If you've ever played baseball you'll connect immediately with this book. If you've never played...you'll wish you had. Mr. Mathews writes about a set of young boys in the best years of their youths playing a game. But they could be any set of boys. You'll undoubtedly see yourself or your son or daughter in many of the characters.
In a way, it's not even about baseball. It's about the ability of children to make life mean more than cell phones and pagers. It's a translator for the secret language that children speak, but few adults do. You'll get an insight into the minds of the nine-year-old boys, and you'll find yourself reminiscing about those days when you were so little.
You'll surely smell the dirt and the dust that rise above the field when the slide came in just under the tag. You'll feel the wind rise out of the west and watch it push the hit into a triple, and you'll hope that Felix's dad can beat cancer.
Mr. Mathews takes the reader on a trip to a gas station as the boys attempt to trick the clerk into believing that Rand McNally is a city in southern Indiana.
He walks you through the rules of the 'Going Down Game,' in which batters have to answer questions about world geography, or become 'beamed' (as the boys say) by the incoming pitch to their cranium area.
Anyone who purchases this book will get more than their money's worth. They'll fall in love with these kids, and maybe, this game.
It's about baseball. It's about children. But most of all, it's about life.
