The Colorado Curveball Read online

  Also by David A. Kelly

  BALLPARK MYSTERIES®

  #1 The Fenway Foul-Up

  #2 The Pinstripe Ghost

  #3 The L.A. Dodger

  #4 The Astro Outlaw

  #5 The All-Star Joker

  #6 The Wrigley Riddle

  #7 The San Francisco Splash

  #8 The Missing Marlin

  #9 The Philly Fake

  #10 The Rookie Blue Jay

  #11 The Tiger Troubles

  #12 The Rangers Rustlers

  #13 The Capital Catch

  #14 The Cardinals Caper

  #15 The Baltimore Bandit

  SUPER SPECIAL #1 The World Series Curse

  SUPER SPECIAL #2 Christmas in Cooperstown

  SUPER SPECIAL #3 Subway Series Surprise

  SUPER SPECIAL #4 The World Series Kids

  THE MVP SERIES

  #1 The Gold Medal Mess

  #2 The Soccer Surprise

  #3 The Football Fumble

  #4 The Basketball Blowout

  Babe Ruth and the Baseball Curse

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by David A. Kelly

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2020 by Mark Meyers

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks and A Stepping Stone Book and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Ballpark Mysteries® is a registered trademark of Upside Research, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web!

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  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kelly, David A., author. | Meyers, Mark, illustrator.

  Title: The Colorado curveball / by David A. Kelly; illustrated by Mark Meyers.

  Description: New York: Random House, [2020] | Series: Ballpark mysteries; 16 | “A Stepping stone book.” | Summary: Cousins Mike and Kate investigate after someone threatens to tamper with the scoreboard right before the Colorado Rockies’ season opener.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019005046 (print) | LCCN 2019007803 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-525-57898-7 (trade) | ISBN 978-0-525-57899-4 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-0-525-57900-7 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Baseball—Fiction. | Colorado Rockies (Baseball team)—Fiction. | Cousins—Fiction. | Colorado—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.K2936 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.K2936 Fr 2020 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  This book has been officially leveled by using the F&P Text Level Gradient™ Leveling System.

  Ebook ISBN 9780525579007

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.4

  a

  This book is dedicated to Mrs. Barbara Werner, one of my biggest superfans and supporters. I may not hit it out of the park every time I get up to bat, but it’s wonderful to have a fan like Mrs. Werner cheering me on from the sidelines!

  —D.A.K.

  “I want people to expect more from me because I expect more. If you don’t set goals high, you’re not trying.”

  —Todd Helton, Colorado Rockies first baseman, 1997–2013, five-time All-Star, four-time Silver Slugger, and three-time Gold Glove winner

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by David A. Kelly

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: A Surprise on the Elevator

  Chapter 2: A Troublemaker for the Rockies

  Chapter 3: A Big Hit

  Chapter 4: A Secret Behind the Door

  Chapter 5: Why Waste a Good Idea?

  Chapter 6: Locked Up!

  Chapter 7: No Bones About It

  Chapter 8: Stopped in Their (Fossilized) Tracks

  Chapter 9: A Terror-Dactyl

  Chapter 10: Dino-mite!

  Dugout Notes Colorado Rockies

  Kate Hopkins stuck out her tongue. Soft white flakes drifted into her mouth and instantly disappeared.

  “Snow?” she asked. “On the opening day of baseball season?”

  “Don’t worry,” her cousin Mike Walsh replied. “Big Bill, the Rockies pitcher, can definitely bring the heat!”

  “He’ll need a flamethrower for this field,” Kate said. “You can’t even see the grass or baselines!”

  Kate was right. The Colorado Rockies’ field was white with snow. It looked like the middle of winter, but it was early April. Mike and Kate were in Denver with Kate’s father for the opening-day game against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  “Maybe we can solve the mystery of the missing field!” Mike said.

  Kate shook her head. “We’re pretty good detectives,” she said. “But I don’t think the Rockies will need us to find the field. All they have to do is turn on the heater.”

  Mike glanced at the thousands of empty, snow-covered seats. He looked past the mountain-shaped scoreboard to the Rocky Mountains off in the distance. “This place is huge,” he said. “There’s no way they can heat it up fast enough.”

  Kate smiled. “I’m not talking about heaters for the stadium,” she said. “I’m talking about heaters under the field! The Rockies installed over forty-five miles of heating wires to keep the grass warm enough to grow, since it gets so cold up here in the mountains.”

  Fans wearing winter coats and hats had started to file into the stadium for the game. Down on the field, the grounds crew ran out to the infield with shovels. They started pushing piles of snow to the sides. Underneath, a big tarp covered the infield grass.

  Kate’s dad, Mr. Hopkins, laughed quietly. “Well, I guess I’ve seen it all now,” he said. Mr. Hopkins was a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He and Kate’s mother were divorced, but he often invited Mike and Kate to meet him on his baseball trips. They had flown in from Cooperstown, New York, while he had traveled from his home in Los Angeles.

