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Lucky: Maris, Mantle, and My Best Summer Ever (Junior Library Guild Selection), by Wes Tooke
Free Ebook Lucky: Maris, Mantle, and My Best Summer Ever (Junior Library Guild Selection), by Wes Tooke
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Louis isn't very good at playing baseball, but he knows and loves the game more than anybody, more than his superathlete stepbrother and the neighborhood bullies. He loves the purity of the sport, the crack of a bat and the smell of fresh cut grass in the stadium. And more than anything, he loves the New York Yankees. So when he amazingly finds himself in a position to become a bat boy for the team during the summer of 1961, it is like a dream come true. Little does he know, that he's about to have a front row seat to one of the most memorable seasons in sports history. And that the heroes he looks up to will teach him things about life that will change him forever.
- Sales Rank: #490426 in Books
- Brand: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
- Published on: 2011-02-22
- Released on: 2011-02-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.63" h x .50" w x 5.13" l, .26 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 192 pages
From Booklist
In the summer of 1961, Louis, who stinks at stickball, manages to make a difficult catch of a foul ball at Yankee stadium. This leads to an invitation from Roger Maris to visit the Yankee’s clubhouse and an offer of a job as one of the team’s batboys. In the course of the summer, Louis forms a friendship with Maris (who dubs him Lucky) as he and Mickey Mantle chase Babe Ruth’s single-season homerun record. Things at home are more challenging; Louis struggles with his divorced parents and a resentful stepbrother. Tooke commits a minor error—he says that a double header is against the Tigers, yet the two games described are against the White Sox—but, on the whole, he captures baseball in a simpler time. The picture painted here isn’t naively nostalgic, however. The bitterness many fans felt toward Maris for breaking the beloved Ruth’s record is a major theme. Best of all, Tooke conveys the excitement that a young boy would undoubtedly feel as an eyewitness to one of the game’s most thrilling seasons. Grades 4-6. --Todd Morning
About the Author
C. W. Tooke has worked as a feature writer and editorial consultant and has published features in Salon, New Jersey Monthly, and the Princeton Alumni Weekly. His first novel, Lucky was a Junior Library Guild Selection. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and dog.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Top of the First
Louis sat next to his father in the second row of Yankee Stadium, roughly even with the third-base bag. His father was talking with one of his clients as Louis filled out a scorecard. This was the fifth game that Louis had attended this season. The first three had been during the Yankees’ sluggish start, but the fourth had come during the furious stretch when the team shot into second place behind the Tigers. Louis believed that you could always tell how the team was doing just by the mood in the stadium. During a losing streak the crowd was quick to boo or heckle the players, but now, with the team surging, everyone was cheering even though the Yankees were trailing the Washington Senators by a run.
Louis loved everything about being at a baseball game. His favorite moment was when he first emerged from the tunnel into the stands. His eyes would leap to a thousand little details: the white chalk of the lines or the bunting on the upper deck or the perfect parabola where the smooth dirt of the infield surrendered to the emerald grass of the outfield. He would smell popcorn and the greasy steam of hot dogs, and the roar in his ears would swell from the reverberating chatter of the concourse to the hollow echo of the stands. And the best part was that the whole game, nine glorious innings, lay ahead of you.
But now, Louis glumly thought, only three outs remained. Three outs before the train back to White Plains and his stepmother and Bryce. Three outs before another few weeks of baseball being just a box score, a voice on the radio, or a lousy game of stickball. If Louis were more selfish, he might have prayed that the Yankees would tie the game in the bottom of the ninth so that he could watch a few more innings, but he was a true fan. He wanted two quick runs and a win.
As the Senators took the field, Louis’s father tapped him on the knee. Even though it was Saturday, his father was wearing a white dress shirt and a black tie that matched the rims of his thick glasses. Everyone except Louis’s stepmother always said that Louis and his father looked alike: brown eyes and hair, big noses, thick eyebrows, and feet as enormous and awkward as water skis.
“Tell Mr. Evans about the World Series game we saw last year,” he said.
Louis kept his eyes on the field, but he spoke loudly because his father got mad when he mumbled to clients.
“Game three,” he said. “Ten to zero. Whitey pitched. Bobby Richardson and Mickey hit home runs.”
“It was a good game,” Mr. Evans said. “And a better series.”
“Mr. Evans is from Pittsburgh,” Louis’s father said.
Louis felt a pang in his stomach when he heard the word “Pittsburgh.” The Pirates had beaten the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series the previous season on a walk-off home run. The home run wasn’t even by Roberto Clemente or Dick Groat, it was by stupid Bill Mazeroski, a second baseman. Louis’s father must have sensed that he was upset because he put a gentle hand on Louis’s shoulder.
