Alan Gratz

Now on sale: Fantasy Baseball!

2010-01-15T07:45:00.043-05:00

You've never played
fantasy baseball like this before.

A flying monkey in the outfield. A toad at short. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz on the mound. Alex Metcalf thinks he’s dreaming, but the Oz Cyclones exist here in Ever After, where storybook characters live on as long as kids in the real world believe in them.

But Alex isn't a storybook. To get home, he and the Cyclones will have to win the Ever After Baseball Tournament and earn wishes from the Wizard of Oz. Trouble is, the Big Bad Wolf wants a wish too.

To win the tournament, Alex and the Cyclones will have to defeat the wolf, play the best baseball of their lives, and find the courage to believe in themselves. But what good is believing in yourself if the real world stops believing in you?

Dial Books | March 2011 | Ages 8 to 12

Available in hardcover and ebook

"Chock-full of whimsical references to children’s literature, the plot builds rapidly with mile-a-minute action and well-drawn sports scenes."

Marilyn Taniguchi, School Library Journal

The Brooklyn Nine

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One family, nine generations.
One city, nine innings of baseball.

"Gratz builds this novel upon a clever enough conceit—nine stories (or innings), each following the successive generations in a single family, linked by baseball and Brooklyn—and executes it with polish and precision."

Ian Chipman, Booklist (Starred Review)

"With an impressively cohesive mix of sports, historical fiction, and family history, Gratz has crafted a wonderful baseball book that is more than the sum of its parts."

The Horn Book

"The fictional voice is sure and engaging, polished without being slick—an entertaining and compelling look at the deep roots of our national pastime."

Kirkus Reviews

Learn more about The Brooklyn Nine

Virtual Author Visits

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Nothing beats an in-person visit with an actual author, but if your school budget has been slashed or if you just want Alan to work with one class then a virtual visit might be the best option for you. With free software from Skype, a webcam and microphone, and a computer that connects to the Internet and displays on a large screen, we can beam Alan's image into your classroom for a live chat with your students.

What is Skype?

Visit http://www.skype.com/ for all the details and to download the free software. In a nutshell, Skype allows us to turn our computers into videophones so we can chat "face-to-face"--just like the Jetsons! The software is free and the signal goes over the Internet, so it doesn't tie up a phone line and doesn't cost anything.

What do I need?
A computer with a webcam and microphone. Most laptops have this built in nowadays, but if yours doesn't have one you can buy a webcam/microphone that connects to any computer with a USB.

An Internet connection (preferably high speed).

Free Skype software installed on your computer.

And it's not necessary, but if you can connect your computer so that it projects onto a large screen, it makes the chat more accessible to a full classroom of kids.

How do I get Skype on my computer?
Go to http://www.skype.com/ and click where it says "download." Choose Mac or Windows. Follow all the prompts to install the software on your computer. Easy peasy.

How do I know it will work?
We'll set up a time to test the transmission before the day of your scheduled chat to make sure everything is running smoothly. Alan will also call in a little bit early for your chat to make sure that you have a good connection.

How do we run the visit?
Alan prefers to take advantage of the interactive nature of the technology by running these visits as informal question and answer sessions--no prepared talk. It's best if the students have read one of his books before the chat and come prepared to ask questions. Students can come up to the webcam (so Alan can see them) one at a time to ask their question, and everyone can see and hear his response on the larger screen. It saves a little time if you can determine the order kids will go in before the chat, so we don't lose time choosing kids and having them come up to the computer.

Want to see it in action?
Click here to see a video of Alan meeting via Skype with a class in Japan.

Cost
$100 for a class period.

Contact
E-mail Alan or Alan's assistant Archie to discuss an author visit.

View Alan's upcoming events calendar
Read a Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators guide to preparing for an author visit (PDF)

School Visits

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Invite author Alan Gratz to your school and your students will learn where he gets his ideas, how he outlines and writes his novels, and how as a Little Leaguer he hit his little brother in the stands with a baseball--from the outfield.

Since the debut of Samurai Shortstop in 2006, Alan has visited hundreds of schools and libraries all over the United States--and one school in Japan!--to talk about his books, the writing process, and more. As a former eighth grade and tenth grade English teacher, he knows how to keep things relevant and entertaining, and, perhaps more importantly, how to out-smart-aleck the smart alecks.

Put Him to Work
School visits may include any combination of the following sessions:

Rounding the Bases
Using examples from all his books and baseball (what else?) as an analogy, Alan explains how his books are made--from inspiration (first base) to outline (second base) to writing (third base) to revision (home).

Recommended audience: grades 3-12
Works well for: small (classroom-sized) or large (auditorium-sized) groups
Requirements: PowerPoint projector and screen

Stealing Shakespeare
Alan stole plots and characters from Hamlet and Macbeth to write his YA murder mysteries Something Rotten and Something Wicked, but Shakespeare himself was an accomplished literary thief. In this talk, Alan discusses Shakespeare's influences and the Bard's impact on generations of later writers.

Recommended audience: grades 8-12
Works well for: small (classroom-sized) or large (auditorium-sized) groups
Requirements: PowerPoint projector and screen

Ten Things Parents and Educators Do to Discourage Reading
Every year, one of the usual suspects is held up as the thing that killed reading: video games, the Internet, mp3 players, television, movies, cell phones and PDAs. But if we're going to compare novels up to these other media, we have to start treating books like the other media, not like scholarly tomes or educational means-to-ends. In this eye-opening talk, Alan discusses ten things parents and educators do--all with the best of intentions!--that discourage kids from picking up books and reading for fun.

Recommended audience: Parent and teacher groups
Works well for: small (classroom-sized) or large (auditorium-sized) groups
Requirements: PowerPoint projector and screen

Q & A
Alan leaves time for questions at the end of every session, but some of his best visits have included entire sessions set aside just for Q & A. No PowerPoint, no prepared speech, just Alan in the front of the room answering every question your kids throw at him--what it's like to have a career as an author, how to get published, where he gets his ideas, the nuts and bolts of the writing process, how he tackles research, and what kind of chances the Tennessee Volunteers have this season. Q&A sessions work best classes that have read at least one of his books and prepared questions ahead of time.

Recommended audience: grades 4-12
Works well for: small (classroom-sized) groups

Presentation Limits
There are no limits! Alan will do as many presentations as you can pack into a school day. Put him to work during lunch too! He loves having an informal pizza lunch with smaller groups of kids--the baseball team, the creative writing club, the newspaper staff, etc. Once he's at your school, Alan wants to meet as many kids as he can! If you're planning to sell books during the event, don't forget to schedule time for a signing too, before the students have to leave for their buses.

Alan's Needs Are Few

Give him a couple bottles of water, a computer hookup for a PowerPoint presentation, and (in auditoriums) a microphone--and he's good to go. If you buy him a plain cheese pizza or French fries for lunch, he'll be your best friend forever.

How to Prepare for the Big Day
School visits work best when the students are familiar with Alan and his work. It just makes sense--when they know the books, they're excited to meet the author. You can download reader guides for most of Alan's books.

