Ray & Me (12 page)
Authors: Dan Gutman
“Hurry, Joseph!” urged Dr. Wright. “I think they're coming.”
I concentrated on the card in my hand; and after what seemed like an eternity, the tingling sensation arrived on my fingertips.
The footsteps were getting louder.
The vibrating feeling moved up my hand, up my arm, and across my chest.
“Something's happening!”
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
My whole body was vibrating now. I had reached the point of no return. My entire body was buzzing.
There was the sound of a key in the lock.
I almost felt like my body was rising up, floating over itself, and spinning around.
The door squeaked open. I resisted the temptation to open my eyes.
“Hey, what's goin' on in here?!” somebody yelled.
“So long, sucker,” Dr. Wright mumbled.
And then we disappeared.
The Decision
D
R
. W
RIGHT AND
I
TUMBLED INTO MY LIVING ROOM HEAD
over heels, crashing into the coffee table and knocking over a floor lamp. My mother was standing there with the vacuum cleaner.
“What happened to
you
guys?” she asked.
Dr. Wright and I looked at each other. We were a sweaty, disheveled mess. A lot of Dr. Wright's makeup had been rubbed off, so part of his face was white and part was black.
“It's a long story, Mom,” I replied.
“I hope nothing bad happened.”
Dr. Wright and I looked at each other again.
“Not really,” he said, getting up and brushing off his pants. “Joseph is a veryâ¦
resourceful
young man.”
“It was really an educational trip, Mom,” I said before he could give her any details.
I always tell my mom that stuff is educational. If she thinks I'm learning something, she doesn't give me such a hard time about it. But if she knew that I was straitjacketed and thrown into a padded cell in an insane ward, and that I'd intentionally dislocated my shoulder to avoid being stuck in 1920, she'd never let me travel through time again. It's better for her to think the whole experience was like a field trip to a living history museum.
“So, were you able to save that baseball player's life?” my mother asked.
“No,” Dr. Wright said, “that didn't quite work out as we had planned.”
“Mom,” I said, “did anything change while we were away?”
“Change?” she asked. “Like what?”
“Like, do you have a flying car now? Or a microwave freezer? Anything like that?”
“Well, sure!” Mom said. “Doesn't everybody? I was just going to fly over to the supermarket now to pick up some liquified ice cream. Want to come?”
“You're kidding, right?” I asked.
“Of course I'm kidding!” she replied. “Flying cars? Joey, are you out of your mind?”
“Let me ask you this, Mrs. Stoshack,” said Dr. Wright. “Is everything the same over at the hospital? Have there been any major medical advances in the brief time we were in 1920? Techniques for regenerating nerve cells? Or for treating head injuries, perhaps? Anything like that?”
“Not that I know of,” my mother said. “Everything is pretty much the same. I'm sorry.”
Dr. Wright's shoulders fell. He sat down on the couch with a sigh. I sat next to him.
“We tried our best,” I told him. “That's what counts, right? I guess that doctor didn't open your envelope.”
“Or maybe he just didn't believe that what I wrote could possibly be true,” he said sadly. “If some strange doctor showed up at
my
hospital and told me what was going to happen in the next hundred years, I guess I would think he was crazy too.”
“I don't know
what
you guys are talking about,” my mother said.
The phone rang, and she ran to the kitchen to answer it. Dr. Wright told me he should be heading home. He got up and shook my hand.
“Thanks for taking me with you,” he said. “Even if we didn't save any lives, it was an experience I will never forget.”
“No problem,” I said. “Thanks for taking care of me at the hospital.”
“Joey!” my mom called. “It's Coach Valentini. He wants to speak to you.”
I went to the kitchen and took the phone.
“Stosh,” Flip said, “I just wanted to remind you we got a game today, and it starts in an hour. You don't have to play if you don't want to, but I wanted to make sure you knew about it.”
“Iâ¦I don't know,” I said into the phone.
“It's okay,” Flip said. “I understand. It's up to you. But you're our shortstop if you want it.”
Dr. Wright was saying good-bye to my mom at the front door. I thought about some of the things he told me when we were locked up in that padded cell. I thought about how he almost quit medicine after one of his first patients died. I thought about the lady who never left her house. And I came to a decision.
“I'll
be
there,” I told Flip.
I hung up the phone and went to change into my uniform.
Everything in this book is true, except for the stuff I made up. It's only fair to tell you which is which.
The true stuff: Houdini really did live in New York in 1920, eat needles, and escape from a straitjacket while hanging upside down. Whether or not he was able to dislocate his shoulder on purpose is a matter of debate.
Prohibition really did start a few months before this story takes place. At one point, there were more than 30,000 illegal saloons in New York City.
Women really did win the right to vote the day after Ray Chapman died, when Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
Babe Ruth and Carl Mays really did not get along and almost fought on several occasions. Most of the baseball stuff is true and can be found in Mike Sowell's great book
The Pitch That Killed: The Story of
Carl Mays, Ray Chapman, and the Pennant Race of 1920
. Read it. I also learned a lot from old copies of
The New York Times
and
Baseball's Great Tragedy: The Story of Carl Mays
by Bob McGarigle.