“The Yankees should have won that series,” he said. “Tell Mr. Evans what you keep telling me.”
“The Yankees had all the numbers,” Louis said. “They outscored the Pirates fifty-five to twenty-seven. It was just bad luck that all the runs came in the same games.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Mr. Evans said. “But let me give you a piece of advice, Louis. Sometimes life is about timing.”
The Senators pitcher had finished warming up, and the Yankees second baseman, Tony Kubek, stepped into the batter’s box. The first pitch was high and outside.
“Who’s this pitcher?” Louis’s father asked.
Louis wanted to ignore the question and focus on the game, but he knew what his father wanted. The reason his company bought the tickets was to entertain clients, which meant, as his father said, that sometimes he and Louis had to sing for their supper.
“Dave Sisler,” Louis said. “Former pitcher for the Red Sox. Son of Gorgeous George Sisler, who holds the record for most hits in a single season.”
“How does he know all that?” Mr. Evans asked Louis’s father in a loud whisper.
“He studies baseball cards,” Louis’s father said.
The second pitch was on the inside corner, but Kubek whipped his hands around and drove a sharp single into right field. As he rounded first base, the crowd rose to its feet, a roar reverberating from the blue walls of the stadium. Roger Maris was striding to the plate, a bat slung over his shoulder. The sleeves of his white pinstriped uniform were shorter than the other players’, which made his arms look long and lean in the gleaming late after- noon sun.
“We need Maris to get on base so Mantle can hit a home run,” Louis’s father said.
Mantle had already hit two home runs in the game, which meant that he was tied with Maris for the American League lead. All of the kids in Louis’s neighborhood liked Mantle better and thought that he should have won the MVP the previous season instead of Maris, but Louis liked Maris. He was good at little things like getting a bunt down or throwing to the cutoff man. In Louis’s most optimistic fantasies—fantasies in which he was actually good at baseball—he liked to imagine that he was a player like Maris: quiet, serious, dependable.
The first pitch was in the dirt. Maris kept one foot in the box as he adjusted his cap and then settled into his relaxed crouch. When he and Mantle were hitting well, they looked similar at the plate—calm and composed on the surface, but in their twitching bats you could see the energy of a coiled rattlesnake. Louis had occasionally stood in front of the mirror in his bedroom with a broomstick and tried to imitate their stance, but his shoulders always slouched too much, and the broomstick had all the energy of a wet noodle.
The second pitch was outside. Maris started his swing late and lunged toward the ball, his front shoulder dropping. Louis heard a hollow crack as the ball rose in the sky. People in his section started to stand, their heads tilted upward, and Louis dropped his lineup card and grabbed his glove. As he leaped onto his seat, Danny O’Connell, the Senators’ veteran third baseman, leaned into the stands, his battered brown mitt stretching toward Louis’s waist. Louis glanced up just in time to see a white streak. His hand, acting on instinct, twitched forward, and he heard a loud pop and felt a sting in his palm.
“Foul ball!” the umpire shouted.
Louis glanced down. Although his glove had folded with the force of the impact, a hint of a ball was nestled amid the worn leather of his webbing. Louis’s mouth fell open. Had he really caught it? Was that possible?
“Hey!” O’Connell yelled. He was glaring at the umpire, his finger pointed at Louis. “That’s fan interference!”
As O’Connell turned his anger toward the stands, Louis sank back into his seat. But the crowd rose to his defense. A man a few rows back yelled, “Hey, O’Connell, get lost,” and as O’Connell opened his mouth his voice was drowned out by a cavalcade of boos. After a few seconds O’Connell shrugged, and as he walked over to the umpire, another man ruffled Louis’s hair.
“That was an all-star play, kid,” he said. “You stole it right out of that bum’s glove.”
Louis nodded, his eyes locked on the field. His cheeks felt hot from the attention. O’Connell appeared to have lost the argument with the umpire because he gave the stands one last glare and then stalked back to third base. As Maris settled back into the batter’s box, Louis
glanced down at the ball. It was an even, dirty brown with just a single scuff mark on one of the fat parts of the leather.
“Great catch,” his father said in his ear.
Louis felt himself flush. His father was always nice about his baseball cards and his grades, but that was the first time he’d ever said something like great catch. To be fair, Louis thought, that was probably the first great catch of his life. In fact, it was probably his first good catch. How had it happened? That ball had been a million times higher and fallen a million times faster than any of the balls in the stickball games, yet his hand had flashed forward just like a real ballplayer. Was it because he hadn’t had time to think about it?
