It's How You Play The Game! The Thing Lenny Loves Most About Baseball by Aaron Larsen

IT'S SPRINGTIME IN THE PARK.

"ONE DAY I'M GOING TO PLAY IN THE BIG LEAGUES," SAYS LENNY, THROWING THE BASEBALL.

"I'LL BE THERE CHEERING FOR YOU," SAYS HIS DAD, CATCHING IT."

Lenny likes to read up on baseball. That night he tells his dad about a game that lasted for two days.

"IT COULD HAVE GONE ON FOREVER," SAYS LENNY. "I LOVE THAT ABOUT BASEBALL."

In the first game, Lenny gets under a hit to the outfield. He runs back and forth, trying to find exactly where it will fall. But the ball drops to the grass right beside him. Lenny is embarrassed to be afraid of the ball. But he keeps studying about the game, and he's consoled when he reads that home-run heroes Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron had many more strikes than hits out of the park.

"I LIKE THAT ABOUT BASEBALL." HE SAYS.

Lenny tries playing catch in his Greek warrior helmet for protection from the ball, but it doesn't help. Lenny tells himself he's going to miss more than he catches, and he's right. But he keeps on practicing and he keeps on getting better. He tries to remember the old adage to "keep your eye on the ball."

And at the next game, with the score tied in the last inning, there's a hit to the outfield. Lenny goes deep, deep, and when the ball comes down, he's there....

THWAP!

It drops right into his waiting glove!

And when the girl who's up to bat first in the next inning hits it out of the park, Lenny remembers the old saying, "You win some. You lose some."

And the old adage is right: it's not whether you win or lose. It's how you play the game, in Andrew Lewis' latest, The Thing Lenny Loves Most About Baseball,(Kids Can Press, 2021).

It's true that "You can't win 'em all," but you can improve your game and enjoy the gameplay, as Dad models and Lenny learns in this story of the right way to play summer league baseball. You can't always win and you won't always be the star, but Lenny's jolly red-bearded dad teaches his son how to play a team sport for the fun of it--just in time to get ready for the start of the spring baseball season.

Says Kirkus Reviews, "... A good counter to the insistent, invidious message that winning is all that matters."

At the OLD Ballgame! Mr. Putter and Tabby Drop the Ball by Cynthia Rylant

Mr. Putter and his good cat Tabby love their naps--naps in the tomato garden, naps in the porch swing, naps in the hammock, even in the car! One day Mr. Putter wakes up from his nap with a new thought.

"We nap too much!" Mr. Putter said to Tabby. "We need a sport!"

Mr. Putter heads down to the basement and comes back with his old baseball mitt. Tabby is awake now and worried. Her frisky days are well behind her!

"We need a TEAM!" declared Mr. Putter.

When in doubt, Mr. Putter always calls his neighbor, Mrs. Teaberry.

Mrs. Teaberry knows just the team for Mr. Putter!

"The Yankee Doodle Dandies!" she says. "You will feel young on that team!

We'll both play!"

Now that he's got the ball rolling, so to speak, Mr. Putter begins to have second thoughts. What about his bad knees that don't want to bend? Is he too old for baseball?

When they arrive the game is in full swing. There is a base runner heading for home plate. He is running, sort of, very, very slowly. The crowd waits and waits and waits and waits.

"I feel pretty young!" said Mr. Putter.

The Yankee Doodle Dandies are happy to have some fresh, new recruits and put Mr. Putter in the outfield and Mrs. Teaberry in at shortstop, commanding her good dog Zeke to STAY in the dugout. Tabby is already ready for a nap.

But when a ball is hit toward Mrs. Teaberry, Zeke runs into the infield and grabs it. GLOMP! The rival team scores a run while Mrs. Teaberry and the Dandies chase Zeke all around the infieldto retrieve the ball. Zeke is benched!

Then the next batter hits a grounder into the outfield, rolling right toward Mr. Putter, who charges to field that ball. It's right at his feet. He can save the game for the Dandies! But...

His knees would not bend.

But it's Zeke to the rescue. With a timely assist, he glomps the ball and puts it right into Mr. Putter's glove. And Mr. Putter throws the ball hard, right to the catcher. The runner is out! The crowd goes wild!

Even benchwarmer Tabby wakes up, in Cynthia Rylant's beginning reader book,
Mr. Putter and Tabby Drop the Ball (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Artist Arthur Howard's jolly comic illustrations, done with verve in watercolor and gouache, add much to the fun, as Mr. Putter, Mrs. Teaberry, Zeke and Tabby celebrate with ... what else...a nap!

Kirkus Reviews calls it "A home run!"