  Moments later, the sun peeked through the clouds. It lit up the snow and instantly made things feel warmer. The fluffy flakes at their feet started to melt.

  Mike used his sneaker to push some snow into a small pile. “Aw…why does it have to melt?” he asked. “If we had just a bit more, we could have gone snowboarding and skiing right here!” He jumped into his snowboard stance and held his arms out like he was cruising down a mountain. He bent back and forth as he pretended to carve through the snow. “That would have been real double play—baseball and snowboarding!”

  “Didn’t you get in enough snowboarding yesterday?” Kate asked. The three of them had spent the day skiing and snowboarding west of Denver. “You’re the one who wanted to stop early in the afternoon.”

  “I didn’t want to stop,” Mike said. “I just wanted to get hot chocolate and rest.”

  Mr. Hopkins nodded. “The altitude around here tires you out more quickly unless you’re used to it,” he said. “That reminds me. Look at that!”

  He pointed to the row of purple seats that went all around the stadium, up near the top.

  “The purple seats!” Kate said. “That row is exactly one
mile above sea level!”

  Mike stood up from his snowboard crouch. “I can’t wait to try sitting there,” he said. “From one mile up, I should be able to see everything in the world!”

  Mr. Hopkins laughed. “It’s one mile above sea level, Mike,” he said. “Not one mile above everything else around here!”

  A buzz came from Mr. Hopkins’s pocket. He reached in and pulled out his phone. “It’s a message from the Rockies,” he said. “The game’s been delayed by one hour because of the snow. I guess we should look around for some hot chocolate while we wait.”

  “With marshmallows!” Kate said.

  They ran up the stairs to the main walkway and headed for the nearest food stand. Mr. Hopkins followed. Mike and Kate ordered hot chocolate while Mr. Hopkins bought a coffee. To keep warm, they walked around the stadium with their drinks.

  Mike slurped up all his marshmallows first, while Kate stirred hers into the cocoa. “I knew I should have asked for extra marshmallows,” Mike said.

  Kate laughed. “Extra should be your middle name,” she said. “Or maybe More!”

  Mike scowled. “Or maybe Super Nice,” he said.

  Mr. Hopkins’s phone rang. “Excuse me, it’s George,” he said. George was Mr. Hopkins’s friend and the engineering manager for the Rockies. He had agreed to meet Mike and Kate before the game. Mr. Hopkins walked closer to the field and answered the phone. Mike and Kate continued sipping their drinks.

  “Mmm, this is good,” Kate said. She tilted the cup and finished her hot chocolate.

  Mike slurped up the last of his. He dropped the empty cup in a trash can and wiped some chocolate from the corner of his mouth. “Now what?” he asked.

  Kate’s dad was still on the phone.

  “How about a quick race now that we’re fueled up?” Kate asked. She pointed to the elevator at the far side of the entrance hallway. “First one to push the button wins!”

  “Okay, go!” Mike said. He took off running.

  Kate dashed after Mike and soon passed him.

  They ran neck and neck until they were just a few steps away from the elevator. Then Mike leapt forward and pushed the button. It lit up.

  “I won!” he panted.

  Kate stopped and nodded. “Yup,” she said softly.

  They were just about to turn and head back when the button flicked off.

  DING!

  The elevator doors whooshed open. Mike and Kate stepped back.

  ROARRRRRRRR!

  A deafening growl filled the area.

  Before Mike and Kate could move, a giant dinosaur came out of the elevator and headed straight for them!

  Mike and Kate jumped back.

  The dinosaur charged forward.

  ROAR!

  Kate grabbed Mike’s arm. “Hang on,” she said. “That’s not a real dinosaur. It’s Dinger!”

  Dinger the dinosaur stopped in his tracks. His big head swiveled from Mike to Kate.

  ROAR!

  He let out another loud bellow. But Kate stepped in front of him.

  “Roar, yourself!” she said. “We’re not afraid! You went extinct over sixty-five million years ago! You’re just the mascot for the Rockies.”

  Dinger stopped charging at Mike and Kate. His head dropped. He leaned back and held out his hands. His arms were short, and he had one small horn on his nose and two horns poking up from the top of his head. He was purple from head to toe.

  “Look at that!” Mike said. “A purple Triceratops!” He nudged Kate. “I think he wants to be friends!”

  Dinger nodded. He reached out and shook hands with Mike and Kate.

  “There are tons of dinosaur bones and fossils in Colorado and some are worth a lot of money, like millions of dollars,” Kate said to Mike. “I read about them on the plane ride here. That’s one of the reasons they made Dinger the dinosaur their team mascot. But do you know the other reason they did that?”

  Mike glanced at Dinger. The dinosaur held up his small hands and shrugged.

  “Um, no,” Mike said.

  “Because they found a Triceratops bone when they built the ballpark!” Kate said. “Right under the Rockies’ dugout!”

