Dan Gutman's "Baseball Card Adventure" novels, about a young, time-traveling, baseball fanatic named Joey Stoshack, cut wide swaths across the social history of the United States.
Gutman's most recent title, "Satch & Me," concerns Joey's trip to Spartanburg, S.C., in 1942 to meet legendary Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige, a story set against a backdrop of segregation. "Abner & Me" (featuring Gen. Abner Doubleday, considered by some the inventor of baseball) involves a visit to the Civil War, where Joey watches Union soldiers play a pickup game before the Battle of Gettysburg.
The second book in the series, "Jackie & Me," is an excellent entrée for elementary school readers into the subject of America's racial history. (Gutman's fiction is also exciting and often moving to read aloud to kids not quite up to a fourth-to-sixth-grade reading level.) In that book, Joey, a contemporary, 13-year-old white boy who loves America's pastime but prays not to be called to the plate during Little
League games, turns up a black child a few blocks from Ebbets Field in 1947, the year Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Joey's harsh, humiliating experiences add insight and resonance to a young reader's first grasp of the monstrosity of historical racism. Any parent who has shared one of the "Baseball Card Adventures" with a child tends to feel grateful Gutman makes it easy to introduce very large subjects in a most intimate way.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that Seattle Children's Theatre's "Honus & Me," a thrilling adaptation of the debut novel in Gutman's series, actually improves on the original. The script by Queen Anne playwright Steven Dietz ("Still Life with Iris"), who also directs, necessarily fills out and sharpens many background details from Joey's life. But in the process, Dietz adds a richness to relationships and a dimension to characters one wouldn't necessarily have realized was lacking in the book until they showed up here.
"Honus & Me" is the story of Joey's startling discovery of a baseball card considered the most rare and valuable of all: a T-206 Honus Wagner, originally a small insert in packs of cigarettes shortly after the turn of the century. The legendary Wagner, a tall man with huge hands, member of the Pittsburg (that's right, no "h") Pirates, rival of the villainous Ty Cobb, and a player considered by some to be the best ever, denounced smoking and demanded an end to the card's production.
That means the few cards that made it into circulation are worth a fortune today, a fact that overwhelms Joey (outstanding work by Cornish graduate Gabriel Baron) when he finds a T-206 among attic clutter he's being paid to clear from the house of old, cantankerous Miss Young (Marianne Owen). Certain the card, worth over a million, can solve all the problems of his divorced mother (Morgan Rowe) and even set the stage for a reconciliation with his father (Peter Crook), Joey rationalizes the T-206 is rightfully his. After all, Miss Young ordered him to get rid of everything but keep whatever he wants.
Joey makes an instant enemy of a burly collector, Birdie (Timothy Hyland), who vows to separate the boy from his bounty. But not even that scare is as disturbing for Joey as going to sleep with the T-206 in his hand and waking up during the night to find the great Wagner (David Drummond) in his room.
(The procedure for time travel in Gutman's books has never been particularly satisfying: Joey holds an old card, goes to sleep and either finds himself in the past or in the company of a long-deceased player brought forward to today. Dietz doesn't change this arrangement in any way, but he manages to imbue it with more magic and mystery.)
Once past his disorientation, Wagner befriends Joey and watches him struggle at bat. He shares advice along with some favorite tall tales and a golden, workaday integrity about playing the game without compromise or delusions of grandeur. Having first signed to the majors for $30 and a bag of bananas (seriously), he says no man should be paid more than $10,000 annually for hitting a ball and running around bases.
(Following the delivery of that line on "Honus & Me"'s opening night, all eyes in the audience turned bemusedly and affectionately toward the Seattle Mariners' recently retired, millionaire catcher, Dan Wilson, who was in attendance with his family, and the Ms' general manager, Chuck Armstrong, who has to negotiate all those seven- and eight-figure deals.)
Wagner listens to Joey talk about the designated-hitter phenomenon (first put into practice in 1973) with dismay. (A professional should be able to do it all, he says.) The man from 1909 bemoans the homerun-friendly liveliness of modern baseballs and the metal bats that today's kids use. ("Did you run out of trees?")
But Wagner, as Dietz envisions him, isn't really a complainer so much as a statesman-in-the-making. (A display in SCT's lobby contains some extraordinary memorabilia, including a magazine article the real Wagner wrote toward the end of his life opining about new major-league rules changing, for the worse, the art of pitching.)
The imposing Drummond, a SCT regular ("Bunnicula," "Holes") born to play this part, finds in Wagner an American original, a man buoyed by heroic devotion to the game but steadied by a healthy perspective and sense of fairness. Some of the most exciting scenes in the play's second half (after Wagner entices Joey to go with him back to 1909) find Wagner eyeball-to-eyeball with his opposite, the Detroit Tigers' Ty Cobb (Troy Fischnaller, with an epic aura), a great player who routinely drew blood from opponents, in game seven of the World Series.
Events get pretty exciting in the latter part of "Honus & Me." Having attended all of SCT's productions to date this season - and there have been some pretty good shows (with one more to go) - I have to say I haven't felt as much electricity or heart in anything else. Even the resolutions Dietz refines from Gutman's book, the lessons Joey learns about the things different people value, about fair play and generosity of spirit and the myth of quick fixes to longstanding problems, aren't the least bit trite.
Moreover, "Honus & Me," typical of the "Baseball Card Adventures," provides a glimpse for kids into an older time in America, an era of all-white major league baseball, of limited opportunities and lives spent in coal mines and of old-fashioned courtship. "Honus & Me"'s combination of thrill, history and personal challenge is something special.[[In-content Ad]]