Keeping Control: Strike Zone by Mike Lupica

Nick Garcia had grown up almost in the actual shadow of the old Yankee Stadium and in the virtual shadow of his idol, Yankee pitcher Michael Arroyo. Now Nick is twelve years old, and in his last summer of Little League ball with his team. Coach Vierra tells him that he believes Nick throws harder and faster than Arroyo at his age.

"I saw Michael play in Little League. Heard the sound the ball made in the catcher's glove. The sound you make is louder."

Nick dreams of his team as the champions of the Dream League and himself as Most Valuable Player, getting to throw out the ball at Yankee Stadium. The pressure is on. In his league there's a kid named Benny who's hitting home runs in every game, and rival pitcher Eric Dobbs is throwing a lot of fastball strikes, too.

Nick knows he can throw heat. But being a winning pitcher comes down to one thing. Control.

But controlling his pitches are only part of what it's going to take. His parents are undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic, each working two jobs, and his older sister has lupus, requiring frequent trips to urgent care. The family is used to tight money, but when his father is swept up by an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent and jailed, Nick has to deal with the very real fear that his parents may be deported and he and his sister, as U.S. citizens, will be forced to remain behind with foster parents or leave home and go with his mom and dad back to the Dominican Republic. Nick knows that he has to stay in control of his own emotions--for his parents' sake and for his team's chance to share the Dream League trophy.

Keeping cool under pressure is one theme of top-selling sports novelist Mike Lupica's Strike Zone (Philomel Books, 2019). But Lupica's narration also portrays the support and cooperation it takes to maintain family unity and team support. Nick gets by with the humor and help from his best friends Ben and Diego, his sister, his coach, the strength of his mother and father, and the help of strangers, including his idol Michael Arroyo. Lupica's game-play writing is, as always, taut and authentic, but the winning season story is matched with the drama of a threatened family and the community who supports them, making this middle grade novel more than just another "big game" story. A follow-up to Lupica's hit, Heat, this one stresses that, although natural talent goes a long way, keeping strong and in control goes all the way.

Says Kirkus in their starred review, "Lupica skillfully addresses the timely and complicated topic of living as the child of undocumented immigrants and the uncertainty facing many American families. This exceptional baseball novel delivers both lively sports action and critical subject matter."

Go For It! I Got It! by David Wiesner

Wish. Hope. Aspiration.

All that and more are in the opening pages of David Wiesner's newest, almost wordless, book, I Got It! (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). The frontispiece shows a boy in orange sneakers and baseball cap, with his fielder's glove on his left hand, wistfully watching from behind a chain-link fence as a group of guys and one girl gather to get up a game of baseball. The title page shows the boy inside the fence, hesitantly standing a few feet away from the others, socking one hand hopefully into the pocket of his glove.

It's the usual motley assortment for a sandlot game--a girl in a pink cap, a couple of blond kids who could be big and little brothers, a biracial kid and an Asian girl, a couple of bespectacled brothers who've brought the bats, and the tall kid who seems to be in charge, the requisite baseball in his hand.

The tall kid gives the kid with the glove the nod and points him toward the far outfield, where he waits for his chance to show what he can do. The bigger kid with glasses socks the first pitch. It's a fly ball rising high over the infield. The kid with the glove goes deep and calls it.

I GOT IT!!

It's a gutsy call and the kid goes for it, flat out.

And he falls flat, tripping on a root, as the ball comes down, just a couple of feet from his outstretched glove.

The other kids cover their eyes. SHEESH!

But the boy calls the next pop fly and again reaches for it, tripping on a root and slamming into a tree. He's not hurt, but his confidence is a bit shaken. The next ball hit high seems huge, filling the sky, and the other fielders go for it, all reaching for the ball; it seems like the whole team has called that ball. Has the kid got what it takes to snag it?

I GOT IT!

"Ah, but man's reach should exceed his grasp!" said poet Robert Browning, and that "go for it" feeling fills Wiesner's inspired picture book about making the big catch and making new friends.

The multiple Caldecott-winning David Weisner juggles both realism, in his real-kid illustrations of this pick-up team, and fantasy, as he imagines seems to flash through the space above as he goes for the ball. It's a little life lesson, as Wiesner's final illustration shows the boy's team, now waiting by the fence for their turn at bat, the new kid now sitting right in the middle of his teammates, ready to root for his side. Wiesner's exceptional illustrations, done with much detail, are still ambiguous enough to lend themselves to more than one understanding by the reader. And what's with that flock of birds that fill in most of the pages and who seem to be the boy's biggest fans? Wiesner always leaves the reader waiting for some ball or other to drop.

