The Boy Who Saved Baseball

Ritter, who has written several middle grade books about baseball, offers this story of Tom Gallagher saving baseball and, thus, the community of Dillontown as a volume in the “baseball as a game of miracles” subgenre. While baseball has faded in popularity, seemingly eclipsed by football, basketball, and even soccer, authors like Ritter, Carl Deuker, Troon McAlister, and W.P. Kinsella continue to pen volumes intended for younger audiences about the apparent supernatural underpinnings of baseball. This theme is also prevalent in movies through motion pictures like The Bad News Bears, The Natural, and Angels in the Outfield. Like many other stories in this subgenre, Ritter’s narrative contains several common plot conventions: a team comprised of misfits, a former baseball legend pressed into service, an apparently insurmountable challenge, and what appears to be divine intervention just as all hope seems lost.

Long before Ritter’s fictional creation of Lucky Strike field, baseball was a real-life game of miracles, curses, prophecies, legends, and hope. Ritter could point to the 1968 “Miracle Mets” as the basis for the extraordinarily improbable victory of the Wildcats. The long-time Red Sox “Curse of the Bambino” and the Chicago Cubs “Curse of the Billy Goat” hung over those clubs almost as long as Blackjack Buck’s cryptic jinx seemed to doom Dillontown.