Â
What happened to the Cleveland Indians?
After Ray Chapman was hit, the Indians went on to win the game. Cleveland kept a slight lead in the standings on the White Sox and the Yankees.
But after Chapman's death, the Indians lost seven of their next nine games. The White Sox (eight of whom would soon be banned from baseball for throwing the previous World Series) opened up a three-game lead. It looked like Cleveland might collapse.
But they didn't. Dedicating the season to their fallen shortstop, the Indians went on a rampage and won the American League pennant, then went on to win the 1920 World Series too. They only won it one other time, in 1948.
Â
What happened to Ray Chapman?
The doctors waited until after midnight to operate on Chapman. He died four hours later.
Thousands of people attended the funeral in Cleveland, and thousands more couldn't fit into the church. Players on both teams attended but not Chapman's close friend and manager, Tris Speaker. He had collapsed and suffered a nervous breakdown.
The fatal game.
Ray Chapman is buried in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland.
The ball that hit him is not necessarily missing. The Sports Immortals Museum in Boca Raton, Florida, claims to have it.
Ray's wife, Kathleen, was not actually at the hospital right after the accident. She got the news in Cleveland and didn't arrive in New York until the next morning, after Ray had died. She was three months pregnant at the time; and a daughter, Rae Marie Chapman, was born on February 27, 1921.
After Ray died, Kathleen never attended another baseball game; and in 1928, she took her own life. A year later, Rae died from measles. She was only eight years old.
Â
What happened to Carl Mays?
After Ray Chapman died, Carl Mays was the most hated man in baseball. Mostly, it was his own fault. Instead of being remorseful (as he appears in Chapter 18), he blamed others for the tragedy. He claimed there was a scuff mark on the ball and the umpire should have thrown it out of the game. He said Chapman ducked into the pitch. Mays did
not
show up at the hospital after the accident and (upon the advice of the Yankee management) didn't attend Chapman's funeral either.
Mays faced a strong reaction, from
MAYS THE MURDERER
being scrawled in locker rooms to opposing players yelling “Murderer!” from their dugouts
when he was on the field. He received death threats. Many American League teams threatened to boycott games unless Mays was kicked out of baseball.
It never happened. There was also talk of banning underhand pitching. One change that
did
come was that umpires began to throw out balls that were scuffed or dirty. That, and the success of Babe Ruth, ushered in the home run era.
Baseball also began experimenting with batting helmets after the Chapman tragedy. But they would not become mandatory until the late 1950s.
Ray Chapman was only the fifth batter Carl Mays hit in 1920, and the only one he hit in the head. While he was known as a “headhunter,” Mays hit only 89 batters in his career. Walter Johnson hit 203âthe most by any pitcher. For the record, Cy Young hit 163, and Nolan Ryan hit 158.
Carl Mays did not actually consider quitting baseball after Chapman died. In fact, he pitched a shutout in his next game and won his next four in a row. He finished the season with a record of 26-11 and continued his very successful (208-126) career. He grew bitter when pitchers with similar records, like Rube Marquard (201-177) and Stan Coveleski (215-142), were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Here's a trivia question for you. Who was the second Yankee (after Babe Ruth) to hit a homer in Yankee Stadium? It was Carl Mays. He was also the last pitcher to clinch a world championship for the Red Sox in the twentieth century.
After he retired, Carl Mays went home to Oregon, where he was a scout for several teams and ran a baseball camp. He lost his life savings in the 1929 stock market crash. His wife died at age 36 from an eye infection. They had two young children.
For fifty years, Carl Mays had to live with the fact that he had killed a man. “Nobody ever remembers me for anything except that one pitch,” he used to say.
He was right. When he died in 1971, the obituaries focused almost entirely on what happened to Ray Chapman.
Carl Mays is buried in River View Cemetery in Portland, Oregon.
Â
Louis T. Wright is the name of a pioneering African-American surgeon who was born in 1891 (the same year as Chapman and Mays). I learned of Louis Wright from Howard Camerik's novel
The Curse of Carl Mays
.
Stosh, his mom, and Flip are fictional characters. So is Adeline, but that
is
my mom's name, and this book is dedicated to her.
I would be helpless without Bill Francis, Pat Kelly, and Andrew Newman of the National Baseball Hall of Fame; Dave Kelly of the Library of Congress; Drs. Dan Cho and Stephen Dante; Mike Sowell; Nina Wallace; Tom Lalicki; and J. J. Fennell. Thanks to all.
DAN GUTMAN
is the author of many fantastic books for young readers. Besides his popular Baseball Card Adventures and My Weird School series, he has written about soccer, basketball, bowling, and aliens. When he is not writing books, Dan is very often visiting a school. Thanks to his many fans who voted in their classrooms, he has received fifteen state book awards and thirty-seven book award nominations. Dan lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey, with his wife, Nina, and their two children, Sam and Emma.
You can visit him online
at
www.dangutman.com
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
