Guide to Baseball Fiction: Juvenile Fiction

by Tim Morris
The University of Texas at Arlington

Juvenile books in this part of the Guide range from early readers to young adult novels. The criterion for placing them here has been generally that they tend to appear in children's sections of bookstores or libraries. The juvenile section of the Guide won't be comprehensive for a very long time, if ever. My aim is to offer examples of trends and themes in children's and young adult literature as they're refracted through baseball. Or, if you like, I offer a guide to the baseball juvenile fiction likely to be held by a large public library (coincidentally, I work across the street from a large public library).

I have tried to cover important series, but life is literally too short to read every item in every juvenile baseball series. Nor have I gotten anywhere near including all the major series. Listed so far are a few examples from The Baker Street Sports Club, Barnstormers/Sluggers, the Baseball Joe series, Clair Bee's Chip Hilton series, Matt Christopher's Peach Street Mudders, Duane Decker's Blue Sox, S.S. Gorman's High-Fives, Dan Gutman's Tales from the Sandlot and Baseball Card Adventures; Dean Hughes's Angel Park All-Stars, David A. Kelly's Ballpark Mysteries, Wilfred McCormick's Bronc Burnett series, the Jake Maddox series, The Pink Parrots, Harold M. Sherman's Home Run Series, The Southside Sluggers, and John R. Tunis's Dodgers series.

Juvenile short stories are listed here with juvenile books.

For an exhaustive treatment, see Andy McCue's Baseball by the Books (Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown, 1991).