Samurai Shortstop Reader Guide
Something Rotten Reader Guide
Something Wicked Reader Guide
Brooklyn Nine Reader Guide - coming soon

In addition to reading his books in the classroom, teachers can work with students before the visit to help them come up with questions beyond "How much do you make?" "How old are you?" and "How much do you weigh?" Alan's been asked all those questions and more, and he's happy to answer them (even the ones about how much he makes and how much he weighs) but with a little advance preparation kids will often ask surprising and interesting questions about his research and the writing process, and make the visit far more educational and memorable.

You'll Need Books, Right?

You can arrange pre-event sales of Alan's books through a local bookstore, or you can buy the books yourself directly from Penguin. You'll get a 40% discount off the retail price of the books--so you can either pass that discount on to the kids or sell them at full price and use it as a fundraising opportunity. Click here to read more on ordering books from Penguin, and click here for a printable list of Alan's books with all the info you'll need to place an order.

Cost

$1,000 per day plus travel and hotel.

If that's beyond your school's budget there are a couple of ways to make a visit more affordable. You can partner up with another school (or schools) in your area, booking back-to-back events and sharing the travel expenses. If you and other schools can join forces and schedule Alan for five consecutive days, he'll pay his own travel costs. Each school will only pay for one day's honorarium and one night's lodging.

You can also split a day between two schools if they're close enough together so that getting from one school to another doesn't eat into too much of the day.

This blog post by fellow North Carolina author Adrienne Bashista has a great list of grant resources for funding author visits. Some of them are specifically for NC schools, but most of the list is applicable to schools anywhere in the US.

Alan is also available for online chats via Skype for $100 per hour. Click here to see Alan Skype chat with a class in Japan! And click here for more details about planning a virtual visit.

E-mail Alan or Alan's virtual assistant Archie to discuss an author visit.
View Alan's upcoming events calendar
Read a Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators guide to preparing for an author visit (PDF)

Contact Me

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E-mail:

bigcheese@alangratz.com

Snail mail:

Alan Gratz
PO Box 35
Penland, NC 28765

Follow me on Facebook
Follow me on Twitter

Alan's Books

2010-01-05T08:26:00.020-05:00

Fantasy Baseball

A flying monkey in the outfield. A toad at short. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz on the mound. Alex Metcalf thinks he’s dreaming, but the Oz Cyclones exist here in Ever After, where storybook characters live on as long as kids in the real world believe in them.

Suggested audience: Grades 3-7

The Brooklyn Nine

The story of nine "innings," or nine generations, of Schneider children from 1845 to the present, and their enduring connections to Brooklyn, baseball, and American history.

Suggested audience: Grades 7-12

Something Wicked

A Scottish Highland Fair turns foul when its beloved founder is found dead in his tent. Horatio Wilkes is on the case, but he'll need all his snark and all his smarts--and a little "Amazing Grace"--to bring the killer to justice.

Suggested audience: Grades 9-12

Something Rotten

A stinking-rich family. A reeking paper plant. A murder most foul. Something is definitely rotten in Denmark, Tennessee, and only 17-year-old detective Horatio Wilkes can sniff out the killer.

Suggested audience: Grades 9-12

Samurai Shortstop

Sixteen-year-old Toyo Shimada must blend baseball with bushido--the way of the warrior--to prove to his father there is still room for their family's samurai traditions in turn of the century Japan.

Suggested audience: Grades 7-12

Frequently Asked Questions

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Alan gets a lot of e-mails from fans asking him questions about his books and his life. Below are some of the most frequently asked questions, and his answers. Questions are broken down into categories: personal, the books, and writing advice.

To learn everything you didn't want to know about Alan, check out his blog.

Personal

Where were you born?
Knoxville, Tennessee.

Where did you grow up and go to school?
I went to high school at Webb School in Knoxville, then went to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for both undergraduate and graduate school.

How old are you?
I was born in 1972. You can do the math.

Where do you live?
In a little town called Bakersville in Western North Carolina.

Do you ever do tours or author visits?
I don't have any say whether or not my publisher sends me on author tours, but I do many, many school visits each year that are arranged through me. Click here to find out more about inviting me to your school.

Are you married? Do you have any kids?
Yes, and yes. My wife's name is Wendi, and my daughter's name is Jo. We all share a blog called Gratz Industries, where we chronicle our attempts at living creative, productive lives.

Do you have a day job?
Yes. It's writing. This is my full-time job. (Pretty awesome, huh?) And despite what my dad thinks, I really am in my office researching, outlining, writing, or taking care of writing business stuff all day.

If you weren't a writer, what would you be?
I was an eighth grade English teacher before I was a full-time writer, so I suspect that's what I would be doing. My dream job, outside of writing novels? Game designer. I also wish I could draw comics.

Do you have any hobbies?
Sure. I love playing board games and video games and role-playing games. I also like building things, like chicken coops and woodsheds and catapults. I collect action figures and other toys. Oh, and I read, of course. Books, magazines, and comic books.

What is your favorite food?
To say that my favorite food is pizza is like saying that my favorite thing to breath is air. Let's just leave it at that.

What's your favorite baseball team?
Major League Team: Los Angeles Dodgers
Japanese Pro Team: Hiroshima Carp
Minor League Team: Asheville Tourists

Who's your favorite baseball player?
Sean Casey, aka "The Mayor." He played for a lot of teams, including the Cincinnati Reds, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the Boston Red Sox. He's retired now, and works as a commentator for MLB Network. I also like James Loney, first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

What are your favorite television shows?
I watch very few programs, but those I do watch I tune in for religiously: Project Runway, Pardon the Interruption, Iron Chef, Veronica Mars, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, Justice League Unlimited, Columbo, Pushing Daisies, and all the Star Trek series. (A lot of my favorites are now defunct, but I still watch them over and over again on DVD.)

Who are your favorite authors/what are your favorite books?
Yikes! It's hard to choose. If you held hot coals to my feet, here's a top ten:

Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; Summerland)
Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)
Rex Stout (the Nero Wolfe novels)
Neil Gaiman (American Gods; Sandman comics)
P.G. Wodehouse (the Jeeves and Wooster stories)
Mike Mignola (Hellboy comics)
Frank Herbert (Dune)
Peter David (Imzadi and all his other Star Trek novels)
James Robinson (Starman comics)
Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; Watchmen)

Did you read a lot as a kid?
No. I read some things--I remember loving Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, and enjoying a lot of classics now given to kids, like Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea--but I was usually playing video games or building forts in the woods. My best friend and I had an imaginary country we invented called West Columbia, and we made up maps and flags and a constitution and official edicts. We even printed up our own money. So even though I wasn't reading, I was always up to some kind of invention, which I like to think made me into a storyteller as an adult. I do wish I'd read more as a kid though, if only so I wouldn't feel so very behind with all the books I want to read now!

The Books

Where did you get the idea for Samurai Shortstop?
I've always wanted to visit Japan, and I was thumbing through a travel guide when I saw a picture of a Japanese man in a kimono throwing out the first pitch at a baseball tournament in 1915. 1915! I had no idea Japan was playing baseball that long ago, so I found a book about Japanese baseball. And another. And another. A dozen or so books later, and I had a story about a boy blending bushido with baseball and . . . well, go read the book!

