Chet The Dog

Posts Tagged ‘Quacky Baseball’

Baseball’s Back! Sort Of!

How are we feeling about all those empty seats?

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 –

 

Beginnings (More)

On Sundays we’ve been doing beginnings – all the Peter Abrahams books in chronological order, including those written under the Spencer Quinn pen name. Here from 2011 – #26, my only picture book – QUACKY BASEBALL, illustrated by the great Frank Morrison.

[“When ‘the little rookie from the wrong side of the marsh’ swings the bat, he brings it on home.”
– Publishers Weekly]

Opening day – and Thumby Duckling is nervous.

 

Medwick Ducky Medwick

“Interesting recipes were turning up down below yesterday,” Spence says.

Recipes? That has something to do with food. I open my eyes. But why? I can hear just as well with them closed. I close them. I open them. I close them.

“What’s he doing?” Admin says.

“No idea,” says Spence. “Did you see that message from your dad?”

“No.”

“About Quacky Baseball. He got himself a copy down in Florida, caught the Medwick Ducky reference. He wanted you to know that as a little kid he saw Ducky Medwick playing for the Cardinals against the Braves.”

“Cool. The Boston Braves, of course. He must also be one of the only people around who saw Babe Ruth hit a home run in both leagues.”

“Should we give him a call?”

“Not now. He’ll be at the gym. Also we’ve got to figure out this whole patch thing, design and manufacture.”

“Sounds like a project for tomorrow.”

Welcome dude who fell into a tough life, Nanna, shotgun rider (what a pic!), Texan partier.

http://freshfiction.com/blog/2011/04/fresh-pick-to-fetch-a-thief-by-spencer-quinn.html