Everyone's Hero: The Unofficial Novelization

Chapter 1

In 1932, America was a country waiting the Depression to end. But what did anyone else care? The movies were there and the sports were there. Baseball was a favorite pastime for anyone who lived in New York. So favored, in fact, that it might have been America's national sport. The sport of baseball was favored highly in the City of New York, home to Yankee Stadium, the New York Yankees and plenty of other legends. This is the story of a man called by the Yankees as Babe Ruth...

...or so you may think.

This is the story, of an ordinary little boy from the Bronx called Yankee Irving. He was just as fast, and clever, but not quite as physically strong as the other children of his neighborhood. He was the thinnest boy of them all. He was about ten or thereabouts with emerald green eyes and ginger hair that shamed the red earth of Ireland. His face had a nice paste of freckles that were barely noticeable under the shadow of his eyelids, expanded by the blue baseball cap that he always wore to protect his hair from lice, even though he seemed perfectly healthy, if not average. His family lived a modest lifestyle, in a modest apartment, and on a modest budget that was carried on the shoulders of his father Stanley, who worked as a custodian, shared his physical traits with Yankee and was even the one to christen him that name because of how much he and his own father loved watching their games. His mother Emily, however, wasn't the job-seeking type. She believed that a woman of her station was destined to become a housewife and accepted this life with no complaints. But in spite of all of this, they loved each other.

It had stayed that way, even when the Crash of 29 saw a lot of people losing their jobs. And at the end of every day, Stanley would be the one to tell his son about what he did at Yankee Stadium and whatever player he met...as long as it sounded interesting. It was because of his father's position, his stories and their family's love for the team that Yankee wanted to become a baseball player.

On days where he didn't go to school, he would spend his spare time playing baseball with the other local kids and some friends of his at an empty sandlot behind a breadline on 170th Street. It was known to the kids as the "Ant Pit" because, in their philosophy, the houses that sandwiched the lot seemed large and imposing and it made them feel like they were the ants. Their rivals consisted of three African-American boys, two Puerto-Ricans, and one Asian among others who lived in Harlem and Brooklyn. Sometimes they won, sometimes they didn't, and no matter what games they played, Yankee was always there to lend a helping hand.

But the rival kids saw him as an object of scorn and jeered at him for how lanky he was, but Yankee was quick to put them in their place with either a sardonic remark or a line drive...or at least when he was completely angry.

His anger soon got the best of him on September 26th, 1932.

It was after school when Yankee joined his friends at the Ant Pit. The sun had not yet slipped behind the buildings, but it wasn't in the very center of the sky either. From what Yankee could remember in his later years, everything seemed to have a golden hue. Perhaps from the light of the sun, perhaps as a nostalgic illusion of a simpler time. The Ant Pit, with it's tawdry, shoddy reconstruction of a miniaturized replica of Yankee Stadium (or at least it's field) looked like the work of a master craftsman in his head. Sure, the wooden boards looked a little crooked and there were no bleachers, but it was still a good place for aspiring baseball stars like he wanted to be.

But the most engraving memory that he could recall from that day was that his friends were.... shall we say "creamed"?

It was a teenaged Bobby Hoskins who called Clarence Brown up the bat. Bobby was fifteen years old with brown hair. He did not wear a uniform, but he did wear a yellow shirt with red square lines all over it and brown trousers supported by suspenders and black boots that were close to getting worn out. His physical build was certainly average, since his family ate meals on a low budget, but he coped with this change in lifestyle by exercising on a playground, running letters to and from the local Western Union post office and helping his father with chores around the house, especially since his mother had been invalided by a fall down the stairs two years earlier.