Willie & Me by Dan Gutman Read Free Book Online Page B

sneak into this place. There were no surveillance cameras or anything. They really should have some security. Any lunatic could waltz right into the Polo Grounds and planta bomb, start a fire, or who knows what? I guess they didn’t have to worry about terrorism and stuff like that back in 1951.
    Eventually, I got tired of waiting. YOLO, right? You only live once. I dug my sneaker in and hopped the fence. If anybody stopped me, I figured, I would just play dumb and buy a ticket later. I had the money my mom had given me.
    But nobody stopped me. Nobody was around. Not even the groundskeeper. I had the run of the place. It was like a ghost town. I hopped another fence inside and a few seconds later I was climbing over a short wall near the third-base line to get right on the field.
    Have you ever been in a ballpark all by yourself? It’s sort of an eerie, beautiful feeling. I felt like a neutron bomb had wiped out the human race, and I was the only living person left on Earth.
    I ran out to second base and spun around slowly to see the Polo Grounds as a panorama. I pinched myself to make sure it was real. Here I was, standing in a place that didn’t exist anymore. I knew the Polo Grounds had been torn down in the 1960s. In my time, there was an apartment building complex on the site. For that matter, Yankee Stadium had been torn down, too. But that was just a few years ago. Neither of these great ballparks was with us anymore. Probably most of the buildings from 1951 had been torn down a long time ago.

    At the Polo Grounds, the center-field wall was nearly twice as far as the foul lines.

    The Polo Grounds was pretty much the way I remembered it from my previous trips. It’s shaped like a giant horseshoe, with the open end at center field. It was actually possible to hit a home run that traveled only 260 feet down the foul lines, and yet you could blast a shot 450 feet to center field that would be a fly ball out. It didn’t seem fair.
    There was a huge sign over the scoreboard—an ad for Chesterfield with a giant cigarette on it. REGULAR & KING-SIZE , it said. A HIT !
    So much history had taken place on this field.And I’m not just talking about all the famous baseball and football games that were played here. I had read somewhere on the internet that the hot dog was invented in the Polo Grounds in 1900. That’s right. Some sausage salesman ran out of plates during a game, so he started wrapping his sausages in rolls. For all I know, that could be one of those urban legends. You never know how much truth there is to these stories.
    I do know this : In 1908, a guy named Jack Norworth was riding the New York subway when he saw an ad for a Giants game at the Polo Grounds. Norworth had never been to a baseball game in his life. But the ad inspired him to write a little song you may have heard of—“Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
    That’s a true story. You can look it up if you don’t believe me.
    I jogged over to the batter’s box and took a couple of pretend swings. This was the exact spot, I remembered, where Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians was standing when a fastball from Carl Mays shattered his skull. Chapman died a few hours later. It was the only time in baseball history when a batter was killed by a pitched ball. Of course, that was in 1920, before they had batting helmets.
    I looked toward the outfield. Everything was green—the grass, the wall, even the seats were painted green. A green background, I knew, makes it easier for batters to see the ball.
    The upper deck stuck out about ten feet over thelower deck. On the wall out in left field was the number 315. That’s where Thomson is going to hit the Shot Heard Round the World , I remembered from my research.
    The left and right field lines were really short. I could probably hit a ball that far. But on the wall out in center field was the number 483. Four hundred and eighty-three feet. That’s a