  Dinger raised a hand to his mouth as if he was shocked.

  Mike smiled and reached out to Dinger for a high five. “I’d say that’s pretty cool,” he said. “Sounds like good luck to me.”

  Dinger nodded happily. He gave Mike a high five and danced around a little bit, swinging his tail out behind him and waving his short arms in the air.

  A woman next to Dinger motioned to her watch. Dinger bowed to Mike and Kate and waved goodbye as he followed the assistant off down the hall.

  “We have to go, too,” Kate said. “We’re supposed to be meeting George!”

  Mike and Kate raced back to her dad, who watched as the workers shoveled the field. The sun shone bright, and the snow on the seats and walkways had turned to puddles.

  “There you are!” Mr. Hopkins said. “Just in time. George said he could meet us now. Let’s go!”

  Mike, Kate, and Mr. Hopkins walked through the stadium to the lower level. Mr. Hopkins showed a security guard his identification. The security guard waved them on.

  They walked down a hallway with unpainted gray cinder-block walls. They passed an open door on the left labeled FIELD HEATING SYSTEM. Two men in blue construction suits were inside unpacking some tools.

  Mike looked at the unfinished ceiling covered with wires, pipes, and heating ducts above them. Two medium-size TVs on the wall played a pregame baseball show. “Cool! Look at this! We’re getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the Rockies’ stadium!” he said.

  Mr. Hopkins laughed. “We are,” he said.

  As they reached the end of the hallway, a stocky man wearing a purple Rockies warm-up jacket appeared.

  “George!” Mr. Hopkins said. “Great to see you! This is Mike and Kate. I just told them how you’re in charge of something pretty important here in Denver.”

  “That’s right!” George said. He took a ball out of the pocket of his warm-up jacket and tossed it to Mike. “Here’s a gift for you.”

  “Baseballs!” Kate said.

  Mike turned the ball around in his hand to check it out.

  “You won’t see anything different about baseballs here, but they are different,” George said. “When we first opened the stadium in 1995, players were hitting too many home runs!”

  “So what did you do?” Kate asked.

  “The players were hitting more home runs because the ballpark is one mile above sea level and the air is thinner up here. There are fewer molecules of oxygen, which means less air resistance to slow balls down when they’re hit. But more importantly, the mountain air dries out the baseballs, so they’re harder and slicker. That makes it harder for pitchers to grip and throw curveballs and most other pitches. And drier baseballs also bounce off the bat more than moist ones and travel farther. All that added up to too many home runs!”

  “I read about that,” Kate said as she pointed to the silver door behind George. “You’re the one who found a way to fix it with a humidor!”

  George nodded and patted the door. “That’s right. I came up with the idea of putting the baseballs in this humidor,” he said. “A humidor is kind of like a big refrigerator, but instead of keeping the baseballs cold, it keeps them moist.”

  Mike tossed the baseball in the air and caught it with his other hand. “So you keep the baseballs in a humidor and add moisture to them,” he said. “The moisture makes it easier for the pitchers to grip the balls and put more spin or movement on them. The added moisture also means that the balls bounce off the bat a little less, so they don’t go as far.”

  “Exactly,” George said. “Once we started using a humidor, the home run totals for the park dropped to normal levels. Now other teams are s
tarting to use them, but we were the first. Do you want to see inside?”

  “Yes!” Kate said. She tugged on Mike’s shirt and jumped up and down.

  George waved them forward to a large metal door and unlocked it with a key. When he pulled the door open, moist, cool air drifted out.

  Mike and Kate stepped into the room-size humidor first. Mr. Hopkins and George filed in behind them. Racks stacked with large flat boxes of baseballs filled the room’s shelves. But then Mike spotted something odd in front of them.

  “Uh-oh!” Mike said.

  “That doesn’t look right,” Kate said.

  George pushed forward to look.

  The floor was covered with baseballs!

  Several dozen boxes of brand-new baseballs had been knocked from the shelf on the left. The shiny white balls had rolled all over. The empty boxes lay flipped open on the ground.

  “That’s impossible,” he said. “No one’s allowed in this room but me. Someone’s trying to make trouble for the Rockies!”

  “I thought something strange was going on,” George said.

  He bent down and started putting the baseballs back into the empty boxes. Mike and Kate scrambled to help. Halfway through the cleanup, George stood up and looked at the door latch and lock. “I’d better get this changed in case someone else has a key,” he said. “We can’t take any chances with the balls. First the note, and now this.”

  “Um, what note?” Kate asked.

  George patted the pockets of his jacket and then reached into his back pants pocket. He pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to Kate. She read it out loud to Mike and Mr. Hopkins.

  George—

  We can’t explain now, but we need you to keep an eye on the main scoreboard during the games this week. No one will be hurt, but something is going to happen. You need to be there to see it. We’ll explain this fully in a week or two.