Why is that opening chapter of Samurai Shortstop so graphic?
I had two reasons for beginning Samurai Shortstop with a depiction of Toyo's uncle killing himself. First, I wanted to grab the reader's attention with something startling. But second, and most importantly, I wanted to scare Toyo, and, by extension, the reader. After his uncle commits suicide, Toyo's father says he's going to do it next, and Toyo spends the rest of the novel trying to stop his dad from following in his uncle's footsteps. The first chapter is the motivation for everything else Toyo does in the book. So that first chapter has to be graphic and scary, otherwise we as readers wouldn't understand what the big deal is.

Is Samurai Shortstop saying it's okay to commit suicide?
No. That's what Toyo is fighting against the whole time. But ritual suicide among the samurai was a real thing, and there's no reason to pretend things didn't happen in the past just because we wouldn't do the same thing today. Toyo comes to understand his uncle's decision, but that doesn't mean he agrees with it. That's an important difference. The same could be said of modern Japan: they understand why their ancestors did what they did, but they no longer agree with it. Even by Toyo's time, ritual suicide in Japan was seen as scandalous and sensational.

If anyone was going to die at the end of Samurai Shortstop, who would it be?
I get this question all the time, and I have no idea where it comes from. No one would die! That's not the way it ends!

Is Ichiko a real school? Are the storms and the Clenched Fist real?
You know those author notes you skipped at the end of Samurai Shortstop? Read them. Then go here.

Where did you get the idea for the Horatio Wilkes mysteries?
I like telling people that Horatio is as old on paper--in my notes--as he is in Something Rotten. That is, he's seventeen years old in Rotten, and I'd been writing about Horatio Wilkes since I took a Mystery and Detective Fiction class in college seventeen years before he ever made it to print. We had to create our own detectives for that class, and that's when Horatio was born. He didn't start out as a teenager though--at first, he was a thirty-something forensic scientist who taught at a university. I never was interested in doing research into forensics though, so Horatio went through a lot of changes over the years. I always liked his character, but never found the right story for him until I started writing young adult novels, and had the inspiration to make him seventeen. It was a perfect fit. All I needed then was a story for him. I had borrowed his name from Hamlet because I liked how down-to-earth and practical Hamlet's friend Horatio was, and I figured if the character was good enough to steal, so was the story. :-) I had always loved Hamlet and was looking for a way to turn it into a contemporary murder mystery, and everything came together. After that, I chose Macbeth as the inspiration for a second Horatio mystery because I've always loved its villains--Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

Are there going to be any more Horatio novels?
I'm in talks with my publisher to do a third Horatio Wilkes mystery, but I don't know when or if it will come out. If it happens, it will be called Something Foolish, and loosely follow the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I have ideas for lots more--including a Julius Caesar take-off that has Horatio solving a murder at a fraternity toga party during a college visit, and a version of The Tempest in which Horatio spends a summer as an intern at a Disney World-like amusement park.

Where did you get the idea for The Brooklyn Nine?
My terrific editor wrote to me one day and asked me what I would do with a story about baseball and different generations of a family, and I came back to her with the idea of nine innings--nine generations--of an American family and their connections to baseball throughout the decades. I had particular eras I wanted to hit--like the women's leagues during World War II and the "Gentleman's Agreement" to keep black players out of professional baseball around the turn of the century--but otherwise I left the stories up to the research. I was always able to find some story I wanted to tell for each generation--often more than one story--and I enjoyed reading up on American and baseball history along the way.

How much of The Brooklyn Nine is real?
You know those author notes you skipped at the end of The Brooklyn Nine? Read them. Then go here.

Has anything or anyone in your life ever inspired something in your books?
Yes. When I was sixteen years old, I watched my favorite uncle commit ritual suicide. I'm kidding! I'm only kidding! The real answer is: not much. The pollution angle in Something Rotten is loosely based on the Champion Paper controversy that was all over the front pages of the Knoxville newspapers when I was younger, and the setting for Something Wicked is based on my trip to a Scottish Highland Festival, but none of the characters in my books are based on people I've known. Oh, and Horatio's car is my best friend's old hand-me-down car.

I did write one novel that uses a lot of my own experiences from high school in it, but that novel hasn't sold and I haven't returned to it in some time. If I ever did sell it, I think a lot of people I once knew would recognize themselves in it, and they'd probably sue me for defamation of character.

Are you like any of your characters?
I share a love for baseball with most of my characters (even Horatio). I also share a lot of the emotions and frustrations of my characters at times, but I'm not Toyo, or Horatio, or any of the characters in The Brooklyn Nine. Horatio and I do share something of the same fashion sense, and I suppose there's a little part of me in all of my characters, but none of them is all me, or vice versa. When I write, I try to create characters who have lives of their own.

You write a lot about baseball. Are you a big baseball fan? Did you ever play baseball?
You can't write baseball books and not love baseball. (Well, I guess you could, but why?) So yeah, I'm a fan. But I've always been a greater fan than player. My greatest Little League moment: I misplayed a long drive to left field, then absolutely launched the ball, trying to throw a runner out at the plate. The ball sailed over the pitcher's mound, over first base, over the fence, and into the bleachers, where it hit my little brother in the arm. All the runners scored. After the inning was over, the coach told me I had a good arm. He also told me not to come back.

Did you create the cover images for your books? Do you have any say about them?
I wish I were that talented. No, I didn't create the covers to any of my books, and no, I don't really have much say (if any) about what they look like. But covers are terribly important; they say, "Don't judge a book by its cover," but we all do, don't we? Here's how it works: when the writing is finished, my editor sends a description of my book and some thoughts about what kind of tone or look she wants the cover to have to the designer who's gotten the assignment, and then she works back and forth with the artist and the art editor to create something they hope will say what the book is about, stand out on a bookshelf, and sell copies. I've been very lucky to have gotten terrific covers for each of my books--a testament to the talents of my editor and the Penguin art department!

If you didn't write your books, would you want to read them?
I get this question a lot, and it always surprises me. Maybe it's because I write books meant for young readers and I'm not "young" anymore? I guess what some people don't realize is that a lot of adults--including me--still read young adult novels. So yeah, I'd read my own books even if I wasn't the author. I can't imagine writing a book I wouldn't read! I write about only those stories and characters I'm interested in. If I didn't like them, I wouldn't write about them--especially since it takes such a long time and such a lot of work to write a book. If I didn't like what I was writing, it would be awful--and the books probably would be too!

Which of your books is your favorite?
This too is a tough question--like a parent being asked to pick which child is his favorite. I love all my books, and I often say my favorite is the one that came out most recently. If I had to pick a favorite though, I'd say Something Wicked--I already knew Horatio and was glad to see him again, and to research that book I went to the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, which was a blast. That book was a lot of fun to write every step of the way.

What are you working on now?
A bowl of popcorn.

Writing

Did you always want to be a writer? When did you decide to be a writer?
My original dream was to be a Jedi master. Unable to master the Force, I quickly turned to writing. When I was in grade school I produced a newspaper called the Blue Spring Lane News for my street, and by fifth grade I had written my first book. It was called Real Kids Don't Eat Spinach, and it was a play on a popular humor book at the time called Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. I think my mom still has it. I kept writing stories and newspaper articles all through middle school and high school, and studied writing in college. I guess I should have seen this coming.

