Honus & Me: Introduction–Chapter 6

It was sort of like the feeling you get when you touch your fingers lightly against a television screen when the set is on. Static electricity jumps off the glass and onto your skin, or something like that.

I’m short for a twelve-year-old and a little stocky.

Mom says buying baseball cards is like throwing money into a garbage can. But I figure a kid should be allowed to have one harmless vice.

She’s been living by herself in that dilapidated old house for as long as anybody can remember.

The shutters were hanging off the windows at an angle, and the place hadn’t had a coat of paint in decades. You could tell home maintenance was not very important to the old lady.

“We didn’t have television back then, or even radio. But we used to pore over the newspaper. Did you know that the manager of the Pirates invented those flip-up sunglasses outfielders wear?”

He broke his bat one day, and a little boy took him home and carved Pete a new one on his daddy’s lathe.

His dad was a woodworker you see, who made wooden butter churns. Do you know what a butter churn is, Joseph?

She put on a pair of old-lady glasses and opened a drawer in the bureau in her front hallway.

After sifting through the junk in there for a minute, she pulled out a photo and held it under a lamp.

But it was exactly what she said it was—worthless junk. Broken candlesticks. Old clothes. A set of encyclopedias.

I decided to take a short break before cleaning up the mess, so I lay down on the dusty wooden slats and stared at the rafters.

In a few minutes I felt rested and rolled over on my side to look at the junk strewn across the floor.

It didn’t register at first. But when I picked up the card, I felt a strange tingling sensation.

Instinctively, I looked around to see if anybody was watching.

He had a solemn expression on his face, with his head swiveled slightly so he was looking off to the left.

As I cruised down the streets I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of joy.

The teenager went in the office and came back out with Birdie, a burly guy with glasses. Birdie Farrell is pretty famous around town because he worked as a professional wrestler for awhile before opening Home Run Heaven.

Besides, Birdie would be able to authenticate the card for me.

He had regained his composure.

Wagner would charge ground balls like a bull and scoop them up like a shovel. He grabbed handfuls of dirt along with the ball, so when the throw reached its target, the first baseman would be pelted by rocks and pebbles.

The Louisville Library gets The New York Times, so I scanned the index for WAGNER, HONUS.

A few minutes later the librarian gave me a reel of microfilm.

A multicolored baseball card depicting Honus Wagner, the great shortstop for the Pittsburg Pirates, was sold yesterday for $451,000 to Wayne Gretzky, the Los Angeles Kings hockey great, and Bruce McNall, the club’s owner.

The purchase, at Sotheby’s in New York, represented the highest price paid at auction for sporting memorabilia, about four times the previous record, set in 1989 for another Honus Wagner card.