"Abner & Me" by Dan Gutman, Chapters 1–6

“Yeah, right,” I whispered. “Do you think that if I could travel through time and go to any year in the history of the world, I’d be sitting here listening to this?”
Kenny snickered.
The fact is, I can travel through time—with baseball cards.

Bobby Fuller has had it in for me ever since I hit a double off him to break up his no-hitter. And that was back in our T-shirt league days! You’d think he would forget about it by the time we got to seventh grade. Bobby Fuller sure could hold a grudge.

Fuller and Kenny were on the same team. They’re a couple of prejuvenile delinquents.

Fuller used to really get to me. He could make some stupid comment and rattle me just enough to throw off my swing a little so I’d strike out or pop up or something. But he didn’t bother me anymore. Now he just seemed pathetic.

If you know baseball, you know that infielders are trained to be masters of deception.

“Who said that?” I asked. How could Bobby Fuller possibly know that I could travel through time?
“I’ve got my sources,” he said, grinning his stupid grin.
Maybe he was bluffing. Maybe he just made up something to be outrageous and it was just an amazing coincidence that it was true. Or maybe he knew.

Samantha! I knew I shouldn’t have been showing off in front of that annoying little runt. She slipped a card into my hand when I was about to go back and meet Mickey Mantle in 1951, and the next thing I knew, it was 1944 and I was sitting in the dugout of an all-girls team in Milwaukee.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Uncle Wilbur is alive thanks to me.
What happened was that when I went back to 1919 to meet Shoeless Joe Jackson, I also tracked down Uncle Wilbur when he was a kid. Mom had told me that he died from a disease called influenza when he was a boy. I gave him some of the flu medicine I had brought with me, and when I returned to the present day, Uncle Wilbur was alive.

Mom told us that one of the patients at the hospital almost died, and they had to give her CPR. That stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

“You will have in your hand the only baseball in the world that was signed by the man who actually invented the game! Remember when Barry Bonds hit his seventy-third homer in 2001? That ball sold for around half a million. A ball signed by Abner Doubleday should be worth twice as much as that. The sky’s the limit!”

I don’t usually get a lot of mail. Just a couple of sports magazines and catalogs, mostly. The return address on the envelope Mom was holding said National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
“Hey, maybe you’ve been inducted into the Hall of Fame, Joe,” Uncle Wilbur joked.

“This guy Abner Doubleday may have invented baseball,” I said. “Or maybe he didn’t. Nobody knows for sure. I was…thinking of traveling through time to find out.”
I cringed, waiting for her to tell me it was too dangerous and all that.

"...This has been so educational for you. I guess I’ve come around to thinking that these trips are a good thing. I want to see what it’s like.”
Educational? Ha! My mother is clueless.

I’d never told Mom how educational it was when I went to meet Jackie Robinson in 1947 and a psychotic batboy chased me through the streets of Brooklyn, swinging a baseball bat at my head.

There were two crucial things I needed to bring with me on a trip to meet Abner Doubleday. First, I needed a new pack of cards. Baseball cards take me to the year on the card, so they would be our return ticket home. If I didn’t have new cards with me, Mom and I would be stuck in the past forever.
Second, I needed a baseball so I could get it autographed for my dad. And a Sharpie marker, of course, to write on the baseball.