CORKED

I was twelve the first time Poppa Joe let me hold it.

It was dark brown, the leather cracked and peeling back, so that it flaked off and left a fine residue on my fingertips.

“So?” asked Poppa Joe.

I weighed the ball in my hands. I thought about pretending to drop it, but you just don’t do that to a man who just had a triple bypass who’s letting you hold his personal treasure.

“So?” I echoed. “It feels like a baseball. An old baseball.”

“Right,” said Poppa Joe. He took it back from me, put it back in its little airtight plexiglass case that kept it from disintegrating into a little pile of brown dust.

Two years later, I made it onto the JV team at my high school. We went zero and five the first half of the season. It didn’t bother me too much, because at least it meant I wasn’t the one dragging the team down. But it would have been nice to win one. We stopped going out for pizza after the games. None of our friends wanted to come watch us totally suck it up. Some of us couldn’t even get our parents to come.

So I was surprised when, just as we lost our sixth game, I saw Poppa Joe sitting on the front bleacher. He waited for me to help up pack up the balls and batting helmets and stuff, and then gestured for me to come over.

“Well, that was a pretty pathetic game, Jamie,” said Poppa Joe. He slung an arm around my shoulder.

I wriggled out, embarrassed. “Pops, there’s people,” I said.

Poppa Joe started walking to his car-- a big, beat-up boat of a car that he’d been driving since before I was born.

He talked like he would have kept right on talking even if I hadn’t followed him.

“It was back in eighteen seventy-five,” said Poppa Joe.

“What was?” I asked.

“That’s the year the National Association folded,” said Poppa Joe. “The first real major league. But they wouldn’t let my grandfather play in it. He just served beers to all the drunks in the stands. That’s why they folded, y’know. All the gambling and drinking scared the normal folks away.”

He got into the car, put his key in the ignition. I slipped into the passenger side seat and buckled my belt. Poppa Joe wouldn’t start the car unless everybody had their belts buckled.

“But he played on a traveling team, too,” said Poppa Joe. “Back in those days, if you were black, or Italian, or depending on where you lived, Jewish or Irish...if you wanted to play ball, you had to play with your own people, and nobody’d pay you to play. Especially after those professional leagues started, like the National and then the American, later on.”

The car lurched out of the parking lot, him with both hands on the wheel at exactly ten-and-two, just like old people drive, and me with my mitt folded over my knee.

“But back in those days,” said Poppa Joe, “baseball wasn’t the same game. They played with what we call a dead ball now. You know what a dead ball is?”

“What, a ball that’s been shot? Stabbed?” I asked.

“Don’t be a snotty kid,” said Poppa Joe. “A heavy ball. A ball that wants to go down, not up. So ball in those days, it wasn’t all about the big guns. Steroids wouldn’t have done you any good. It was a strategy game. You bunted more, you stole more bases. You picked your pitches careful-like. It was an art. You had to be smart to play. But there wasn’t much spectacle to it. Sure, sometimes you’d get a home run here or there, but nobody went to a game expecting to see one.”

“So some of the teams, they’d go to extremes to draw a crowd, because the only way you made enough even to cover the train tickets out to wherever you played was selling tickets. So you started seeing teams with midgets--”

“Dwarves, Poppa Joe,” I said. “Midgets is rude.”

“Midgets,” Poppa Joe repeated. “And giants, and Siamese--”

“Conjoined,” I tried, knowing it was no use.

“Siamese twins,” said Poppa Joe. “And all kinds of freaks. Some of them would wear funny uniforms, or juggle fire or all kinds of things, just to draw a crowd. But none of those were the good teams, the serious teams. The serious teams, if you were a little too ethnic for the National, there you were, playing good ball, smart ball, and nobody there to see you.”

“And that was your grandfather?”

