Say-Hey and the Babe: Two Mostly True Baseball Stories (review)

In brief chapters that flash back from 1951 to the '20s and '30s and back again, Waldman follows the fate of a baseball autographed by the 1927 Yankees. The ball is presented as a sort of consolation gift to Mona Finkel, who was whacked in the head by a Babe Ruth homer. Her brother, short a ball for a street game, takes it from the family shrine and loses it down a sewer. In 1951, a bunch of Willie Mays (Say-Hey) fans watch him drive a rubber "Spauldeen" a record seven sewers away in a game of stickball; when they try to retrieve it, they fish out instead a slimy baseball from decades gone by—and it just happens to be the ball presented to Mona Finkel by the Babe and his teammates, which is now back in the hands of her nephew, Peter. Waldman actually has three stories going—the Finkel story, the Babe Ruth story, and the Willie Mays story—and since a concluding note says the Finkel plot is based in part on true events, it's difficult to determine just where the fictionalization lies; although some of Waldman's many sidebars about baseball and stickball back in the day put some bits of the story into context, others simply slow the pace of the main event. It's an entertaining yarn nonetheless, brightened by a plethora of monochrome and full-color mixed-media pictures, and it will likely prove inviting to younger baseball-mad readers.