'd caught fly balls that had really fallen out of his glove. And he “accidentally”
bumped into opponents as he rounded the bases.
These tricks did help Syl's stats. But it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Cheeko wasn't teaching Sylvester
to play better ball. He was teaching him to cheat.
And there was something more, too. Sylvester had a nagging feeling that Cheeko's help went much further than just advice.
How else could he explain the weird sensation that he'd gotten an invisible boost in time to make a spectacular top-of-the-fence
catch? Or that he'd started getting hits again, and always —
always!
— when there were people on base? Much as he wanted to think that he was doing these things himself, he just couldn't. Somehow,
he believed, Cheeko was helping him.
The mystery didn't end there. Toward the end of the season, Sylvester made two startling discoveries.
His friend Duane had a sizable collection of baseball cards. One was of the most famous
slugger in the world, George Herman “Babe” Ruth. When Sylvester saw that card, he nearly fainted. The man in the picture looked
exactly like Mr. Baruth!
Duane had another card in his collection, this one of southpaw pitcher Eddie Cicotte. Cicotte played for the White Sox in
1919. That year, the White Sox went to the World Series as the heavy favorites to win. Instead, they lost to the underdog
Cincinnati Reds, five games to three.
The reason for the surprising defeat soon came to light. Cicotte and seven of his teammates had lost the World Series on purpose!
Gamblers had promised to give them a lot of money if they flubbed catches, struck out, and got caught stealing base. Knowing
that the White Sox were sure to lose, the gamblers bet on the Reds instead — and made a pile of cash when the Reds won.
People everywhere were outraged when
they learned that the players had thrown the World Series. Dubbed the Black Sox Scandal, it was the biggest disgrace in baseball
history. Cicotte and the others were banished from the sport forever. To this day, they are viewed as some of the most dishonest
players the game has ever seen.
Sylvester had never heard about Cicotte or the Black Sox Scandal. He was stunned when he saw Cicotte's picture for the first
time. The corrupt pitcher was the spitting image of Cheeko!
These discoveries made Syl's imagination go wild. Was it possible that he'd been coached by the ghosts of these two players,
one famous, one infamous? It seemed too fantastic to believe, and yet, whenever Sylvester looked at pictures of Cicotte and
Babe Ruth, he couldn't help wondering.
But one thing was certain: whether Cheeko was really the disgraced Cicotte or not, Syl
no longer trusted him. Right before the last game of the season, he told Cheeko he wasn't going to play dirty anymore. That
very afternoon, Cheeko disappeared, never to be seen again. And that very afternoon, Sylvester stopped hammering in hits and,
instead, played with the same skill as any other thirteen-year-old kid.
That game had been weeks ago. Now Sylvester stared up at the man in the Yankees cap sitting next to him. Was yet another mystery
about to begin — and, if so, how would this one end?
“Who — who are you?” Sylvester asked. “How did you know my name?”
The man smiled. “I'm a ballplayer, like you. And I've recovered from my share of injuries, too. In fact —”
He broke off in mid-sentence. Head cocked to one side, he seemed to be listening to something.
Syl listened, too. He heard car doors slamming shut. He sat up and looked at the parking lot at the far end of the field.
There were his mother and Duane!
A wave of relief flooded over him. “It's my mom,” he said, turning back to the man.
But the man was no longer there. He had simply vanished!
S
ylvester!” Mrs. Coddmyer hurried to her son's side. “Oh my! How badly does your ankle hurt?”
“Pretty bad,” Syl admitted. “But there's something else I —”
His mother cut him off. “I'm calling your doctor.” She pulled out her cell phone and punched in the number.
Duane sat down next to him. “Sorry you had to wait out here by yourself.”
“But I wasn't alone,” Syl said in a low voice. “Didn't you see the man wearing the Yankees cap?”
Duane shook his head. “You were alone when we got here! Maybe you hit your head when you fell — or dreamed up the guy?”
Sylvester sank back onto the grass. His ankle was throbbing worse than ever. “Maybe I did,” he murmured.
His mother clicked her cell phone shut. “The doctor says to go right to the emergency room for X-rays. Duane, can you help
me get him to the car?”
The rest of the day passed in a blur. The X-ray of the ankle showed it wasn't broken. But the doctor told Syl to stay off
it for a week or so.
“Rest, ice, and elevate that ankle every day,” she said as she pushed her patient in a wheelchair out to the car. “Start doing
those exercises I showed you in a few days. And before you play any more baseball, get yourself a sturdy ankle brace. You
don't want to suffer a reinjury!”
It wasn't until that night, after Sylvester had finally crawled into bed, that he thought about his meeting with the mysterious
man in the Yankees cap. He toyed with the idea of searching for information on him. He was pretty sure he knew where to look:
baseball books, websites of old-time ball players, and Duane's baseball card collection.
But in the end, he decided against it. While part of him was burning with curiosity, a bigger part of him wanted to see what
would happen next. Would the man reappear and help him with his game, as he had said he would? And if he did, would he be
like Cheeko or Mr. Baruth?
But as the days went by, the man didn't show up. By the middle of the next week, Sylvester had almost convinced himself that
Duane had been right. He had dreamed up the man after all.
