Baseball, Lucille Ball, And More Great Kids’ Books!

Marty loves baseball and watches her brother play at every game, strategizing and offering feedback. This earns her the nickname of Smarty Marty. When both the coach and assistant coach need to take a week off, they ask Smarty Marty to serve as a coach for the game that Saturday. At first, the boys on the team don’t want to accept her and follow her instructions. But her superior baseball knowledge soon puts them in line. This picture book is inspired by the first female coach in Major League Baseball history, Alyssa Nakken.

I confess I do not know much about baseball’s history, so pretty much everything in this picture book was new to me! It tells the story of the first time two Native American baseball players played against one another in a World Series, which happened in 1911. Charles Albert Bender, Al, grew up on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota and, at seven, went to an Indian Boarding School with other Ojibwe children from his reservation. He learned to love baseball by watching older boys play during the summer. John Tortes Meyers, Jack, learned to play baseball on his Cahuilla nation’s reservation in Southern California. This picture switches back and forth between their lives until that 1911 game.

This middle grade historical fiction takes place in 1930s North Carolina, where Jim Crow laws led to segregation and racial tensions. Twelve-year-old Cato loves baseball and plays on his town’s Black Little League team. He dreams of joining the Negro League. His team practices on a derelict field while the white kids get a brand-new baseball field. The kids get curious and decide to play on the new field. When they’re caught, the town erupts in racial tensions, and the two teams will have a play-off to decide who can use the new field.

This is not the first time I’ve reviewed this one on here, but it’s a fantastic epistolary middle grade. Vivy Cohen is a Jewish autistic girl who loves baseball. When her mom says she can’t join a baseball team, she writes to her baseball hero, Black Major League star pitcher V.J. Capello, and amazingly, he writes back and coaches her on how to perfect her knuckleball throw. Vivy catches the eye of a little league coach and joins the team, but the other kids on the team aren’t always nice to her.