For Young Readers

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Play Ball

It's springtime in America, and all across the land baseball novels pitched to kids are bursting forth like azalea blooms on steroids. Here are three that transcend the usual tired formula of Kid Meets Ball and Beats Daunting Odds to Realize Dream.

Alan Gratz's debut novel, Samurai Shortstop (Dial, $15.99; ages 12-up) is a page-turner that's as much about history as baseball. Gratz traces his inspiration to a photo he saw of the 1915 National High School Baseball Summer Championship Tournament in Japan. " 1915! " he writes. Wasn't baseball imported into Japan by American GIs after World War II? When he discovered that the game's roots in the country go back to the 1870s, Gratz came up with the idea of a beseboru novel set in an elite Tokyo boys' boarding school 20 years later, when the modernization set in motion by the emperor Meiji was in full spate.

Toyo, 16, is a samurai's son and the school's star shortstop. His efforts to square his father's fast-fading bushido warrior code with the brash new Western game symbolize the crunch felt by many Japanese in an era of cruelly compressed transition. But the novel is far from schematic. Gratz's research pays off in vivid portraits of the walled school and the teeming city beyond it. There's violence, from a seppuku suicide to hazing rituals that Gratz tries not to be anachronistically judgmental about. There's drama in the climactic game between the Japanese high schoolers and a flashy team of American businessmen and servicemen. There's humor. The boys' efforts to run their own cafeteria are priceless, as is the school's dim-bulb cheer squad, "screeching at the top of their lungs" for friend and foe alike. And there are insights that still hold. The heart of the action is the forging of a team -- a concept more valued in Japan than here, as Ichiro Suzuki reminded us after his country captured the baseball World Cup last month.

Still, there's this to be said for America: It might overemphasize individual achievement, but thanks to Title IX, at least those individuals now include girls. Check out the history of the landmark law in Karen Blumenthal's heartfelt Let Me Play (Atheneum, $17.95; ages 9-12). Two other new novels show how attitudes altered in the wake of Title IX now permeate not just sports, but everyday relations between the sexes.

Under the Baseball Moon (Philomel, $16.99; ages 12-up) is the latest offering from John H. Ritter, author of a string of YA books in which baseball is used to illuminate social issues from conservation to violence. This one is quirkier, riffing on the nuances lurking in the word "playing." Set in real-life Ocean Beach, a funky community on "the sandy edge of San Diego," it even comes with a hand-drawn map. Sharing star billing are Andy Ramos, a skateboarder "on a mission . . . to become a world-class trumpeter," and Glory Martinez, Andy's childhood nemesis turned star softball pitcher, dreaming of the Olympics. "Truth is, I was not much of a baseball guy," Andy admits. "But I did understand music." So he plays up a storm onstage, just as Glory does on the field, each galvanizing the other in a sort of physical equivalent of the sound of Andy's band, "Fusion Charge, or the FuChar, for short." Most refreshing thing in the book: the fact that it's the girl who's the killer athlete, the guy who's the sensitive artiste . Most fun: the drummer Lil Lobo, whose acerbic wit offsets Andy's gush. ("You guys," says Andy. "I have the perfect name for our band." "Oh, you do, huh?" deadpans Lil Lobo. "What is it? Two Duds and a Stud? Won't that put all the attention on me?")

Paul Haven's Two Hot Dogs With Everything (Random House, $15.95; ages 8-12) is a sweet, subtle yarn that Haven wrote mostly in Afghanistan and Pakistan when he was the Associated Press bureau chief there, obviously pining for some true-blue Americana. Set in a fictional city that feels like New York, at a time that would feel like the '40s if it weren't for the presence of a brainy, athletic, post-Title IX girl named Molly and the odd mention of computers, it is about young fans rather than young players. One young fan in particular: Danny Gurkin, probably the most dedicated and superstitious supporter the dismal Sluggers have ever had. Eating two hot dogs with everything before each game is just the beginning of the rituals Danny deploys to spirit his team out of the doldrums. It all seems too wholesome and corny for words until Haven starts piling it on -- a century-old curse, a Hamptonesque mansion with turrets shaped like baseball bats, magic bubble gum -- and you realize his tongue is firmly in his cheek. Except that he's also deadly serious about the mysterious powers wielded by the truly loyal fan.

--Elizabeth Ward

(warde@washpost.com)

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