“Yup, that was my Poppa Joe. I wasn’t alive yet then, of course. He wasn’t much older than you are now. And he loved baseball. He always told me, his father wasn’t so crazy about him running around swinging things with a bat, you know, because back then, kids worked the same as adults, but his mother said, you just let the boy play ball. Nobody’s ever going to care how much work he does, he’s never going to be as good as them. But you see him with that bat in his hands, he’s just as American as any boy you see.”

“At least,” said Poppa Joe, “that’s how he told me the story. I don’t know if she really said that; she was dead before I was born. So there he was, playing like any American boy, and he was good. Better than any of the boys in the National, but the only thing he was allowed to sling in the big fancy ballparks was drinks. Meanwhile, he had his team he played on, the Yellowjackets, they were called, and of course they wore yellow jackets. They must’ve had some of the best players that young game had ever seen, playing on fields run to dirt and barely making a penny.”

“So one day, their manager lets them have the bad news. Man’s name was Bat. I don’t know what it was short for, but wasn’t it the nickname for a ballman? Bat says, boys, we’ve got to do something to making bank, or we’re not going to be able to pay the fare to Johnstown next week. It doesn’t matter if we win or lose, we just have to bring the crowd.”

“And Joe says, he says, give me a ball, Bat. Bat asks him why, what’s he going to do? Joe tells him he’s going to do magic to it. All the boys laugh, but he takes that ball home with him that night, and brings it back when they’ve got practice the next evening. And he says to Bat, Bat, you find someone to play us, and I’ll show you how we’re going to make money.”

“So Bat gets a team from just down the way-- because there used to be, in those days, you didn’t have school teams, you had teams from down the lane or over the hill. And they all crowd around, and Bat asks Joe, Joe, he says, what next?”

“And what does Joe say? He says, play ball.”

“Pitcher from Joe’s team, he takes Joe’s ball, and the first batter steps to the plate. Pitcher winds up, ball flies over home plate, batter swings...and the ball doesn’t dribble down the first base line. Ball goes whoosh. Flies over the field, over the road, lands on the steps of the post office. The Postmaster comes out, thinks someone knocked, but there’s just this ball, and all these boys running over, they want this ball back. By the bottom of the second inning, half the town’s out watching. By the top of the fourth, the whole town is, including Joe’s dad, who never watched a game in his life. And they’re cheering, and hollering, and passing the hat around to send the boys to Johnstown.”

“Yellowjackets lost that game. But they got to Johnstown, and they brought that ball with them. The boys played three games in Johnstown, went two and one, and made more money in that weekend than they’d made the whole season up till then. By the third game, folks were bringing in ladders to stand on so they could see the field, somebody brought a band, it was a regular holiday. Then they started getting letters from folks farther afield, asking them to come play. Begging them to come play. Because the beauty of it was, it wasn’t that the Yellowjackets were better than anybody else. Nobody wanted to get clobbered on their home field. It was the Yellowjackets made their team better, too.”

“So what did he do to the ball, Poppa?” I asked. “I saw it. I felt it, that one time. It’s just like any old ball, only really old.”

“Ah,” said Poppa Joe. “But it wasn’t like any old ball. It wasn’t the only ball. Joe brought the team more balls, just like it. But he never told anyone the secret, and he always took them home with him at night so nobody could find out. And he kept on telling them, when they asked, Joe, what do you do to make those balls fly so good? He’s say, it’s magic. I’m a regular baseball magician.”

“But it wasn’t magic,” I said. I was fourteen. I wasn’t a little kid. I knew better.

Poppa Joe shrugged. “I’m not saying it is, and I’m not saying it isn’t. But round about thirty-five years later, eight years before I was born, man named Ben Shibe owned the Philadelphia A’s. Yeah, the Oakland A’s, before they moved out West to Kansas City and then California. And that year, World Series comes around, and Ben Shibe shows up with a ball that looked a lot like Joe’s. He says, hey, here, you use this ball instead. And the next year, they replaced every ball in the game. They say that was a series like no one had seen before. But this was the big leagues, and none of them had ever seen the Yellowjackets.”