Dumbest joke ever, but they both laughed anyway.
Maggie took the scorebook back to her room. All the others were on her bed, higgledy-piggledy; Joey-Mick must have thrown them there when he was looking for the right one. She picked up the books and sat down with them on her lap.
Five of them. 1951. The '51 playoffs. 1952, '53, '54.
It was always wait till next year.
Maggie opened the book on top of the pile. 1951. She leafed through it slowly. Page after page of little squares filled with tiny numbers and letters ... and every square Maggie looked at brought pictures to her mind, all vivid with the colors and sensations of having been at a game herself.
Jackie dancing on the base path.
Pee Wee going deep in the hole.
Willie in center field, running toward the wall as fast as he could.
She could almost hear Red Barber's voice on the radio. Maggie held her breath, as if those plays were happening at that very moment. Would Jackie steal second? Who would get to the ball first—Willie or the wall? The crowd roaring in the background ... and once, her own voice had been part of that crowd noise.
Her breath eased out slowly as she continued to turn the pages. Every game, every inning, every play—really, every pitch she had recorded in the book had been a chance to hope for something good to happen.
She shook her head and almost smiled. Dodger fans probably had more practice at hoping than fans of any other team. The same thing over and over again, but always different.
Prayers were like that, too. Her bedtime prayers—saying almost the same thing each night, but feeling a little different sometimes, depending on what she was praying for. And the novena.... She recalled the quiet and stillness in the church, the glow of the candles both fierce and lovely, her mind full of thoughts about Jim, hoping for him to get better.
Maybe praying was another way to practice hope.
If that was true, then between the Dodgers and praying, she ought to be getting awfully good at hoping.
Maggie sighed. What's the use of getting good at it? Hope doesn't do anything.
Another voice spoke up inside her head. But hope is what gets everything started. When you make plans, it's because you hope something good is going to happen. Hope always comes first.
One by one, she picked up the scorebooks and turned their pages, pausing now and then to recall the plays and the games. As she flipped through the last notebook, something fluttered to the floor.
It was the photo of Jim and Jay. Maggie bit her lip, remembering how furious she had been when she hid the picture there. She picked it up and fingered the torn corner.
Then she rose from the bed, took the frame Treecie had given her out of the bureau drawer, and put the photo carefully into the space behind the glass. The missing corner hardly showed at all.
Maggie spent the next few minutes clearing off the top of the bureau, putting away bobby pins, books, a pencil stub, other odds and ends. She picked up the scorebooks one by one and stacked them in order of their years, 1951 on the bottom. She put the score-books on top of the bureau, and took her war notebook down from its place on the shelf and put that on the stack, too.
Finally, she placed the framed photo of Jim and Jay carefully on top.
As she left the room, she turned back for a moment and stood in the doorway.
It was just right. She would see them every time she came into the room.
December, three days before her thirteenth birthday. Maggie walked home from the bus stop after school, thinking about the celebration that had been planned. Her and Treecie's joint birthday. They would be going downtown with Mom and Mrs. Brady to see a matinee and then have tea at a fancy hotel. They would get all dressed up, too; Treecie had said she was even going to wear a hat.
Maggie had Treecie's present ready. Last week, there had been a sale at the library. Many of the books looked pretty old, but others were in perfectly good shape and Maggie couldn't understand why they were being sold. Some cost only a nickel.
Browsing through the piles on the tables, Maggie had come across a spiral-bound book with lots of photographs in it. It was called Women at Work: A Tour Among Careers. Several of the pictures had been taken by Margaret Bourke-White.
Maggie knew that name. Treecie's hero!
As well as the photos, the book had stories about women who had interesting jobs. Maggie especially liked the essay by a woman named Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Mrs. Fisher had gone to France during World War I. She had worked with soldiers there, mostly those who had been blinded, and had also set up a shelter for children injured in the war.
Most of the women in the book were authors or journalists. They had traveled all over the country and to different parts of the world, and had written about a whole bunch of different subjects.
Maggie had found out that the official scorer for the Dodgers was a position rotated among the journalists who covered the game. It wasn't actually a separate job all by itself. You had to be a journalist first. And here were all these women journalists....
So maybe I could be a journalist when I grow up. Listening, and then writing things down—kind of like scoring.
She could already hear Treecie's response to that: "What a great idea! We could travel together! You'll write the stories, and I'll take the pictures—we'd be a great team!"
Maggie had wrapped the book nicely and made a card. She was looking forward to Treecie's reaction when she opened the gift.
"Mail for you," Mom called from the kitchen when Maggie arrived home.
Maggie always got birthday cards or letters from both Ireland and Canada; she liked knowing that people so far away were thinking about her.