Louis turned his attention back to the field just in time to see Sisler start his windup. This time Maris timed his swing perfectly, and as the ball left the bat, he froze for an instant, his legs locked in a long stride and his hips pointed at center field. The man in the front row leaped to his feet, blocking Louis’s view, but Louis knew from the roar of the crowd that the ball was headed for the right-field stands. A moment later people were pounding Louis on the back and leaping up and down, and Louis caught only a quick glimpse of Maris celebrating with a little crowd of teammates before he disappeared into the dugout.
“What a comeback!” Louis’s father shouted over the pandemonium. “What a game!”
As the cheers slowly started to fade, Louis carefully marked the home run on his scorecard and tucked his pencil and the card into his pocket. A warm glow was filling his stomach and making the skin on his arms tingle. Maybe he hadn’t done much; maybe he’d just gotten lucky and stuck his glove out at the right moment, but Louis still felt as if he’d contributed to the Yankees’ comeback in some small way. He wondered if the kids in the neighborhood would believe the story. Probably not—after all, nobody would ever believe that he’d made a great catch. Louis wasn’t even sure th...
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
I was totally hooked on LUCKY
By KidsReads
Let me just say right off the bat that I'm a fevered New York Yankees fan. The players may change, but the quality and immeasurable intensity of the game when played by the boys in pinstripes make for a glorious spectacle every year. That being said, I was totally hooked on LUCKY, the story of Louis May and the summer of 1961, which happened to be when the hottest home run race ever (without steroids) melted the hearts of baseball fans around the globe. Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, #7 and #9 on the Yankees that summer, battled it out to see who would end the season with a hard-to-break record of home runs. LUCKY brings this period alive with the unique voice of its main character and a realization of the awesome sports history that its story is built on.
This is still the stuff that baseball legend is made of. There have been movies, books, and endless myths and fables constructed around this one crazy summer. In his first novel for middle-schoolers, Wes Tooke uses his snappy journalistic attention to detail to make this one riveting and visceral way to get inside the heads of the players and to understand the context of the time from one superfan's behind-the-scenes perspective. Louis being a ballboy is a great ploy for getting into the dugout, the locker room and the field, the places where the emotional and physical toils took their greatest tolls.
Louis gets whisked away from his mom and out of his home comfort zone in the East Village of Manhattan, a hotbed of intellectual and artistic weirdness and activity. He gets plunked down in the suburban quiet and green lawns of White Plains, feeling a little out of his element. Add to that a nasty stepbrother, who happens to have magnificent physical aptitude of his own, and you have a recipe for one lousy school vacation. However, the job with the Yankees comes just in the nick of time, and the day-to-day relationship he creates with two of the game's greatest players gives him the kind of philosophical education in teamwork, sportsmanship, dedication and hard work that he couldn't find anywhere else.
Tooke captures two truly significant historical periods: baseball before it was a land of overpaid whiny babies on steroids, and the burgeoning cultural revolution percolating in Louis's village before the hippie movement became a parody of itself, when both of these things were pure and maintained an ethos, an aesthetic, that spoke to a genuine determination to produce good and true results. Art and baseball, in their most intense states, aren't so dissimilar, as Louis finds. They both make for strange bedfellows but also wonderfully exciting and educational worlds for a young man who is starting to look at life with his own unique vision.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
This was a surprise
By J. Wiles Parker
I should start by saying I'm not a fan of baseball books even though I read just about every Matt Christopher book, baseball ones included, when I was a kid. Lucky was a surprise, though. It's less about the formula of being a sports book for kids and more about the human interest aspects of baseball and the main character's interactions with his family and friends. Even though the book takes place in New York in 1961, it has a timeless quality about it regardless of the pop culture references. I never felt that Maris or Mantle felt like characters thrown in a book for the sake of making the story more interesting. Louis's family reflects the 60s as much as they reflect the 2000s, and the relationships between characters are well done. Louis may not be the best at baseball, but given the chance to learn from some of the best, he learns to stick up for himself and gains confidence where he had little to none. That the history aspects of Maris and Mantle's home run race present as more or less correct is a bonus and only added to my personal enjoyment. A great book for children and parents. I recommend this one as a readaloud, a readalong, or just a plain fun read.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Good book to hook boys
By SJC
This book is in our state children's choice selection this year. I'm not a huge sports fiction fan, but this worked in much more. Kids with divorced parents will relate to this story and boys will love the baseball aspect. The history in it is just a bonus. Even though the setting is from 60 years ago, the story is not so dated or out of reach of an intermediate age kid's understanding. A good solid read for intermediate level readers.
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