Chet The Dog

Posts Tagged ‘Cal Ripken Jr.’

October and Baseball

This is the best month for baseball lovers! Football, basketball, hockey – they’d all be basically understandable right away to a newcomer seeing a game for the first time, but baseball: never! Baseball comes up quite a bit in our work – in the YA thriller Bullet Point, for example, the kids’ picture book Quacky Baseball, and of course The Fan was all about baseball. (Cal Ripken, Jr., paying me a very nice compliment on its accuracy, asked how far I’d gone in baseball.  That was a funny conversation.) Baseball also comes up in the Chet and Bernie series. Here’s a little something from Thereby Hangs A Tail:

We drove toward the sun, through a few neighborhoods a lot like our own, then past a baseball field with a kids’ game going on. I didn’t understand baseball but it always looked like fun, and the ball itself I loved. Who’d have guessed what the insides were like? At that very moment a kid swung his bat and the ball went soaring into the sky. We weren’t going very fast. Would it be totally impossible to –