By Dan Gutman
A baseball-crazy boy who isn't much of a player finds the most valuable card in the world in a neighbor's attic, and holding it sends him back in time to meet the legend on the front.
Joe Stoshack loves baseball more than anything and is, honestly, not very good at it. Cleaning out an elderly neighbor's attic for a few dollars, he finds a small square of cardboard that turns out to be a 1909 Honus Wagner card, the rarest, most valuable baseball card that exists, worth enough to change his family's whole life. Then he discovers something even stranger: holding an old card can pull him back through time, and Wagner himself steps off the front of it. Joe has to decide whether to sell the card that could fix everything, or do the right thing with it, all while a smooth-talking card dealer circles, wanting it for himself.
If your child would rather be at the diamond than in a chair, this is the book. Joe isn't a star, he's the boy warming the bench who loves the game anyway, so a real-life mediocre player sees himself on the page. The time travel is the sugar that carries the rest: it's short, the chapters move fast, and the history of baseball comes in sideways while your child thinks they're just reading an adventure. It's the first of a long series built the same way, so a hooked child has a whole shelf of famous players waiting.