Satch & Me (12 page)

I WAS AFRAID TO OPEN MY EYES
.
I WAS AFRAID OF WHAT
I might see. Or what I might
not
see.

What if I arrived back in the twenty-first century and Flip's Fan Club was gone? What if Flip Valentini had died years earlier and he never opened up the store? Or what if he settled down in Atlanta or Los Angeles or someplace other than Louisville? What if I did something or simply
said
something back in 1942 that changed history forever? It would be my fault. Whatever good or bad that had resulted from my actions would be my responsibility.

I opened my eyes.

I was in Flip's Fan Club. I breathed a sigh of relief.

There was good old Flip behind the counter, wrinkled and stooped over. Everything in the store looked just the same.

A little girl and her mother were talking to Flip. I remembered them. They had been asking about Barbie cards the last time I was in the store. The girl wanted to buy new Barbie cards, but Flip only had some old ones to sell.

“Can I have your autograph, Mr. Valentini?” the girl asked. “It's for my cousin's birthday. He's a big fan.”

A big fan? Of Flip? That was strange. Why would anyone want Flip's autograph?

“How much do you charge?” the girl's mother asked, opening her purse and taking out her wallet.

This was
too
weird. Somebody was willing to pay Flip for his autograph? I must have been hallucinating.

“Fuhgetaboutit,” Flip said. “What's your cousin's name?”

“Steven,” the girl said.

Flip reached under the counter and took out a black-and-white photo of a baseball player who looked a lot like Flip. He wrote across the bottom with a black marker:

I looked at the photo. It was a guy in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform. He was winding up to pitch. Now I was
sure
I was hallucinating.

Flip handed the photo to the girl, and she held it like it was a treasure. She and her mom must have thanked Flip about ten times before they finally left the store.

“Stosh!” Flip said after the door jangled shut. “How ya doin'?”

“You…you played in the majors?” I croaked.

Flip looked at me strangely.

“You
know
I played in the majors,” he said. “Are you okay, Stosh?”

“I think I need some water,” I replied.

While Flip went to get me a drink, I looked around the store. At first it looked like everything was the same. But then I looked at the photos of the old Brooklyn Dodgers on the wall. Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider. I'd seen those photos a hundred times. But there was something different about them now. I went over for a closer look.

There
was
a difference. There was a second person in each photo now. And the second person was Flip!
Young
Flip.

I thought I might faint.

Next to the photos were some yellowed old newspaper clippings, and they were all articles about Flip. I scanned the headlines.
FLIP FLIPS CARDINALS IN
3-1
VICTORY
…
VALENTINI WINS
20
TH GAME
…
FLIP VALENTINI ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT
.

The last one was dated 1963. I read the first paragraph:

“Are you okay, Stosh?”

I turned around to see an old lady standing there. She handed me a glass of water and held the back of her hand against my forehead, just like my mom does when she thinks I'm coming down with something. Flip was standing behind her.

“Who are you?” I asked, taking a sip.

“See what I mean, Laverne?” Flip said. “We should call his mother.”

“Laverne?”
I asked. “You're Laverne?!”

I searched the old lady's face. Her hair was gray and her skin was wrinkled, but it
was
Laverne! I could see a faint resemblance in her eyes.

“Well, of
course
I'm Laverne, you silly willie,” she said, chuckling. “Who else would I be?”

Suddenly it was all clear to me. I had traveled back to 1942 with Flip. We met Satchel Paige, and Satch taught him how to throw the Hesitation Pitch. We also met Laverne in 1942, and she and Flip fell in love. When Laverne's dad went psycho and tried to shoot us, I had to leave Flip behind and come back to the twenty-first century by myself. After I left, Flip and Laverne must have run off together, and Flip must have tried out for the Dodgers. He had a baseball career. He had a new life. And now Flip and Laverne were an old married couple!

“You're just a little dizzy, Stosh,” Laverne said. “You'll be fine. Flip, will you please call up Mrs. Stoshack and ask her to come get him?”

Flip was about to pick up the phone, when it rang.

“Hello?” he said into the receiver. “Yeah, this is Flip Valentini…. Very funny…You're kiddin' me…. You sure this ain't some joke?…Okay, thanks.”

Flip let the phone fall back on the hook. He had sort of a glassy-eyed look on his face.

“What is it?” Laverne asked. “Is something wrong? Did somebody die?”

“You'll never believe me,” Flip said.

“Try me,” said Laverne.

“Not in a million years,” Flip said.

“What happened?” I asked.

“They voted me into the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

For a moment, the three of us just stood there. It was like somebody had just told me that an elephant had landed on the moon. It was so different from anything I expected to hear that I didn't know how to react.

But it wasn't long until we were all screaming and jumping up and down and hugging one another. Somebody must have seen us through the window, because people started streaming in to congratulate Flip. Soon the tiny store was jammed with people, and we were in the middle of a party. Somebody produced a bottle of champagne and squirted it at Flip. The phone started ringing and it didn't stop.

After about an hour, Laverne told everybody that all the excitement had tired Flip out and he had to go home and rest. I was about to leave when she pulled me aside.

