Historical Fiction Baseball

Stephen Satlow is an eight-year-old boy living in Brooklyn, New York, which means he only cares about one thing - the Dodgers. Steve and his father spend hours reading the sports pages and listening to games on the radio. Aside from an occasional run-in with his teacher, life is pretty simple for Steve. But then Steve hears a rumor that an African-American family is moving to his all-Jewish neighborhood. It's 1948 and some of his neighbors are against it. Steve knows this is wrong. His hero, Jackie Robinson, broke the color barrier in baseball the year before.

It’s the summer of 1973, and Joe Castle is the boy wonder of baseball, the greatest rookie anyone has ever seen. The kid from Calico Rock, Arkansas, dazzles Chicago Cubs fans as he hits home run after home run, politely tipping his hat to the crowd as he shatters all rookie records.

Reporting for his first day as a Boston Red Sox player, Mickey Rawlings discovers a faceless body in the empty stadium. When police name him as their suspect, he knows he must clear his name or give up baseball and his freedom. But nameless foes are trying to silence him with warnings that become increasingly dangerous. A member of the Society for American Baseball Research, Troy Soos creates delightfully authentic ballplayers and places them in believable, colorful settings.

Last Days of Summer is the story of Joey Margolis, neighborhood punching bag, growing up goofy and mostly fatherless in Brooklyn in the early 1940s. A boy looking for a hero, Joey decides to latch on to Charlie Banks, the all-star third basemen for the New York Giants. But Joey's chosen champion doesn't exactly welcome the extreme attention of a persistent young fan with an overactive imagination. Then again, this strange, needy kid might be exactly what Banks needs.

Troy Soos' sparkling Mickey Rawlings Baseball mysteries pack early 1900's baseball lore and colorful period details into baffling whodunits. Hunting a Detroit Tiger vividly brings to life the turbulent post-World War I days when the nation partied with bootleg liquor and labor unrest swept the nation with violence.

Play ball! Jack and Annie aren’t great baseball players... yet! Then Morgan the librarian gives them magical baseball caps that will make them experts. They just need to wear the caps to a special ballgame in Brooklyn, New York. The magic tree house whisks them back to 1947! When they arrive, Jack and Annie find out that they will be batboys in the game - not ballplayers. What exactly does Morgan want them to learn? And what’s so special about this game? They only have nine innings to find out!

When local baseball player Junior Jones receives death threats over the color of his skin, the team's wealthy owner hires Sam Rockwell to solve the case and stop a murder before it happens. Sam goes undercover as a minor league pitcher to strike out the culprit. Follow the clues along with Sam's curmudgeonly ghost of a father Frank Rockwell, and Sam's wife Amelia, who holds a secret that will forever change the lives of the entire Rockwell family. It's another laugh-filled, madcap mystery in the warm, witty 1950's Hollywood-style of author Jason Anspach.

Eddy Pareti is a street-smart kid who does things his own way. He ditches school and dodges duties at the family’s tavern, Ernie’s Bleachers (now Murphy’s Bleachers), which is just across from Wrigley Field. World War II is ending, the Cubs are heading to the World Series, and Eddy sneaks into games and brushes up against baseball legends, including stars of the Negro League. From behind his family’s bar, Eddy pours beer for soldiers, ball players, and rodeo clowns, runs bets for a bookie who wants him to shoot a deadbeat gambler and—hold your horses—crashes a stagecoach on State Street.

Conor Nash has lived his life with a single purpose - to pitch in the major leagues. He’s been released from professional baseball contracts 10 times over a 16-year career, but he’s overcome every obstacle to finally reach "The Show" when he’s a decade too old. As he faces the specter of injury-forced retirement, he becomes a man neither he nor his wife recognizes. During his career, Conor avoided the trap of alcohol and drugs because his drug was baseball.

