Jim & Me (10 page)

Jim turned suddenly and headed back down the street in the direction we had come from.

“Where are you going?” Bobby yelled after him.

“The boys are losing,” he said. “They might need me. Come on!”

“
THE POLO GROUNDS
!”
JIM ORDERED THE CAB DRIVER
. “And step on it!”

It was one of those old Model T cars, with tires that weren't much fatter than the ones on my bike. Jim climbed in the front seat. Bobby and I jumped in the back.

“This Tin Lizzie will do 40 miles per hour, sir!” bragged the driver.

Bobby and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh. 40 miles an hour?! That was it? But when the driver hit the gas, we wiped those grins off our faces. He was weaving around the other cars and horses like a maniac. Every time the cab swerved, we bounced around the backseat like a couple of Ping-Pong balls.

“Where are the seat belts?” Bobby yelled.

“The
what
?” Jim replied.

I told Bobby they didn't have seat belts in 1913, and we grabbed onto whatever we could to avoid being thrown out of the cab. Somehow, we made it back to the Polo Grounds without getting killed.

When Jim opened the cab door, I could hear a brass band playing that old song that goes “East side, west side, all around the town.” People inside the ballpark were banging pots, pans, and cowbells. The smell of roasted peanuts was in the air.

“These boys are with me,” Jim told the guard as we rushed through the turnstile.

Jim dashed through the winding tunnels under the ballpark. He ran with a natural grace, like a deer. Bobby and I were huffing and puffing to keep up.

“When you run,” Jim said, “you draw strength from the four directions—north, south, east, and west. That strength helps you meet the challenges you face.”

“What does that mean?” Bobby asked me.

“Beats me,” I said.

We were just about to collapse when Jim stopped and opened a door. It led directly into the Giants' dugout. John McGraw was standing there.

“I knew you'd be back,” McGraw barked. “Who the hell are these guttersnipes?”

“Mr. McGraw,” Jim said, “there's an old Indian superstition that children bring luck.”

“Well, get 'em in here,” McGraw ordered. “We need all the luck we can get. What's that I smell on your breath, Thorpe? Whiskey? That'll cost you
another hundred bucks. Now get your uniform on!”

Jim ran to the locker room. Bobby and I grabbed some bench. Even though I had been in major league dugouts before, it was still a thrill. I was watching Christy Mathewson, John McGraw, and the 1913 New York Giants! It was like a dream come true.

Bobby had this look on his face like a kid in a candy store. It was so different from the scowl he always carried around back home.

“How cool is this?” I whispered.

“Way cool,” Bobby said.

I looked at the scoreboard. It was the bottom of the sixth inning. Pittsburgh was still leading, 3-2. The Pirates were jogging out to the field and the Giants were coming into the dugout. Christy Mathewson sat down next to me, slapping his glove on the bench. He didn't look too happy. Nobody likes losing.

The Pirates whipped the ball around the infield. It was pretty much like watching a modern team warm up, except for two things. First, the ball wasn't white anymore. It was sort of dirty brown. Second, the gloves were tiny! I couldn't imagine how anybody could catch a ball whizzing at you with a glove that wasn't much bigger than your hand. But they were doing it, and well. They never dropped the ball.

The shortstop looked familiar to me. He was a husky guy with bowed legs.

“Excuse me,” I said to Matty, “who's that guy at short?”

I could swear I had seen that guy somewhere before.

Matty looked at me like I must be a total idiot.

“You never heard of Honus Wagner?” he said.

Honus Wagner? Of course! Not only had I heard of him, but I had even
met
him before. The first time I traveled through time, it was with a 1909 Honus Wagner card. But that's a story for another day.

A guy with a huge megaphone walked back and forth in foul territory behind home plate.

“Now batting for the Giants,” he bellowed, “Red Murray.”

After looking at a couple of pitches, Murray grounded out to short. So did the next batter. Honus scooped each ball up in his huge hands and fired it like a bullet, peppering the first baseman with dirt and pebbles along with the ball.

“Man, Wagner's got a gun for an arm,” Bobby said.

Jim Thorpe, now in uniform, stepped into the dugout through the back door. He sat between me and Bobby.

