The Boy Who Saved Baseball

 Reviewed by Danny

The Boy Who Saved Baseball by John.H Ritter was written for fans of baseball, and to people who hate it, like me. When I had to choose a book, I was trying to find the easiest and the shortest book I could find, and The Boy Who Saved Baseball caught my eye. After I signed out the book, I realized that it was only about baseball. At first I thought the story would be boring, tiring, and that I wouldn’t understand anything about the book. When I started to read, the book wasn’t only about baseball after all. It had lots of action and mystery about what’s going to happen next after each paragraph. The main idea of the story is that the whole towns fate is rested in the hands of a small baseball team called the Wildcats.
The plot of the story is really easy to follow. The story is about Tom Gallagher (the protagonist of the story) and how it’s up to him, and his small team of baseball players. They have to spend several days training with one of the most famous baseball hitter, to hopefully win the small league baseball game and save his town from being torn down by the developers, and also find a mysterious boy along the book. The protagonist of the story, Tom Gallagher is the captain of the Wildcat’s team and the nicest of them all, but he is also the shyest and he doesn’t speak much throughout the story.
The protagonist mostly spends his time writing in his journal, and thinking about the mountains, the people, and how good life is instead of speaking to everyone. The narrator expresses the characters feelings towards what Tom thinks or what Tom writes and sketches, not by expressing him by his verbal tone, as shown in the following example. “You sure are quiet.” Tom nodded. “That’s what everybody says.” “What are you thinking?” “I don’t know.” Tom was the happiest when he could sit silent, be the observer, the notice of small details, the sketcher. (61). in only 3 sentences, the Narrator could describe us perfectly of how the character feels in his daily life. Another important character in the book is Cruz De La Cruz (the mysterious boy I was talking about earlier.) Cruz came horse riding from a far off town until he came to Dilltown to play in the legendary Lucky Strike Field, in where many famous players came to play ball. Cruz’s relationship in the book was to teach the players to believe in themselves. Before Cruz came, they thought they were dead, but then he thought them valuable lessons that can be used in their lives to help them win the game.
The message that the author is trying to give throughout the book is to never give up. He doesn’t really show it in the context, but you can realize it while you’re reading it. For example. Tom starts out all depressed and thinks his team will lose and everyone would blame him for it, but then he starts to realize how much effort his team is putting in their training, and how the players starts to hit the balls more harder and faster, this sight made Tom start to believe that there is a possibility of winning. He says how kids our age should start working hard to get to new heights.
In my opinion I would give this book a seven out of ten, because in some parts of the story the author should give you suspense and make you want to turn the page around and see what’s happens next, but sometimes you would already suspect that would happen, and it would be kind of boring to read. But despite those minimal problems, the book is written with great detail and it’s a book in which everyone can enjoy.