Two envelopes. She sat down at the table and looked at the stamp on the first one. Canadian. She slid her finger under the flap and took out a pink card with red roses on it. "Thinking of you on your special day," it read on the front in fancy gold letters, and inside, "Many happy returns of the day."
Written at the bottom:
Maggie dear, can't believe you're thirteen!
We miss you.
Love from Aunt Maria
and Uncle Scott
Maggie walked across the room and reached up to stand the card ajar on the shelf above the radio; Mom always put cards there so everyone could see them. Then she went back to the table and picked up the second envelope.
An ordinary envelope, not card-shaped.
U.S. stamp.
Her name and address on the front.
Maggie drew in a sharp breath.
That handwriting. She had seen it many times before—on score sheets and letters....
Inside the envelope was a folded piece of notebook paper. As she pulled it out, she could see that there was hardly any writing on it.
When she unfolded the piece of paper, it was upside down. She turned it right-side up and read:
Dear Maggie-o,
You're right about the walks.
Your friend Jim
She read it again. And again. Then she touched the words on the page with her fingertips, gently, gingerly, as if they were a flock of tiny birds that might at any moment fly away.
***
The next day Maggie took all the money she had left—five dollars and forty cents—and went to Mr. Aldo's store. It wasn't a big place; still, there was enough variety in the display that it took her several minutes to decide.
Maggie gave her selection to Mr. Aldo. She counted out two dollar bills and thirty dimes as he put her purchase into a paper bag.
There was no snow yet, but it was cold enough that Maggie ran the last half-block home, holding the bag carefully so as not to bump it.
Back at the house, she hung her coat on its peg in the hall and went up to her room. From the paper bag, she took out two fancy notebooks. They were more like journals, with real leather covers instead of plain cardboard.
One brown, one black.
Maggie put the black one back in the bag. She stroked the s
mooth leather of the brown one. She had wanted blue, but the choice had been black or brown. Maybe she could find a blue one next year.
She tried to guess where the exact middle of the book was and opened it carefully there. The spine creaked sweetly, as if the notebook was glad to be opened for the first time.
The pages were heavier than ordinary paper. Maggie riffled through them a few times; she liked the whispery sound of the riffling.
At last she turned to the first page. In the upper right-hand corner, using her best handwriting, she wrote:
Dodgers Scorebook by Margaret Olivia Theresa Fortini for the 1955 season
The black journal was for Jim. Black, the Giants' team color. Tomorrow she would mail it to Carol's house in New Jersey.
Opening Day was five long months away, but she would be ready, and maybe Jim would be, too.
* * *
Epilogue
In 1955, for the first and only time in their history, the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series, defeating the Yankees in seven games.
* * *
Acknowledgments
My thanks to:
Fred Vergara, Lisa DeVries Workman, Gerry Roth, and Dave Ruby, among many others, for helping nurture my childhood love of baseball. Freddy Berowski, Research Associate, A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Library at the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., for assistance with key baseball facts and figures. The staff of the Brooklyn Public Library, for specific help with questions for this story, and for being there years ago, when I was a young mother in Brooklyn.
Ginger Knowlton, Marsha Hayles, Julie Damerell, and Michele Burns: my all-girl, all-star infield.
Dinah Stevenson, who sometimes has to drag me kicking and screaming toward a better story, but always does so with patience and wisdom and good humor. The staff at Clarion Books, especially Jim Armstrong (who has a picture of the 1955 Dodgers on his office wall), for blocking all those pitches in the dirt.
My husband and daughter, for putting up with my passion for baseball. My son, for sharing it. My dad, for taking me to games at Wrigley Field when I was a child, and my mom, for preparing the sushi picnics we ate during the games.
Any errors in the text are my responsibility.
* * *
Authors Note
Two seasons after the landmark World Series victory, Maggie would have mourned with all of Brooklyn when, at the end of the 1957 season, owner Walter O'Malley moved the Dodgers to the West Coast, where they became the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Giants went west as well, to San Francisco, taking Willie Mays with them. As much as it hurt New York fans at the time, the moves helped make baseball truly a national game.
After the two teams relocated to California, there was no National League team in New York for five years. In 1962, the New York Mets franchise was established, eventually with a new stadium in Queens. Maggie, like many Brooklyn fans, could never in a million years have become a Yankees fan, and I am pretty sure she eventually became a Mets fan. In 1972, she would have seen the return of Willie Mays to New York, where he finished out his career with two seasons as a Met.
I grew up in the Chicago area; as a child, I was a rabid Cubs fan. And like Maggie, I had a favorite player on another team—Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Whenever the Cubs and Pirates played each other, I would cheer for Clemente to do well but for the Cubs to win the game.
