Stories to Capture a Love of Baseball

“There are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization,” predicts the writer and scholar Gerald Early. “The Constitution, jazz music and baseball.”

Pretty heady company for a game, isn’t it? But Early, of course, is right: Few things have pervaded our culture more than baseball. It’s the sport our parents passed on to us and the one that we’ll pass on to our children. So, in an effort to keep that cycle intact, here are a few of the dozens of baseball-themed titles that have been released in time for opening day.

“Close Call,” a novel for middle-school students by Todd Strasser (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 128 pages, $15.99), opens with the crack of the bat, which is how all baseball books should begin. But soon the ball field becomes a battlefield pitting 11-year-old Ian and his friends against a group of rock-throwing neighborhood bullies.

The rival groups eventually settle their differences by squaring off for a good old-fashioned game of hardball that, fittingly, isn’t decided until the bottom of the ninth.

Iron man Cal Ripken Jr., who played in a record 2,632 consecutive games before finally taking a day off in September, tells his story to young readers in two new releases that writer Mike Bryan and Dial Books for Young Readers adapted from Ripken’s bestselling autobiography “The Only Way I Know.” In “Cal Ripken Jr.: Play Ball” (48 pages, $13.99), the Baltimore Orioles star tells beginning readers about his childhood, his start in baseball and the streak in a breezy book packed with color photos.

“Cal Ripken Jr: My Story” (113 pages, $16.99), a book for middle-grade readers, tackles many of the same themes, only in much greater depth. But here Ripken also writes frankly of the deep personal disappointment he felt when the Orioles fired his father as the team’s manager six games into the 1988 season, of his many struggles in baseball and of life away from the ballpark.

For those unwilling--or unable--to let go of last season’s epic home-run duel, Aladdin Paperbacks has issued a brief, photo-packed synopsis of the magical summer that was. As you might expect, “McGwire & Sosa: A Season to Remember” (by James Preller, 32 pages, $5.99) is short on insight and long on hyperbole, imbuing the tale with the kind of mythic tone that lifts the players’ exploits from simple history to legend. The keepsake book also contains two pages of statistics listing the date, site and opposing pitcher for Sosa’s 66 and McGwire’s 70 home runs.

The heroics of McGwire and Sosa did little to tarnish the memory of baseball’s first superstar, Babe Ruth, who is resurrected in “The Babe & I” (by David A. Adler and illustrated by Terry Widener; Gulliver Books, 32 pages, $16), a bittersweet Depression-era story for beginning readers about a quick-thinking newsboy, his too-proud father and the Yankees’ bighearted slugger.

We won’t tell you how the story ends, but history shows the Yankees won the World Series that year. Winning a title is also the goal of the aptly named Scrappers, nine kids and a coach who are united for one eventful summer in the first three volumes of a fast-paced series from author Dean Hughes and Aladdin Paperbacks. The team is born in “Scrappers: Play Ball!,” when Robbie Marquez learns he’s missed the deadline for signing up for the local summer league and decides to put together a team of his own. Power-hitting catcher Wilson Love and how he overcomes his struggles at the plate are at the forefront of “Scrappers: Home Run Hero,” while soft-spoken Trent Lubak and his discomfort with a couple of hot-dogging teammates drive the plot in Vol. 3, “Scrappers: Team Player.”

Each volume is between 115 and 123 pages long, sells for $14 and concludes with two to three pages of basic tips for running the bases, hitting and playing different positions in the field.

Few games rely on numbers more than baseball, from the sport’s simple rules, which hold that three strikes is an out and four balls is a walk, to its obsession with statistics. All of which make Barbara Barbieri McGrath’s “The Baseball Counting Book” (illustrated by Brian Shaw, Charlesbridge Publishing, 30 pages, $15.95) a natural.

McGrath has taken novel approaches to helping children count, the most notable being “The M&M;’s Brand Chocolate Candies Counting Book.” Here she weds simple rhymes with images common to baseball to help beginning readers count from one to 20.