For the Young, the Old Ballgame

As is the case with many sports books these days, one of the more dramatic passages in Keystone Kids (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $14.95; 240 pp.) revolves around salary negotiations.

At a tense moment, the owner of the Dodgers confronts two rookie brothers who are demanding a raise for their second season in the majors. Finally, though, the boys win. Their collective salary goes up from $6,500 to $15,000. “Fatheads! Chowderheads!” the owner rages.

Clearly, this novel is not set in 1990.

In the 20 years since Jim Bouton’s iconoclastic “Ball Four” was published, the literature of baseball has chucked the illusion of innocence. But “Keystone Kids,” one in a series of 10 books written in the 1940s by John R. Tunis, and recently rereleased in hardcover (other titles include “The Kid From Tomkinsville,” “Rookie of the Year” and “World Series”), issues from an era when the game was as pure and childlike as Steve Garvey before the scandals.

In these pleasant novels, the Brooklyn Dodgers travel by train; salaries for the entire team come to $180,000, and fans only have to cough up a nickel for a bag of ballpark popcorn. Corny is, in fact, the operative adjective here: the perfect tone for young people’s books about baseball.

Whoever started calling ballplayers the “boys of summer” was right on target. Baseball is a game for 8- and 9- and 12-year-olds. That’s also the age when the peculiar genre of the baseball novel--with its core of tension between the development of individuality and cooperation--has its greatest appeal.

Two new series, The Alden All Stars by Tommy Hallowell (Puffin Books: $2.95, paper) and The Angel Park All-Stars by Dean Hughes (Bullseye Books/Alfred A. Knopf: $2.95, paper), arrived this summer intent on capturing an audience of baseball-fixated young people. Both series embrace the realities of contemporary culture--the teams are multiracial in a matter-of-fact way, and a few girls of summer are on the rosters.

The basic themes, however, seem to be timeless. For instance, in “Keystone Kids,” written in 1943, the Brooklyn Dodgers find themselves torn apart by the arrival of the team’s first Jewish player.

In another context, adolescents might find their gag reflexes triggered by the sort of schmaltz that Tunis throws into his stories: “A team was like an individual, a character, fashioned by work and suffering and disappointment and sympathy and understanding and perhaps not least of all by defeat.” But for a 10- or 12-year-old faced with peer pressures and the first flashes of introspection, this can prove pretty potent wisdom.

The Alden All Stars series follows the athletic careers of four junior high school students. Set in the here and now--Bo Jackson’s the hero du jour, and the adolescent patter is rife with awesome nerd references--this is baseball from a jock’s perspective.

In “Dual on the Diamond,” for example, the hardball hard core will relish lines such as “Dennis . . . found the ball in his glove quickly, turned it to find a seam with his finger--to get good control--and snapped it away.”

Still, though, the perennial issues work their way into the subplots. “Baseball isn’t a team game like football or basketball. It’s really an individual’s game, right?” ponders one player who happens to be having a painful, book-length adolescent feud with a teammate (one happens to be white, one black, no racial motives involved). Naturally, by the time the teammates hook their gloves onto the handlebars of their bikes and pedal off into the sunset, these pivotal concerns have been neatly resolved.

The Angel Park All Stars step back a couple of years to what are probably the purest moments of baseball a person experiences--the deeply intense games played and envisioned between the ages of 8 through 10.

This eight-book series (from “Making the Team” through “Championship Game”) tracks three Little League players and their team through a single season.

Dean Hughes, author of this series, is no Mark Twain, no Charles Dickens, and the baseball diamond is a much more confined setting for great fiction than the Mississippi River or the London slums. But these books do, with a Hardy Boys-Nancy Drew simplicity, capture the fears and triumphs of boys and girls of these ages. The conversations ring of authenticity, even without slangy references to Teen-age Turtles or the Simpsons, and the baseball field remains a refreshingly gimmick-free stage on which to let the morality play unfold.

Reading about baseball is, especially for a kid, a lot like listening to a game on the radio. The gentle rhythms, punctuated with unpredictable flashes of excitement, lull the brain into a daydream state. Anyone who has eavesdropped on (or has been) a young baseball fanatic, knows how effortlessly he or she can invent a whole season, calling out scores and dugout chatter.

The Angel Park series, featuring almost pure baseball, will tap into this fantasy tendency. (In an ingenious stroke, the author even provides complete box scores for every game the team plays.) It’s easy to imagine young readers kicked back in their bedrooms on a smoggy summer afternoon--aromatic leather glove for a pillow, Nintendo flickering idly in the background--working their way through a season of Angel Park All Star’s games.

In an introduction to “The Kid From Tomkinsville,” Bruce Burns praises the series for rescuing the sports novel from “the land of fairy tales.” In truth, though, the beauty of those books and the newer series is that they are as direct and effective as the old-fashioned fairy tales that seep into impressionable young minds, soothing universal fears and implanting personal values and cultural mores.

The same may at some level be true of the game itself. Even in the Big Leagues, where the game has been undermined by commercialism and cynicism, significant myths emerge.

A good example of this is reflected in Teammates, by Peter Golenbock (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $15.95; 32 pp., illustrated). Using straight-ahead prose and clear illustrations combined with historic photographs, the book tells the story of Jackie Robinson’s rise from the Negro Leagues to become the first black Major Leaguer.

Racism is not a simple thing, but in the context of baseball, the complex social problem can be distilled down to the level of individual character and team spirit. Robinson, with the courage to stand up to the jeers and threats of the nation’s hate-mongers, is a perfect kids’-book hero. And what young ball aficionado, regardless of background, could resist the lesson taught by Robinson and his white teammate, Pee Wee Reese, “who more than anything . . . believed in doing what was right.”

In a well-known historic moment, Reese strolls out before a heckling crowd in his hometown of Cincinnati and throws his arm around Robinson. It is baseball at its corniest, most fairy-tale-like level. But what kid who has absorbed the values of the game could resist a book that ends with these lines: “ ‘I am standing by him,’ Pee Wee Reese said to the world. ‘This man is my teammate.’ ”