In Peter Schilling's wonderful novel, the extraordinary baseball season of 1944 comes vividly to life. Bill Veeck, the maverick promoter, returned from Guadalcanal with a leg missing and $500 to his name, has hustled his way into buying the Philadelphia Athletics. Hungry for a pennant, young Veeck jettisons the team's white players and secretly recruits the legendary stars of the Negro Leagues, fielding a club that will go down in baseball annals as one of the greatest ever to play the game.

Havana Heat transports readers to 1911 America, where real-life pitcher Luther "Dummy" Taylor is trying to work his arm back into fighting shape. Though deaf, Taylor helped lead John McGraw's New York Giants to the pennant, winning 115 games between 1900 and 1908. But an injury relegates him to the minors, and he dreams of one last shot at the big barnstorming trip to Cuba.

From Coney Island sideshows to the brand-new Yankee Stadium, Diamond Ruby chronicles the extraordinary life and times of a girl who rises from utter poverty to the kind of renown only the Roaring Twenties can bestow. But her fame comes with a price, and Ruby must escape a deadly web of conspiracy and threats from Prohibition rumrunners, the Ku Klux Klan, and the gangster underworld.

In an America ravaged by the Great Depression, a talented but ragtag baseball team sets out to change the world. Barnstorming the back roads and dusty ballparks of the Midwest, the Racine Robins rally fans to the populist cause, raising money for soup kitchens and strike funds even as they thrill small-town crowds and dazzle opponents on the field. Yet winning the hearts and minds of the people turns out to be easier for the players than facing the twin seductions of love and money, conflicting desires that threaten to derail everything they are fighting to achieve.

Set in 1918, Dear Frank offers the listener a glimpse of life in the Boston area during the waning days of World War I. Young Andrew, writing to his older brother Frank, a serviceman fighting overseas, is intent on keeping his brother abreast of all that is going on around him, especially the Boston Red Sox, led by the young, hard-hitting, left-handed pitcher Babe Ruth.

Recently widowed and now retired, Billy Bryan is “coming to the end of many things.” Then a long-forgotten scrapbook stirs memories of a distant past - and beckons him and his grown daughter on a reluctant journey to relive his role in history. In 1947 Bryan was playing winter ball in Cuba, his future as uncertain as the island country’s. Then one fateful night Bryan witnessed a young student radical named Fidel unleash an amazing curveball. So begins Bryan's tug-of-war with destiny.

What does clinical hypnosis that cured a 12-year old's bed wetting and the wisdom of a Persian Holy Man's book have to do with major league pitching? A phenomenal rookie pitcher and an over-the-hill bullpen catcher invent "weasel ball", which employs the power of suggestion rather than common trash talk to affect opposing hitters. The pitcher, a used bookstore junkie and student of ancient wisdom, carries a mysterious book in his hip pocket.

An unlikely team of misfit players, and the coach fighting to hold them all together… The All Nation Team tells the story of the first fully integrated, "post-racial" baseball team, very loosely based on an actual team that played in the years before World War I. In his first season as head coach of the All Nations team, former slave George Grunion must contend with racist crowds, flagging team morale, his own loneliness, and even the ghost of the previous head coach.

The Roaring Twenties: America is dancing to jazz, gangsters are selling bootleg liquor, and the New York Yankees are building a baseball dynasty. In 1923, Yankee Stadium opens and Babe Ruth is about to lead the team to its first world's championship. But the promising season gets off to an ominous start when the body of a murdered bootlegger is found buried in the new ballpark.

On the 50th anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the World", Don DeLillo reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life characters who on October 3, 1951, witnessed Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning.

What’s a 16-year-old boy to do when he learns that his stepmother and a local judge have murdered his father and now plan to kill him, too? Well, when it’s 1906, and you can play pretty good second base, you join a barn-storming baseball team making its way across Kansas. It also helps that the team is the Kansas City National Bloomer Girls. After all, who’d look for a runaway boy disguised as a girl on a women’s team that competes against town-ball teams of male players? Of course, it’ll take more than long hair, a Spalding glove, and a quick bat to stay alive.