For the scenes depicting Maggie's disappointment at the Dodgers' many near-misses, I was able—alas!— to draw on many memories from my years as a Cubs fan. Most of all, I recalled the 1969 season, when I was the same age as Maggie is when this book opens. In first place for most of the season, the Cubs lost a nine-game lead in an agonizing stretch during August and September. It was the Mets who overtook them and went on to win the pennant and the World Series.
Life sometimes throws you a curve ball, and these days, due to geographical and family happenstance, I am a devoted Mets fan. It took a while for those raw memories of 1969 to fade to sepia, but I have magnanimously forgiven the Mets and now follow their progress daily throughout the season. As of this writing, the Mets are constructing a new stadium (to be opened for the 2009 season). To my—and Maggie's—delight, it will have an entrance rotunda inspired by the one that graced Ebbets Field, and it will be named in honor of Jackie Robinson.
The score sheet on the endpapers for that fateful game between the Dodgers and the Giants in 1951 was produced exactly as Maggie would have done it: by listening to the audio broadcast of the actual game (ordered from baseballdirect.com) and marking down the plays as I heard them. Likewise, I listened to a recording of Game 1 of the 1954 World Series to score the play depicted on page 168—Willie Mays's catch of Vic Wertz's fly ball.
Scoring a baseball game is both neatly standardized and wildly personal. Some notations are recognized universally, but everyone I know who keeps score also has foibles and codes unique to themselves. On page 42, Jim "invents" the use of the exclamation point to denote an outstanding play. This was something I myself "invented" when I kept score as a child. At the time, I had never seen anyone else score a play this way, but years later I learned that it has become a notation standard.
Maggie develops a way to track the pitch count, as she explains to Jim on page 33. I got this idea from my son, who began rigorously recording the ball-and-strike count when he was only eight years old. There are now preprinted score sheets available that include an area to record the pitch count for each at-bat.
Maggie would be pleased that there is now indeed a statistic that includes walks as a measure of a player's ability to reach base. The on-base percentage (OBP), which includes a player's hits, walks, and getting hit by pitches, was first calculated in the 1950s (by Branch Rickey and Allan Roth) but was not adopted as an official statistic by Major League Baseball until 1984. When I was a child, a player's official stats did not include OBP (although the OBP of past players has since been calculated and is now available). Today it is considered one of the most important offensive numbers.
In 1980, the system of using journalists to serve as official scorers was abolished, and it is now, indeed, a separate job. Scorers are appointed by each team but are employees of Major League Baseball. If Maggie had become an official scorer, she would have been one of several women who have held that position throughout the years, beginning with Eliza Green Williams, official scorer for the Chicago White Sox from 1882 to 1891. However, Treecie would have been outraged at how few women there are even now in the top ranks of sports journalism and management.
Although I don't remember being taught to keep score, I do know who taught me: Fred Vergara, a lifelong family friend and baseball fan, whose own score sheets are works of art. I owe him a great debt for increasing my love of the game, and for giving me many hours of pleasure when I taught my son how to score.
Of the many sources I used to research this story, three were especially helpful. Wait Till Next Year, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, is a memoir about being a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in the 1950s. We Were Innocents: An Infantryman in Korea, by William Dannenmaier, includes letters written by the author during his years of service. I Remember Korea: Veterans Tell Their Stories of the Korean War, 1950–53, by Linda Granfield, contains first-hand accounts and archival photographs as well as an introduction by author Russell Freedman, who served in Korea. In addition to newspaper accounts, I relied on www.baseballlibrary.com, www.baseballalmanac.com, www.baseball-reference.com, and www.retrosheet.org for statistics and game details.
The tragedy of the civilians gunned down under the railway bridge described in Chapter 14 is loosely based on an incident that happened during the Korean War. According to The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, by Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza, South Korean civilians, including women and children, were killed by U.S. soldiers at a railway bridge near a village called No Gun Ri in July 1950. Hanley et al. won a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2000.
A cease-fire has been in existence in Korea since 1953. A cease-fire is defined as not an end to hostilities but a pause in the exchange of fire. Both South and North Korea and their allies have thousands of soldiers who patrol the border (known as the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ) in a constant state of armed readiness. A peace treaty has never been signed.
Which means that as of this writing, the Korean War is not over. It is currently the war of longest continuous duration in the world.
* * *
Keeping Score
The following websites provide information on how to keep score of a baseball game:
http://ldt.stanford.edu/ldt1999/Students/dkerby/ldtportfolio/scoring/titlepage.htm
A fun site with a tutorial that includes quizzes to help you along.
http://www.baseballscorecard.com/kscore.htm
A good site for beginners, with the basics clearly explained.
http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle/baseball/tutorial.phtml
This site includes a bibliography of books about scoring.
http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/baseball_basics/keeping_score.jsp
The official site of major league baseball; however, the information on KEEPING SCORE is minimal.
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Keeping Score Page 14