“None of this would have happened if it wasn't for you,” she whispered in my ear. “You realize that, don't you? Flip and I owe everything to you. Will you come join us for dinner tonight?”

“What are you having?” I asked.

“Roast chicken and corn bread,” she told me. “It'll make you think you died and went to heaven.”

 

She was right. Dinner was great. Flip and Laverne had a nice house too, much nicer than the dumpy apartment Flip used to live in. He seemed so much happier now.

While we were eating, the conversation turned to baseball, as it usually did whenever Flip was around. Laverne said it would be interesting to travel to the
future
to see what baseball would look like a hundred years from now. But that would be impossible, Flip and I pointed out. I always go to the year on the card. I would need a future card to go to the future, and obviously, future cards don't exist until you get there. Flip suggested some players from the past I might want to visit, like Roberto Clemente, Ty Cobb, or Ted Williams. I tossed out Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg.

It was a great evening, for all of us. The only disappointment, we all agreed, was that we never did clock Satch's best stuff on the radar gun.

“Now that it's all over,” I asked Flip, “how fast do you think Satch really was? Do you think he could have thrown 105 miles an hour?”

“Maybe it's none of our business,” Flip replied. “Some legends oughta stay legends. Some mysteries oughta stay mysteries. It'd be nice to know, but it's better to wonder.”

Everything in this book is true, except for the stuff I made up. It's only fair to tell you which is which.

From 1898 to 1946, African Americans were banned from professional baseball for no other reason than the color of their skin. Many of the greatest players in history never played major league baseball.

Satchel Paige was arguably the greatest pitcher who ever lived, and certainly the most quotable. (Much of his dialog in this book was spoken or written by Satch himself.) Negro League statistics were not always written down, but Satch claimed to have pitched 2,600 games and won 2,100 of them. He also said he pitched 300 shutouts and 55 no-hitters. Of course, Satch was known to have stretched the truth on occasion.

Satch really did drive his car (and sometimes fly his own plane) to games, rather than take the team bus. He pitched for any team that would pay him,
sometimes blowing into town and fronting a hastily assembled team of local amateurs (like the New York Stars) for one game. The Indianapolis Clowns, however, were a real Negro League team. A young Hank Aaron, by the way, started out on the Clowns at age eighteen.

Satch really did call in his fielders sometimes and strike out the side, and he really was served with divorce papers by somebody pretending to want an autograph.

I played a little fast and loose with the facts about the 1942 Negro League World Series. It was actually Game Two when Satch walked two batters intentionally so he could pitch to Josh Gibson with the bases loaded. That incident took place in the seventh inning, not the ninth. Satch pitched in all four of the World Series games that year, and he won three of them.

After a long Negro League career, Satch finally made his first major league appearance for the Cleveland Indians on July 9, 1948. He was 42 years old by then, and possibly older. (Satch was always cagey about his age.) Satch won six games and lost just one that year, helping the Indians win the American League pennant. (The league banned the Hesitation Pitch as soon as Satch used it.)

But he still wasn't finished. Satch went on to pitch four more seasons. Finally, after being out of the big leagues for a dozen years, the Kansas City Athletics brought him back for one last appearance
on September 25, 1965. Satch was almost sixty years old. He pitched three shutout innings that day. It had been nearly forty years from his first professional game until his last.

In 1971, Satchel Paige became the first Negro League player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He died on June 8, 1982, in Kansas City. He is buried there, in Forest Hill Memorial Park Cemetery.

Just as Satchel Paige was quite possibly the best pitcher ever, Josh Gibson may have been the game's greatest hitter. He hit around 800 home runs in his career, with a batting average of .352. In exhibition games against major league pitchers, he hit an incredible .426.

But by 1942, Josh had begun to fade. He was experiencing bouts of dizziness and headaches. He only made 2 hits in 13 at bats in that 1942 World Series.

Four months later, on New Year's Day, 1943, Josh fainted and was in a coma for ten days. It was determined that he had a brain tumor. Josh refused to have an operation to remove it, and things got worse. Over the next four years, Josh suffered from nervous breakdowns, hallucinations, alcoholism, and addiction to heroin. After several suicide attempts, he was briefly admitted to a mental hospital.

On Sunday, January 19, 1947, Josh went to a movie. When the lights came up, he was found slumped in his seat. He died in the middle of the
night at his mother's house. He was only 35 years old.

Nobody knows if Josh died from a brain hemorrhage, a stroke, or a drug overdose. Some say he died of a broken heart. He had hit more home runs than Babe Ruth, but he never was allowed to play in the big leagues. He was virtually unknown outside the world of black baseball.

Josh Gibson was buried in an unmarked grave in Pittsburgh's Allegheny Cemetery. Twenty-five years later, his accomplishments were recognized and he became the second Negro League player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Money was raised for a proper gravestone.

Ten weeks after Josh died, Jackie Robinson (who played with Satch on the Kansas City Monarchs in 1945) broke the color barrier. White baseball began snatching up the best Negro League players, such as Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. Fans stopped going to Negro League games and the league went out of business. The last Negro League World Series was played in 1948.

Stosh, Laverne, and Flip Valentini do not exist in the real world (though I do have an old friend named Fred Valentini).

And you can't travel through time. At least not yet.