Where do you get your ideas?
All over the place. In line at the grocery store, reading a magazine, surfing the internet. There are stories everywhere if you're looking for them. My favorite writing teacher showed me the trick of keeping an idea book, a journal where I can scribble a good piece of dialogue, an idea for a character, a random quote--anything. I've filled five and a half books in fifteen years. Not everything in my idea books will turn into a novel, but they're great places to experiment and have fun without the pressure of turning them into a real story.

How do I become a writer?
Well, you sit down at your computer and start writing. If you want to write well, I suggest you a) spy on your friends and family and listen to the way people talk, b) keep your eyes open and watch everything that happens in the world around you, c) always start in the middle of the action, d) make sure your story has a beginning, middle, and an end, e) read a lot and imitate your favorite authors. Note I didn't say copy what they write--just how they write. And did I mention you actually have to sit down at your computer and start writing?

When and where do you do your writing?
I write on a Dell laptop I bought with the money I made from my first television script sale. I love writing by hand, but it just takes too much time. I find that my thoughts get ahead of my ability to scribble, and then I lose whatever it was I was thinking about. Typing on the computer is so much faster, and allows me to cut and paste and rework with the words right in front of me. As to where I write, my family and I live in a house we designed ourselves, and I have a small office with a nice view of the woods. I research, outline or write from around 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every week day. I'm also a night owl, so sometimes I write very late at night after everyone else has gone to bed.

How long does it take you to write a book?
The research on historical novels actually takes longer than the writing. The idea for Samurai Shortstop had been percolating for a month or two when I thought of the title and a rough story idea. Then I hit the library, and for the next few months I only did research. When I felt like I could construct a chapter outline of my story, I stopped reading and started building the story. The outline probably took me a month to refine (it was very detailed!), and then I began writing. Once I begin writing, especially when I have a detailed outline that tells me where the story is going, I can write a chapter a day, sometimes two if I'm really cruising. At that rate, I can have a first draft in about a month--but then begins the long editing phase. I rewrite things that are choppy or don't work, bounce the story off trusted early readers, and then go through another round or three of corrections. From idea to final draft, it probably took me about nine months to write Samurai Shortstop. After it sold, I spent another year doing more research and going through even more rounds of revision with my editor.

What do you do about writers block?
I try to avoid the whole problem of writers block completely. I used to suffer from writers block all the time--I'd be sitting at my computer, ready to write, and have no idea what I was going to write. The clock would tick away, and with it would go the time I had to write that day. Then I'd come out of my office mad that I hadn't gotten words on the page. Then I learned to outline, and that's made all the difference. I now outline every novel I write, chapter by chapter, before I ever write the first word. If I hear a scene in my head, I scribble it down--when the muse speaks, you listen and take notes!--but I never try to push past the inspiration in the outline phase. Once I know in detail what is going to happen, I sit down to the keyboard and try to figure out how to tell it. Those are two very different processes, but most writers try to tackle them both at the same time. Separating them was a real breakthrough for me. I still get writers block (of a kind) when I can't figure out what's supposed to happen next during the outline phase, but at least then I don't come out of my office thinking that I've wasted time by not getting words and paragraphs and chapters written. Once I have the outline finished, I never get writers block--which is important when you're in a mood to knock out first draft pages. I open my notebook in the morning, turn to the next chapter, read what's going to happen, and then start writing.

Do you belong to a critique group?
I have a critique group of one--my wife, Wendi. She reads everything I write, and gives me good, honest feedback on it. Sometimes too honest, and I don't want to talk to her for a few days, but then I get over it. Usually.

I know many writers who thrive in larger critique groups, and many who have all been able to parlay their work as a group into publication. Larger critique groups just never worked for me.

Interviews

Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire - 2011
Chapter 16 - 2011
From the Mixed-Up Files of... - 2011

The Happy Nappy Bookseller - 2010
TeachingBooks.net - 2010

Guys Lit Wire - 2009
Market My Words - 2009

Novel Journey - 2008
writing it out - 2008
joelleanthony.com - 2008
The Book Report podcast - 2008

Interactive Reader - 2007
Cynsations - 2007
Karen's News - 2007
Dulemba.com - 2007
Powell's Books - 2007
Paper Tigers - 2007
The Edge of the Forest - 2007

Appearances

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Alan is a former middle school, high school, and university instructor who knows how to keep things relevant and interesting in the classroom.

School visits may include any combination of:

School assemblies (45-60 minutes)
Classroom/library presentations (45-60 minutes)
Writing workshops (45-60 minutes)

Alan also enjoys doing shorter, less formal events with kids, like pizza lunches with students who've read his books, interviews with school newspapers, and book signings. Once he's at your school, he wants to meet as many kids as he can!

Suggested audience: Grades 3-12
Full day fee: $1,000 plus travel & hotel

(Please remember, a school visit takes away
two or three days of Alan's writing time!)

If you can't afford a full-day fee, consider sharing the travel expenses with another school in your area, or split the day between schools. Alan is also available for online chats via Skype for $100 per hour. (Click here to see Alan Skype chat with a class in Japan!)

School visits, particularly classroom presentations, work best when the students are familiar with Alan and his work. Teachers and librarians are encouraged to make copies of Alan's books available to students in advance of any school visit.

Pre-event sales of Alan's books can be arranged through a local bookstore, or directly from Dial Books. Click here to read more on ordering books from Dial.

E-mail Alan to discuss an author visit
View Alan's upcoming events calendar

Read a Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators guide to preparing for an author visit (PDF)

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2010-01-05T07:20:00.000-05:00

About Alan

2010-01-05T07:04:00.008-05:00

Alan Gratz was born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, home of the 1982 World's Fair. After a carefree but humid childhood, Alan attended the University of Tennessee, where he earned a College Scholars degree with a specialization in creative writing, and, later, a Master's degree in English education.

In addition to writing plays, magazine articles, and a few episodes of A&E's City Confidential, Alan has taught catapult-building to middle-schoolers, written more than 6,000 radio commercials, sold other people's books, lectured at a Czech university, and traveled the galaxy as a space ranger. (One of these, it should be pointed out, is not true.)

Alan's first novel, Samurai Shortstop, was named one of the ALA's 2007 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults. His second novel, Something Rotten, was a 2008 ALA Quick Pick for Young Adult Readers, and was followed by a sequel, Something Wicked, in October 2008. His first middle grade novel, The Brooklyn Nine,was one of the ALA's Top Ten Sports Books for Youth, and a new middle grade baseball novel, Fantasy Baseball, debuted in Spring of 2011. His short fiction has appeared in Knoxville's Metropulse magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and in the anthologies Half-Minute Horrors and Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction, which benefits victims of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

As the first Artist in Residence at the American School in Japan in 2011, Alan spent six weeks teaching historical fiction-writing to middle school students in Tokyo, and he was the Thurber House Children's Writer in Residence in 2011, living and writing in James Thurber's attic for a month while working with young writers from all around the Columbus, Ohio area.

Alan lives with his wife Wendi and his daughter Jo in the high country of Western North Carolina, where he enjoys reading, eating pizza, and, perhaps not too surprisingly, watching baseball.

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Something Wicked - Chapter One

2010-01-04T01:14:00.009-05:00

History is full of guys who did stupid things for women. Paris started the Trojan War over Helen. Mark Antony abandoned Rome for Cleopatra. John Lennon gave up the Beatles for Yoko Ono. You can say I'm a dreamer, but they're not the only ones. Like my friend Joe Mackenzie: he was about to jump off a five-story building just to impress a girl.