David Wiesner's Caldecott Award and Honor Medal books are Tuesday, Flotsam, The Three Pigs, Free Fall, Sector 7 (Caldecott Honor Book), and Mr. Wuffles! (Caldecott Medal - Honors Winning Title(s))

April 15, 1947: A Great Day for Baseball (Magic Tree House) by Mary Pope Osborne

Jack sat on his front porch steps, his chin in his hand. It was the day for baseball tryouts.

"I've decided not to go," said Jack. "I can't stop thinking about last season's tryouts. I fell down when I swung the bat. Everybody laughed."

"Yeah, well, everybody laughed at me, too," said Annie. "Remember, I threw the ball to the wrong team."

"So maybe neither of us should go," said Jack.

"But our whole family loves baseball..." said Annie. Before she could finish, something dropped from the sky. A small white ball lay in the grass. "It's a baseball!" she said.

It doesn't take Jack and Annie but a moment to realize that they've been summoned for a mission by Morgan Le Fay, King Arthur's legendary librarian. The magic tree house was back.

Inside the tree house in the woods are two gray baseball caps and a fat book, The History of Baseball, with a bookmark for a page with a photo of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, dated April 15, 1947, and a message from Morgan Le Fay

"'Twas a big day for baseball
So many years ago.
Journey to Ebbets Field
To learn what you should know."

The Morgan message tells the kids that when they put on the caps, they will be seen as two teenaged bat boys for the Brooklyn Dodgers, with instructions to "give the ball with the name to the one who knows the rules of the game." But why? What name? What rules? It's an intriguing mystery for this pair of intrepid time travelers.

When the magic tree house drops them in a grove of trees in a park, Jack and Annie find themselves wearing baggy Dodgers uniforms and long socks and ask two kids from the neighborhood, Olive and Otis, to show them the way to the game.

Jack and Annie, who has to be "Andy" for her job as batboy, race to the ballpark and get busy putting out the Dodgers' uniforms, gloves, bats, and balls, in the dugout. They can't help glancing at the crowd, women in dresses and white gloves, men in suits and hats. The stadium is packed and there's a nervous energy in the stands as the Dodgers and Braves warm up. Then they notice something really different from games back in Frog Creek.

Here, half the stands were filling up with mostly white people. The other half were filling up with mostly black people. Annie pointed to a black Dodgers player signing autographs on baseballs. "Who's he?" she asked.

And of course, it's April 15, 1947, the day of Jackie Robinson's first game as the first black major league player. Jack and "Andy" get to see Robinson fail to hit in two at bats and bear the jeers of the crowd with dignity and courage. Now they know what rules. And then they get to see him score the winning run in the game, and they know what name should be on that ball. Now all they have to do is discover the right person to receive that autographed game ball, in Mary Pope Osborne's latest in series, A Big Day for Baseball (Magic Tree House) (Random House, 2017). And for that they have to follow Otis and Olive home and meet his great, great grandmother.

It was a great day for baseball, and an important day in our history, and Annie and Jack, as well as their young readers, now know why they were there.

"You know... Morgan didn't send us to Brooklyn to become great baseball players," said Jack.

"I know," said Annie. "She sent us there to learn how to be brave and keep going. The rules of the game."

Author Mary Pope Osborne even appends some of the lingo and rules for playing the game of baseball, a sneak peak at the perfect book to pair with this beginning chapter novel in Osborne's best-selling series, its companion nonfiction book, Baseball: A Nonfiction Companion to Magic Tree House 29: A Big Day for Baseball (Magic Tree House (R) Fact Tracker).

Where the Heart Is: A Rambler Steals Home by Carter Higgins

"Aren't we lucky?" Garland asked. "Just traveling souls, making traditions and cheeseburgers." I didn't really know if I believed that part, but I sure could believe in the summer's traditions.

Garland always said being a rambler of the road meant food, family, and fun. Triple and I always said it meant three other things--blisters, grease splatters, and loneliness. But there we were, rambling back to Ridge Creek for another summer.

Eleven-year-old Derby's dad, Garland, has a bad case of wander-foot. For most of the year they take their Rambler, towing a grill, from autumn fairs and pumpkin festivals to Christmas tree lots, and on through the spring carnivals, but summer always brings them right back to Ridge Creek, Virginia, parking in the grass between the Heritage Inn and the Ridge Creek Rockskippers baseball stadium. Garland is happiest on the road. He cheerfully homeschools Derby and little brother Triple and mans the grill, selling hamburgers with fried onions and the newest big thing, sweet potato fries. But since her mother left, years ago, Derby has longed for a real home, not one on wheels, and for her the old, faded Rockskippers Stadium is like home, where everything and everyone is the same, especially June Mattingly, her summertime mother.

Right away, she spots the sign taped to the fence.

Welcome back, Sugar Sue.

Only one person called me that.

