The Boy Who Saved Baseball

Lucky Strike field is surrounded by stone walls that are 100 years old. The goal of Tom, Cruz, and others on their team is to protect those walls. To do so, they must tear down two other sets of walls. The first are the stucco walls that surround Dante’s compound. The destruction of those walls represents the second set: the emotional walls Dante erected to keep the hostile, uncomprehending world at bay. Once Dante accepts the dissolution of his barriers, he tears down several other walls. He systematically explodes one assumption after another—that is, he knocks down all the barriers between the Wildcats and their ability and willingness to win the Big Game. In the process, he also challenges the citizens of Dillontown to accept him once again as a welcome resident, breaking down those emotional walls.

Ritter makes another interesting reference to walls when he describes Cruz and Tom riding their horses to Dante’s compound. They see the remains of buildings constructed by Indigenous Americans and possibly by the Hispanic settlers who preceded the Western Europeans who came after them. Ritter’s message is that the walls built by those ancient civilizations did not endure. Similarly, the historical walls of Dillontown are under assault.