“Two outs,” I told him.

“Now batting for the Giants,” the megaphone man shouted, “Fred Merkle.”

Merkle didn't care
what
the pitcher did to the ball.

While Merkle was walking up to the plate, the pitcher stepped off the mound, leaned over, and spit on the baseball.

“Did you see that?” Bobby said.

“See what?” asked Jim.

“That guy just spit on the ball!”

“Yeah, so?”

“Isn't that illegal?” asked Bobby.

The players on the bench all turned and looked at Bobby like he was crazy.

Bobby doesn't know much about baseball history. I whispered to him that the spitball wasn't banned until 1920. He slapped his forehead.

But Fred Merkle didn't care
what
the pitcher did to the ball. He whacked a drive into the gap that went all the way to the rightfield wall. By the time the Pirates got the ball in, Merkle was chugging to third base. The Giants fans went crazy. “Go back to Peoria, busher!” a fan yelled at the pitcher. “Adams, you stink!”

John McGraw hopped off the bench and went to coach third.

McGraw went out to coach third base.

He was a riot to watch. He was yelling encouragement, jumping around, taking off his cap, putting it
back on, patting his head, and touching his ears. If you didn't know he was coaching third and flashing signs to his players, you'd swear he was one of those crazy people you see on the street.

“Now batting for the Giants, Larry Doyle!”

Doyle didn't swing at the first pitch, but the umpire jumped up dramatically to call it a strike.

“You have to learn, before you're older,” the ump hollered in a singsong voice. “You can't hit with the bat on your shoulder.”

The next pitch looked good. Doyle took a healthy cut at it, but missed.

“It cut the middle of the plate,” sang the umpire. “But you missed 'cause you swung late.”

“What's up with that ump?” I asked Jim.

“That dude is annoying,” Bobby added.

“That's Lord Byron,” replied Jim. “They call him the Singing Umpire.”

With a runner at third, and two outs and two strikes on the batter, the Giants were desperate to score the tying run. That's when John McGraw did something I'd never seen before.

“Hey, Adams!” he yelled to the pitcher from the third base line. “Lemme see that ball for a second, will ya?”

The pitcher looked over at McGraw, who was holding out his hands to catch the ball. Adams hesitated for maybe half a second, then he shrugged and flipped the ball underhanded to McGraw. But
instead of catching it, McGraw simply stepped aside and let the ball roll down the third base line.

“Go!” McGraw shouted to Merkle at third, and everybody in the dugout started yelling, “GO! GO! GO!” Merkle didn't need the advice. He took off and crossed the plate standing up.

“Awesome!” shouted Bobby, who got up and tried to give Merkle a high five as he jogged into the dugout. Merkle looked at Bobby like he was from Neptune.

The Pirates' manager ran over to Lord Byron and started shouting at him.

“That's illegal!” he argued. “You ain't allowed to do that. It's a dead ball!”

“Look in the book and read the rule,” Lord Byron sang. “If you throw away the ball, you're a fool.”

John McGraw didn't join the argument. He came back to the dugout chuckling to himself.

“Oldest trick in the book,” he said to the guys on the bench.

That run tied the game. The next Giant struck out to end the inning.

Matty grabbed his glove and went out to pitch the seventh. I watched him warm up. He had a nice, easy, graceful delivery. It looked like he wasn't even trying. But the ball moved so fast, it was nearly invisible after leaving his hand. It popped in the catcher's mitt with a BANG you could hear across the ballpark.

When Matty was throwing the ball, it didn't even look like he was trying.

Most of the Giants were out in the field now, with the exception of Jim Thorpe and Charley Grant, that black guy who McGraw was trying to pass off as an Indian.

“How about putting me in there, Mr. McGraw?” asked Jim.

“You'll get in when I say so,” McGraw snapped.

While Matty was warming up, McGraw had his head in a book titled
Rules of Baseball
.

“Gee, I would think you'd know that stuff by now, Mr. McGraw,” Charley Grant said.

“I know it by heart,” said McGraw, jotting down a note on one of the pages.

“So why are you reading the rules?”