The Rockskippers Stadium is still wonderful, a bit more shabby, its paint a bit more faded, but what is different this year is June. Instead of inviting her to sit on her porch for lemonade and raisin cookies, her sign tells Derby to meet her in the ticket booth, where June works all summer. June is warm and welcoming, but to Derby something seems different.

The old baseball park is just about the same, and the secret space between the fence planks where Derby and her friend Marcus squeeze through is still there. The creek is there, cool and full of turtles for Triple to catch, and Betsy and Lolly, the town mean girls, are still there, looking down their noses at Derby. Candy Plogger is still plotting to win the best dessert contest with her apple pies. But between smiles, June seems sad, and her once neat flower-filled front yard has been taken over by weeds. Even her front door is faded and peeling its paint.

Derby soon learns that June's husband Franklin, has died. Derby's friend, Marcus has taken over the grounds-keeping job, suddenly seeming more serious and grown-up, and he, too, sees that the life seems to have gone out of June, and she is just not the same. And so, for Derby, Ridge Creek is not the same.

Franklin Mattingly had broad shoulders, massive hands, and an even bigger heart. Players came and went, and the teenagers who sold peanuts left for college. But Franklin was always there. The first to show up and the last to go.

But Derby needs June, and soon decides that June needs her. Together she and Marcus make a plan to get rid of the weeds in June's yard and plant flowers and paint and decorate her door in a perfect pink, hoping that some fixing up will help with June's grief. Little by little, others join in the effort, even Betsy and Lolly, who work out big letters, spelling out something secret, and a tricky wave motion from the crowd in the stadium for what turns out to be a big town salute to June.

WE LOVE YOU JUNE

WELCOME HOME

The James Edward Allen Gibbs Stadium was on its feet, cheering from the bullpens to the nosebleeds. When June saw me waiting at home plate, it felt like looking into a mirror. We had the same broken heart, sewn up, and weaved back together.

Derby comes home, in Carter Higgins' A Rambler Steals Home (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). With a main character whose reality is far from the lifestyle of most middle readers, this debut novel has a lot to say about the universal need for a place in the heart, a place to belong. Derby Christmas Clark is different sort of character, but one which readers will recognize in themselves, and the world of Ridge Creek is a rich background for this story about love and community and the need of the human heart to call some place home.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame: Derek Jeter Presents...Night At the Stadium by Phil Bildner

THE YANKEES WIN! "THAT WAS THE AWESOMEST GAME EVER!" GIDEON CHEERED.

TIME TO GET AUTOGRAPHS, DAD!" GIDEON LOVED AUTOGRAPHS, BUT ONE WAS STILL MISSING--THE ONE HE WANTED MORE THAN ANYTHNG.

"EVERYONE, STAY TOGETHER!" MOM SAID.

Giden follows his family, fumbling through his jacket pocket for his precious autograph book. But's it's GONE! He turns around to look behind him toward where he was sitting, but he hasn't dropped it there. And when he turns back around, his family is gone, too, out of sight in the crowd streaming toward the exits!

Gideon panics.

HE ZIGGED UP ONE RAMP AND DOWN ANOTHER.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" SAID A VOICE.

Everything looks strange, and the voice seems to be coming from a tangle of groundskeeping rakes and hoses in a corner.

"YOU TALK?" HE ASKED.

"WE ALL DO. SOME OF THEM TALK TOO MUCH," SAID THE HOSE.

Gideon feels as if he gone down that famous rabbit hole or through that looking glass. But he follows the directions from the talking rake and opens a door that says EQUIPMENT. Inside are some bossy yakking baseballs stacked in a pyramid. One of the bats hops into his hands, and in a wooden monotone croaks"Yer up, Kid!"

But Gideon isn't up to playing ball. Leaving the loquacious equipment behind, Gideon runs up some stairs, to where the food vendors' stocks are stored. He has to find his family!

THE HOT DOG SHOOK HIS BUNS, AND POINTED AHEAD.

"MONUMENT PARK!"

And inside the stadium's Monument Park Museum, it only gets stranger. Gideon meets Babe Ruth, who points his way to where Derek Jeter himself is waiting. Gideon gets his coveted autograph and directions to where he'll find his family from his idol himself, in Phil Bilder's takeoff on Night in the Museum, Derek Jeter Presents Night at the Stadium (Jeter Publishing) (Aladdin Books/Jeter Publishing, 2016). Fantasy-loving baseball fans will enjoy the inside tour of Yankee Stadium and get a chuckle or two from the wisecracking rakes and baseball bats in his latest of Jeter's baseball spinoffs. Jeter may inspire older readers of this one to move on to his popular semi-autobiographical boyhood baseball series, which includes Hit & Miss, (Jeter Publishing) The Contract, (Jeter Publishing) and his current hit (pun intended), Change Up. (Jeter Publishing)