"Come on, you wuss!" Mac's girlfriend Beth yelled. "If you don't jump off that that tower, you're not getting any more of this!" She lifted her sweater up over her head, showing her bra and her extraordinary breasts to Mac, me, Banks, and the five or six other people milling around Kangaroo Kevin's Bungee Jump-O-Rama in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. They actually inspired a small round of applause. I won't say what they did to me, but Beth's fun cushions certainly inspired Mac. With a Scottish war-cry he charged the end of the platform and jumped head first, screaming all the way down. His kilt opened like a daisy as he fell, and everyone saw his stamen.

"Woooohooooo!" Beth called.

"Oh, for the love of Dirk Diggler," I muttered. "Only Mac would go bungee jumping in a kilt without any underwear on." I chose to look at Beth instead. She had covered herself back up, but the image of those perfect breasts was burned into my retinas, like when you look into a light bulb too long and all you see for the next five minutes is the blinding afterglow of the filament.

"Get a good look, Horatio?" Beth asked.

"Of Mac, yes. If you could do that sweater thing again though I would very much appreciate it."

Bashful Banks looked away in case Beth took me up on it, which wasn't likely. Behind us, Mac's screams turned to laughter as he and all his dangling parts bounded into the air on the bungee cord. Beth proved she could multi-task, watching Mac bounce and giving me the finger at the same time.

"Not even if every other boy in the world was covered from head to toe in zits and back hair," she told me.

Beth was out of my league. She was so far out of my league, in fact, that she was the New York Yankees and I was the Weehawken 5- and 6-Year-Old Tee-Ball B Team. She was built like the top half of a lingerie model grafted onto the bottom half of a ballet dancer. She was also a freshman in college, and she suffered us high school juniors like a goddess among the muck-farmers. Beth's dad and Mac's dad were business partners, which was how they'd met, but beyond his male model good looks I'd never understood why she dated beneath herself.

Mac bungeed to a stop, and Beth ran to give him his earthly reward.

"Man, would you ever do that?" Banks asked.

"Not even for those marvelous Dolly Partons," I told him. "That boy is seriously whipped."

Banks sighed, and I wondered if he wasn't thinking right now that he'd be happy to be whipped if it meant having a girlfriend. Don't get me wrong-Wallace Banks was a great guy. He was also some distant relative of Mac's, which automatically let him run around with the king and queen of the Highland Games. But no amount of being nice or being Mac's second cousin once removed or whatever could ever really overcome wearing a white button-down short-sleeve shirt with a pen-filled pocket protector. He was also wearing a red tartan kilt and matching pompom beret, and just below his pasty knees he had on white woolen hose held up with ribbons. That we were in town to attend the Mount Birnam Scottish Highland Games made the getup somewhat excusable; that Banks wore this outfit on a daily basis made him a total geek-but a lovable one.

Mac came wobbling up with Beth wrapped around him. She was breathing harder than he was.

"I can't feel my legs!" he said.

"I think you've lost feeling in your brain too," I told him.

"There is a cushion," Mac said. We'd had this argument twenty minutes ago.

"It was completely safe. They wouldn't let you do it if you could get hurt!"

"Mac, you signed a waiver that said you wouldn't sue them if you died. Does that sound completely safe to you? And a four-foot tall inflatable bag wasn't going to do a whole lot of good if that cord snapped."

"You're just jealous, Horatio. You've got to try it! Woo! What a rush!"

Mac's knees went out from under him and Beth couldn't hold him up. I caught him, and Banks and I steered him toward a bench while Beth bounced away to buy him a bottle of water.

"The next time you go bungee jumping in a kilt, wear some underwear, will you?" I told him.

Mac grinned. "A real Scot wears naught beneath his kilt but a draught, Horatio."

"You're not a real Scot. You were born in Chattanooga."

"I'm Scottish. Besides," Mac said, flicking the end of Banks' kilt, "Beth likes me freeballing. Better access, you know?"

I held up my hands. "Too much information."

Where Banks' kilt was a fashion disaster, Mac managed to look studly in his skirt. It was blue and red and he wore it with a t-shirt that had the blue and white Scottish flag with words "X Marks the Scot" underneath. And Mac would have eaten haggis before wearing the dorky white socks and ribbons Banks wore; instead he showed off his tan, muscular legs in nothing more than a worn pair of hiking boots. But for a short mop of brown hair instead of long flowing locks he could have doubled for one of those beefcakes on the cover of a romance novel.

"Your dagger's showing," I told him.

Mac frowned and adjusted himself under his kilt.

"Not your metaphorical dagger, Spartacus. Your literal one." I pointed at his shoe. The little dagger he wore in his sock had come loose during the bungee jump. It was a Scottish thing; Banks had one tucked into his sock too.

"Your Sgian Dubh," Banks told him.

"Yeah. What he said."

Mac stuck the thing back in his sock. "Oh man, was Beth all over me when they unstrapped me. Just wait 'til tonight at the campground."

"Mac, you're always letting her make you do stupid things," I said.

"She's not making me do anything I don't already want to do."

"He's hooked on Beth Amphetamine," Banks said.

"Yeah. You need to kick the habit."

Beth came prancing up with a bottle of water. "What I need is a little more Beth," Mac said for her benefit. And his. She sat on his lap with a twirl of her skirt.

Of the four of us, I was the only one wearing pants.

"Gee," I said, "maybe someday I'll have a girlfriend who makes me jump off buildings too."

Beth played with Mac's hair. "One of those people who follows you around is talking to me again, Mac. Make him go away, will you?"

Mac lifted Beth off his lap and he stood, ignoring our sniping like always.

"We've only got an hour before we need to be up the mountain. What else do we want to do?"

"There's a Tartan Museum we could go see," said Banks.

Beth looked at him like he had just grown a third eyeball.

"We could maybe set fire to the 'Gooder than Grits' restaurant and hope it spreads to the rest of this tourist trap hell," I offered.

Beth started hopping up and down. "I want to go back to that fortune-teller's! The one we passed. What was it called?"

"Madame Hecate's?" I said.

"I want Mac to have his palm read!" Beth sang.

"Here, hold it out and I'll slap it," I told him. He held out his hands and I tried to smack them and make them red, but he pulled away in time.

"I don't want to go to some stupid psychic," Mac said. "Let's go get funnel cakes."

Beth pressed her boobs into Mac. "But I want you to have your fortune read, Mac."

"Okay, okay. We can come down the mountain and hit the Tartan Museum later," he told Banks. "And maybe we'll have time for a funnel cake before we go back. Right now we'll do Madame Hoodoo or whatever."

Beth took Mac by the arm and pulled him away.

"Meow," Banks said.

I made a sound like a whip cracking and we followed along down the strip.

Pigeon Forge sits like a scar in the earth, a gaping, brightly-colored wound festering in the Smoky Mountain sun. It's not a town; it's an eight lane abomination of go-cart tracks, mini-golf courses, and comedy barns, peopled with Elvis impersonators and neon orange fiberglass gorillas. The dappled green mountains in the background occasionally threaten to reclaim Pigeon Forge and engulf it like kudzu, but at the last minute some new developer will add another outlet mall or country music theater or pancake house and beat back the horrible darkness.

