THE DESPERADO WHO STOLE BASEBALL

This prequel to The Boy Who Saved Baseball (2003) teeters between preposterous and plausible as Ritter splashes his wit on a baseball tale that takes place in a Reconstruction-era mining town in the San Diego hills. Jack Dillon meets up with Billy the Kid on his way to Dillontown, which is renowned for its championship baseball. Jack hopes to have the inside track, as it’s his presumed uncle who founded the town. That John Dillon is a black man who has just issued a high-stakes challenge to the National League Champion Chicago White Stockings doesn’t deter Jack, a determined and optimistic kid. That John would accept this hitherto-unknown white nephew without question, that environmental consciousness could stand in the way of a gold mine and that Billy the Kid could become a whiz baseball player in a few days are just some of the examples of the fast and loose playing with history that Ritter asks readers to accept. However, fans of baseball will chortle all the way through every impossible moment. (Historical fiction. 11-16)