Photograph #1:
Gutman, Dan. Honus & me. New York: Harper Trophy, 2003. Print. [Chapter 7, “One Last Peek,” pp. 33- 37] Gentile, Derek. Print.
Sometime during the night there was a stirring in my room. I thought for a moment it was the house creaking, but the sound was loud enough to make me sit up in bed out of a deep sleep.
I jumped. Air escaped from my mouth in a startled gasp. I brought my hand to my mouth to cover it. My eyes were wide and they strained to adjust to the light from my night table.
There was a man in my room. He was sitting in the chair at my desk, calmly watching me. He didn’t look like he was a thief robbing the house. He was wearing a baseball uniform.
“Who are you?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Who are you?” he replied softly.
“Joe. Joe Stoshack. My friends call me Stosh.”
“Then that’s what I’ll call you. Pleased to meet you, Stosh.” He stood up and stuck out his right
hand to shake. The hand was enormous, about the size of a canned ham. It enveloped mine completely, but gently.”
I looked the guy over. He was a big man. Not tall, but solid. About 200 pounds. He must have been in his mid-thirties, sort of weird-looking, with big ears and a big nose. There were bags under his brown eyes, and a tinge of sadness in his face. He somehow reminded me of Abraham Lincoln.
As he sat back down in the chair, I could see his legs were bowed like mine, but even worse. His chest seemed to be as big as a barrel. There was plenty of room on it for the letters PITTSBURG. There was no H at the end.
“Honus...Wagner?” I whispered, rhyming “Honus” with “bonus.”
“Honus,” he said, rhyming it with “honest.” My friends call me Hans. It’s from the German name Johannes.”
“Am I dreaming?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I am. Sure doesn’t feel like a dream though, does it?”
“No, I just went to sleep, and when I woke up you were sitting here in my room.”
“And I was at the ballpark shagging flies, and the next thing I knew I was here.”
Wait a minute! Shaking the sleep from my eyes, it occurred to me that this had to be some kind
of trick. I’m no fool, and I know not to talk to strangers. I glanced around the room trying to locate my baseball bat. Maybe I could defend myself with it if I had to.
“Who are you, anyway?” I demanded.
“I already told you, Stosh,” he replied gently. “Hans Wagner.”
“If you’re really Wagner, let’s see you prove it,” I said, “Show me some identification.”
“Stosh, I don’t carry my wallet in my uniform,” the guy said calmly. “I have no way to prove to
you who I am.”
“Well, I do.” I pulled my copy of The Baseball Encyclopedia out of the bookshelf and furiously
flipped the pages until I reached the entry for Honus Wagner. “Okay, Honus, or whatever your name is. What was your batting average in 1900?”
“That was my best year,” he answered proudly. “I hit .381.” He was right.
“Yeah, well what’s your birthday?” I asked.
“February 24th,” he replied. “1874.”
Anybody posing as Wagner would know that. I looked down the column for a more obscure
statistic. “How many errors did you make in 1909?”
“That’s easy,” he said. “Forty-nine. But at least ten of ‘em should’ve been scored as hits, if you
ask me. I couldn’t have reached ‘em with a butterfly net.”
I still wasn’t convinced this guy was Honus Wagner. “How many home runs did you hit in your
career?” I asked.
He thought about that for a moment. “I can’t answer that one, Stosh.”
“If you’re really Honus Wagner, why don’t you know how many home runs you hit?” “Well,” he said, shaking his head. “I haven’t hit ‘em all yet. I hope I haven’t anyway. I was countin’ on playin’ for a few more seasons before this old body is too beat up to hit homers.” “What year do you think this is?” I asked him.
“Why, it’s 1909, of course,” he responded. “What year do you think it is?”
I went over to my desk, picked up my calendar, and handed it to him.
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” He was genuinely shocked.
“Are you saying you traveled through time from 1909 to now?”
“I didn’t say nothin’, Stosh. But it sure looks like it.”
“I thought time travel was just something on TV.”
“TV?” he said, puzzled. “What’s TV?”
“Never mind. Why are you here?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Stosh. All I know is, somethin’ very powerful brought me to you. You and me gotta figure out what it is, and we gotta figure it out by tomorrow ‘cause I got a big game on Saturday and I don’t want to miss it. I gotta get back by 1909.”
Informational Text:
The story goes that one day in Pittsburgh, Wagner was manning his shortstop position when he reached around with his glove hand to pull out a chaw of tobacco from his back pocket. (In the early days of baseball, players wore gloves that more closely resembled golf gloves.) The batter hit a sharp grounder his way. Wagner calmly barehanded the ball and gunned it over to first, thus throwing out a man with one hand behind his back.
Wagner was stocky, barrel-chested and had shovels as hands. Legend has it that when he dug balls out of the infield dirt and zipped them over to first base, a small load of stones and dirt would travel with the ball.
He played virtually every position except catcher. He was a tremendous hitter, winning eight batting titles and six slugging average titles. He hit over .300 16 times, led the league in doubles seven times and triples three times. He stole 722 bases, and led the league in that category five times.
In 1902, Wagner played 61 games in the outfield, 44 at shortstop, 32 games at first base, one at second base and pitched once. He didn’t make an error at any of those positions. From 1913-1916, he led the league’s shortstops in fielding position.
Wagner was a terrific athlete: He may well have been the first baseball player to lift weights, and he was a fanatic about a new game that had recently been invented in Sprinfield called basketball. He played baseball until he was 43 and was perhaps the best 40-year-old player in baseball history.