We found Madam Hecate's Psychic Readings wedged in between a funnel cake stall and an airbrush t-shirt hut. A sign in the window said, "Palms Read While You Wait."

Mac pushed his way inside and a bell tinkled, I suppose so Madame Hecate wouldn't have to waste any of her considerable psychic talents on predicting our arrival. The little room was decorated in a combination of Late Victorian and Pier One. The walls were covered with old black and white portraits in gilded frames, and funky beaded lampshades draped with red handkerchiefs did what little they could to give the place some atmosphere. A plug-in fountain spewing clouds of dry ice bubbled in the corner, and in the center of the room stood a small table where it looked like someone had been playing Solitaire with tarot cards.

"Excellent!" said Beth.

Something brushed my leg and I nearly jumped.

"That is Graymalkin, my, how you say? Familiar," said a voice.

The gray cat certainly was getting familiar with my black Converse. Meanwhile Madame Hecate, the source of the creepy accent, ran a hand up the wooden doorframe on the other side of the room. I think she was trying to be mysterious. The fortune-teller was round like a crystal ball, and had her black hair tied back in a yellow bandana. She wore a long flowing gown that shushed as she shifted, and in the strange light I could see she had whiskers on her chin. It wasn't so much disgusting as embarrassing; Madame Hecate could grow a better beard than I could.

She slid her hand back down the doorframe then suddenly jerked it away.

"Ach!"

"What's wrong?" Beth asked.

The woman sucked a finger. "It is nothing. A splinter. I prick my thumb."

"Too bad she didn't see that coming," I muttered.

"Who comes to see Madame Hecate?"

At her invitation we sat in folding chairs around the table, and Mac gave her our names.

"'Horatio' your name is?" she said after I'd been introduced.

"Seriously," I told her, "you of all people do not want to go there."

"I want you to read Mac's palm," Beth told her.

"Is twenty dollars for full reading," said Madame Hecate. I snorted, but Beth already had a twenty out on the table. I shook my head. P.T. Barnum was still right.

In the only real magic she was going to perform that day, Madame Hecate palmed the twenty and made it disappear. Then she took Mac's hand in her own and began tracing the lines on his palm.

"Ah, yes, your fate line is strong," she said. "Very strong. But here-the heart and head line are fused. You think and act at same time, yes?"

"That's true!" said Beth. "He's very impulsive."

"Ah," she said. "And I see you are here for . . . some kind of festival. A competition."

"Well, kind of, yeah," Mac said.

"The . . . Highland Games?" she asked.

"What gave it away," I asked, "the kilts or the funny hat?"

"Hey," Banks said.

"A festival, yes, but you are not competing?"

"I didn't make the clan team," Mac confessed.

I had to admit, the woman's act was good. She certainly had Mac, Beth and Banks snowed. They watched her work Mac's palm like she was revealing the hidden secrets of the universe.

"But make the team you will," she told him. "And not only will you compete, you will win!"

"You mean the Highland Decathlon? I win it?"

"You're not even in it," I reminded him. To Hecate I said, "He missed the cut."

"For you, fate is sealed. You will compete, and you will win," Hecate said, ignoring me again. "And you will be king of the mountain!"

Beth gasped in delight and hugged Mac around his shoulders.
Mac nodded, happy with his fate. "King of the mountain. I could get used to that."

"What about me?" asked Banks. He reached into his sporran-a traditional Scottish waist pouch that was the ancestor of the fanny pack-and pulled out another twenty.

"Oh, not you too," I said.

Banks blushed and shrugged, but he still handed over an Andy Jackson.

Madame Hecate took his palm and gave it the same treatment.

"You, your life line is strong, but you are not athlete," she said. I huffed at her mastery of the obvious, but apparently no one was listening to me now. "For you, there is other competition? Music, perhaps?"

Oh, she was good all right. That had been a complete guess, but it was spot on.

"The bagpipes," Banks offered. "I play the bagpipes. There's this really important tournament, and the winner gets-"

"You are lesser than your friend, but greater," Madame Hecate told him. "I see you not so happy, yet much happier."

Banks frowned. "I don't-"

"While that one will be king of mountain, it is you who will own mountain."

"Me?" Banks asked. "Own Mount Birnam you mean?"

For all the laughing they'd done about coming here, Mac and Banks were deadly serious now. Beth crossed her arms and frowned.

"Is all I see." She turned to me. "I read your fortune, Horatio?"

I loaded up a short laugh with derision and disbelief and let her have it.

"Right," I said. "Let me guess. You see a crease bisecting my life line, which means I'll soon have some kind of big test or trial. And when I get to this great, vague, unnamed challenge, I should just listen to my heart, right?"

She took my palm in her hand and I rolled my eyes. I got a cold shiver though, like the temperature in the room had just dropped ten degrees. I tried not to let anybody see me shake.

"Heart line is strong, yes, but head line is stronger. You think, think, think, which is good," she told me. "But this time you will listen too much to heart. It is head you must learn to hear again."

She was right about me thinking too much. I almost started to believe she had some kind of power, then shook it off. Of course she knew I used my head more than my heart-I'd been the only one playing the skeptic. As for the cold shiver, she'd probably turned up the air conditioning when she heard us come in.

"I hope you're not expecting to get paid for that one," I told her.

"No. That one is free," she told me. "But you will be back. Then you will pay me."

"Right," I said. "Don't bet on it."

We sat through Beth's fortune-something vague about having gall for milk and a snake under a flower-and the mystic rose from the table. "Madame Hecate is tired now. Must, how you say? Recharge batteries."

"Wait, how do you know I'll-" Mac started to ask, but Madame Hecate disappeared into the next room.

"Happy now?" I asked them. "Sixty bucks for five minutes of flimflam. The next time you jokers want somebody to blow hot air up your kilts, let me know. I'll be happy to take your money."

Nobody was listening. Mac and Banks had fortune and glory in their eyes, and Beth was no doubt lost in some fantasy where she was wearing a tiara. We filed back outside and made for Mac's SUV. For a time, everyone was lost in their own daydreams.

Mac gave Banks a punch in the arm. "Hey cousin, you're going to own the mountain!"

It woke Banks up and he smiled. "And, you're going to be king of the games!"

"And I'm going to be queen," Beth said.

"Right," I said. "Which is all just about as likely as me wearing a kilt."

They chuckled, but I could tell they didn't think it was funny. As we climbed into the car for the trip up the mountain, I saw Beth squeeze Mac's hand and pull him down to whisper in his ear.

If I'd been paying attention then, really listening with my head and not my heart, I might have heard it. It was the whisper of something coming.

Something wicked.

______________________________________________

Excerpted from Something Wicked by Alan Gratz by permission of Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Putnam. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Something Wicked

2010-01-04T01:02:00.018-05:00

Something wicked this way comes, and only Horatio Wilkes can stop it.

