Taking Themselves Out to the Ball Games
This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on Mar. 16, 2006 Sign up now!
by Sally Lodge, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 3/16/2006
A mother and son team spent last week in Florida, covering quite a few bases. Sue Corbett (a regular PW and Bookshelf contributor), whose middle-grade novel Free Baseball was published by Dutton in February, and her 11-year-old son Conor Davidson, flew south from their Virginia home. They then criss-crossed the Sunshine State, visiting bookstores, a middle school and spring training exhibition games to promote the novel—and of course to enjoy the on-field baseball action.
Corbett, T.C. (short for Twin Cities,
the Twins' mascot), and son Conor.
To justify letting her son—a diehard baseball fan and avid Little League player—miss a week of sixth grade, Corbett named him "tour manager" and enlisted his help contacting media folk and baseball management. The result: a whirlwind week during which they acquired a copious collection of players' autographs, sunburned noses and some winning memories.
But first a bit about the book. Corbett's novel centers on 11-year-old Felix, who as an infant emigrated from Cuba to Florida with his mother, leaving his famous professional baseball player father behind. One day, while attending a Minor League game, Felix plays along when he's mistaken for the team's new batboy, hoping to learn more about his father from the team's Cuban-born members.
The seed of the book, Corbett explains, was planted one day when she and Conor were attending a Marlins game, when he was "knee-high to a centerfielder." As she watched him participate in the kids' post-game "Diamond Dash" from first to third bases (in his team shirt and baseball cap looking identical to the other young runners), she realized that a kid could easily get lost or run away in this anonymous amalgam of young baseball fans. "Felix whispered in my ear almost immediately," says Corbett of her protagonist, who escapes from his apathetic babysitter in an analogous scene in Free Baseball. "He told me he was running away, because he was angry at his mother. I found Conor and did the Diamond Dash to my car, where I wrote down everything Felix had told me."
The boy's story evolved from there, influenced by Corbett's years working as a reporter in Miami, where she was acutely aware of the Cuban immigrant situation, which she describes as "the so-called 'wet-foot, dry foot' policy.' " She recalls, in her words, "the near-constant headlines about refugees washing up on the beach, refugees caught in the straits of Florida, clinging to driftwood, refugees detained, sent back, allowed entry." As a child of immigrants who can visit her relatives in Ireland whenever she wants, the author reflects, "I have always felt it the most ludicrous of situations that Cubans cannot go home again, that coming to America requires such sacrifice, despite the island being so close to Florida. What must that be like?"
Focusing on the curious, determined Felix, her novel explores that question. The baseball component of the tale was a natural. "This was a journey, a running-away-to-find-some-truth-story before it was anything else," she says, "but it was always set in a ballpark. It is a canvas I know." And likely one that she knows all the better after writing True Baseball—and after her days with Conor at the Florida ballparks.