A Scottish Highland Fair turns foul when Horatio discovers the games' founder, Duncan MacRae, dead in his tent. All signs point to Duncan's son as the murderer, but Horatio's not so sure--especially when his friend Mac and Mac's girlfriend Beth start acting like they own the place. And that's just one of many mysteries: Like why are Mac's and Beth's fathers acting so suspiciously? What's the deal with the goth-punk bagpiper corps threatening Horatio's friend Banks? Who is the hot girl spying on everyone? And why, exactly, are there men in kilts tossing telephone poles around?

Horatio will need all his snark and smarts--and maybe a little amazing grace--to thwart the fate a road-side psychic laid out for him and his friends. Not that Horatio believes in that kind of thing anyway . . .

Kilts, Celts, and killers: the sequel to Something Rotten is "Macbeth" as you've never seen it before!

Dial Books | October 2008 | Ages 14 and Up
Available in hardcover and paperback

Best Children's Books of 2008 Christian Science Monitor

Nominated for:
2009 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Children's Book Award
2010-2011 South Carolina Children's Book Award

"If young adult literature is the new Rock ’n’ Roll, as some suggest, then author Alan Gratz is Frank Zappa, and his smart, droll remakes of Shakespeare’s tragic hits--Hamlet and Macbeth--should win new converts to the old bard’s gems."

Christian Science Monitor

"Replete with cell phones and up-to-date references (Dance Dance Revolution, Michael Vick), this suspenseful mystery will work even for those unfamiliar with the Shakespeare play, and humor abounds as well."

Kliatt Magazine

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Something Rotten - Chapter One

2010-01-03T00:23:00.005-05:00

Denmark, Tennessee, stank. Bad. Like dead fish fricasseed in sewer water. I said as much to my friend Hamilton Prince as we rode in his 4x4.

"You get used to it," he told me. "Just think of it as the smell of money."

And here I had always thought money would smell better.

The Elsinore Paper Plant was the source of the stink, and the money behind the Prince family fortune. Elsinore makes the paper that you use in your printer, the paper you read the sports scores on, and the paper you wipe yourself with. They make just about every kind of paper there is except the kind money is printed on, but enough of that comes rolling back in that they don't have to bother. It was also the first place Hamilton wanted to take me when I arrived in Denmark for my month-long summer visit. I wasn't real excited to go watch paper being made, but Hamilton was looking for any excuse to get out of the house and I didn't say no.

I nodded at an open beer in the cup holder. "One for the road?"

"It's just one, and we're not going far." He nodded over his shoulder. "Root beer for you in the cooler."

We hadn't talked since I had called a week ago to see if my visit was still on, but Hamilton was quiet and I let him stew. He had a lot going on, what with his dad dead and his uncle marrying his mom and all. I wanted to ask about everything, but I didn't want to push it.

A light drizzle kicked up outside, and Hamilton threw on the wipers as we turned down a little access road. A sign told me we were headed toward the Elsinore Paper Plant, but my nose could have told me just as well. The main complex was far enough away from Hamilton's house that you couldn't see it, but not far enough away that you couldn't smell it. Maybe it was once, but not now. The paper plant had been owned and operated by Hamilton's family for generations. His dad was CEO when he died, and now his uncle Claude ran the company. Someday Hamilton would run it too. I thought it must be nice to have a six-figure salary waiting, and I said so.

"I hate it," said Hamilton. "It's like a prison. My own personal prison."

Hamilton's always been a little on the melodramatic side. It was a song and dance I'd heard before and I'd never believed it, but the tone of his voice this time gave me second thoughts.

At first I thought it was a trick of the foggy windshield, but as we drove up to the security gate outside the plant I saw a girl standing by the road holding a sign. Her hair was flat from the rain and her face was smudged from wiping away the drizzle, but you could still tell she was gorgeous. Her Windbreaker broke in all the right places and her jeans hugged her in ways they don't teach you in kindergarten. Hamilton pulled up beside her and ran the window down.

"What are you doing?" he asked her.

"Protesting." She stuck her sign in his face. It said: "Elsinore Paper Poisons the Copenhagen River."

"Give me a break," Hamilton said.

"Denmark's been giving you guys a break for a hundred years. It's time for Elsinore to come clean. That river is so polluted, it would kill you to drink it." The rain was coming a little harder now, but the girl was undaunted.

"Nobody's going to see you here," Hamilton told her.

She held her sign over her head to block the rain. "You saw me," she said.

I liked this girl already. "Hey," I called to her. I pulled off my dad's old St. Louis ball cap and tossed it through the open window at her. She caught it with her free hand and didn't let it fall into the mud, which I appreciated.

The girl pulled her hair back into a ponytail and slipped on the hat, and I saw I was wrong. She wasn't gorgeous; she was stunning.

Her head now covered, the girl brought her sign back down in Hamilton's face. He shot me a nasty look and gunned the 4x4 on through the plant gates.

"You don't have to encourage her," he said.

"Friend of yours?" I asked.

"Her name's Olivia. She's a townie."

I glared at Hamilton, but he ignored me. We both went to an expensive private boarding school called Wittenberg Academy in Knoxville, Tennessee, and when you reduced the school to its lowest common denominators you got two groups-the boarders and the townies. I'm a townie. I'm from Knoxville. I go to school at Wittenberg, but I don't live in the dorms like the rest of the students. There are twenty-three of us townies. We know one another, and everybody knows us. It costs us less to go to Wittenberg-much less-and if it didn't, most of us couldn't afford to go. Sometimes the rich kids won't have anything to do with us, but Hamilton had never been like that. That's why I didn't like the way he called Olivia a townie, like she was beneath him or something. It wasn't like Hamilton, and it pissed me off.

"You mean the Olivia you used to write letters to and call every other night on the dorm phone?" I asked him.

"Yeah," he said. He kept his eyes on the driveway. "I kind of stopped calling. I think she might be mad."

"You think?"

Hamilton shot me another look, but I dodged it. I have to admit, I was a little sore. Part of it was the townie thing, and part of it was the way Hamilton just dropped girls, like there were always more waiting in line. Worse, there always was someone waiting. Hamilton's got that sort of blond Nordic swimmer's build girls dig. Good chin, hard nose. Dresses sharp. He's well-read, well-bred, and well-heeled. Everybody loves him. Everybody but his ex-girlfriends.

But I'd been friends with Hamilton long enough not to be a player hater. He was the kind of guy who could have easily looked down his nose at somebody like me, but he didn't. We'd bonded on the baseball field our freshman year, and I'd been Hamilton's unofficial third roommate ever since, using his room as my base of operations while I was on campus.

Hamilton parked the car. "Come on, we have to check in at the security station." He grabbed his beer and dashed through the rain to a small concrete building. I took a deep breath and reminded myself (again) that Hamilton wasn't himself right now, and I left my root beer and my attitude in the car and followed him.

Inside, one of the security guards was practically hugging Hamilton.

"Why haven't you come to see us since you got back?" the guard asked him. The patch sewn on his rent-a-cop uniform said Bernard in cursive.

Hamilton shrugged. "You know. Busy."

Bernard nodded sympathetically.

"We was real sorry to hear about your dad. He was good people," the other guard said. His patch said his name was Frank.

"Not like that uncle of yours," Bernard mumbled. Frank elbowed him.

"Say what you want, guys. You're among friends," Hamilton told them. "Speaking of, this is my best friend from school. His name's Horatio Wilkes."

We shook hands. From the looks on their faces, Hamilton's introduction was all it took to earn me their lifelong devotion.

"Should we tell him?" Bernard asked.

Thunder rumbled outside. It fit with the sudden chill in the air.

"Tell me what?" Hamilton asked.

Frank looked around, as though there might be spies in the little ten-by-ten-foot room we were in. He beckoned us into the monitor room, where a dozen screens flickered with security camera images of the Elsinore Paper Plant and Hamilton's home. One of them showed the front gate where Olivia still stood, holding her protest sign and wearing my baseball cap and looking pretty.

Bernard pulled an old coffee tin off a high shelf and withdrew an unlabeled videocassette. "We prob'ly should've shown you this as soon as you got back from school," he said, "but like you said, there was other stuff going on."

"You guys got Olivia on tape half-naked or something?" Hamilton joked, trying to break the strange tension in the room.

Frank gave Hamilton a weak smile and started to say something, but then just popped the tape in the cassette player instead.

The central monitor in the bank of screens flickered with static, then adjusted itself. It became an image of the inside of the plant. A huge machine thrummed in the background, rolling acres of paper onto huge reels. The digital time stamp at the bottom gave the date as more than two months ago.

"This is thrilling," Hamilton said. "It's almost as exciting as-"

Hamilton's father walked into the picture.

"-watching paint . . . dry," Hamilton finished. He sat down and stared. It had to be a shock. The last time Hamilton saw his father alive was during Christmas break. He hadn't talked to his father for two months after that, and then one day the headmaster pulled him out of English and told him his dad was dead.

The weird thing was, this didn't look anything like Hamilton's father. The last time I had seen him he was middle-aged, with sandy brown hair and a smooth complexion. The man on the screen had snow white hair and a face like a walnut. He looked like he was a hundred years old, but it was Mr. Prince, sure enough. There was a sad, hollow look in his eyes that I knew but couldn't place.

Hamilton turned to look at me, and then I knew where I'd seen it before.

"Hamilton," his father said, startling all of us, even the guards.

"Dad? What happened to your face? Your hair?" Hamilton said to the ghost in the machine. For some reason it didn't seem crazy for him to be talking to a videotape.

"Hamilton, if the boys show you this tape, it means something bad has happened. Something very bad. It means I've been murdered."

Frank and Bernard seemed to shrink away, and Hamilton and I were alone with the ghost of his father.

"It was poison," his father said. "Slowly, over the course of weeks. Maybe months." He coughed hard. "I should have told you, I know, but I didn't want you to worry. Same with your mother. I-I saw all kinds of doctors. Got treatment. I thought I was going to get better." He coughed again. It was worse this time, and I could see Hamilton wince.

Hamilton's dad's eyes drooped. "Never knew how the stuff was getting into my system. But now, now I think somebody did this to me. On purpose." He hacked again, spitting up little bits of phlegm and blood. "I can't prove anything, but-"

Off camera, a door banged closed. Hamilton's father looked over his shoulder, then whispered quickly into the camera.

"It was all because of the paper plant." He broke off, coughing again. "You think you know someone. You trust them, and then-"

A shadow fell across his face. Someone stood near Hamilton's father, still off camera.

"Hello Claude," Hamilton's father said. "Taking more dioxin samples? I, uh, there was something wrong with this security camera. Just checking it out." He looked back at the camera. "I'm sure if my son was here, he could fix it."

Hamilton put a hand to the screen, but the image had already cut to black.

"I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it," I said.

Hamilton turned. "I believe it. And I know exactly who did it."

"Who?"

"My uncle Claude."

Frank and Bernard shuffled around, trying very hard to be somewhere else and not succeeding.

"You don't know that," I told him.

"Dad practically said as much! He said his name!"

"That's just who interrupted him, that doesn't mean-"

"He took over the company when Dad died," said Hamilton. "And the bastard married my mother." Hamilton spoke through his teeth. "He married my mother."

Sometimes I get stubborn, and this was one of those times. "Look, Hamilton, I don't know what this thing is between you and your uncle, but you can't just go jumping to conclusions. You can't be sure it was him."

Hamilton stepped away and wouldn't look me in the face.

"No. No, I guess you're right. We don't know for sure," he said, mocking my cautiousness. "But until we do, not one of us can breathe a word about this. To anyone."

Frank and Bernard inched out from among the filing cabinets and nodded.

"Why not?" I asked.

"It's family business," Hamilton told me. "Princes don't air their dirty laundry."

"Are you crazy? We need to go to the police with this."

"No. Not a word. To anyone. Swear."

"We swear, Mr. Prince," Frank and Bernard said, almost in unison.

Hamilton fixed me with a stare. "Swear."

Right then and there, I made a mistake. If I hadn't, I might have saved us a lot of trouble. Maybe even kept somebody from getting shot. But nobody ever accused me of being a genius.

"All right already. I swear." I felt like a third grader sealing a deal with a spit-shake.

"You may not be sure in your head, Horatio, but I know for sure here," Hamilton said. He pointed to his heart.

On a monitor behind him, I saw Olivia holding her poster at the gate. I could still read the words: "Elsinore Paper Poisons the Copenhagen River."

One thing was for sure. Something was rotten in Denmark, Tennessee, and it wasn't just the stink from the paper plant.

______________________________________________

Excerpted from Something Rotten by Alan Gratz by permission of Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Putnam. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Something Rotten

2010-01-03T00:03:00.014-05:00

Denmark, Tennessee stinks. Bad. The smell hits Horatio Wilkes the moment he pulls into town to visit his best friend, Hamilton Prince. And it's not just the paper plant and the polluted Copenhagen River that's stinking up Denmark: Hamilton's father has been poisoned and the killer is still at large.

Why? Because nobody believes Rex Prince was murdered. Nobody except Horatio and Hamilton. Now they need to find the killer before someone else dies, but it won't be easy. It seems like everyone's a suspect. Hamilton's hot, tree-hugging ex-girlfriend Olivia Mendelsohn is determined to clean up the river-and the Prince family that's been polluting it for decades. Hamilton's mom, Trudy Prince, just married her husband's brother, Claude, and signed over half of the plant and profits. And then there's Ford N. Branff, Trudy's old flame, who's waging a hostile takeover of Elsinore Paper.

Motive, means, opportunity-they all have them. But who among them has committed murder most foul? If high school junior Horatio Wilkes can just get past the smell, he might get to the bottom of all this.

Dial Books | October 2007 | Ages 14 and Up
Available in hardcover and paperback

ALA 2008 Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers

YALSA 2010 Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults: Twists on the Tale

2008 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Children's Book Award Finalist

Nominated for:
2009-2010 North Carolina School Library Media Association Young Adult Book Award

"Students who have slogged through Hamlet will enjoy this witty, modern retelling of the old story through Horatio's point of view . . . . This book is good fun and might make an excellent reward for those who score 'A's on their Hamlet tests."

Kliatt Magazine

"Gratz is cornering the niche market of novels containing dissimilar topics. Here he combines Hamlet and hardboiled detective pulp . . . . [T]his well-crafted mystery has appeal for readers familiar with both Raymond Chandler's novels and Shakespeare's masterpiece."

Kirkus Reviews

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Samurai Shortstop - Samurai Wisdom

2010-01-02T21:00:00.007-05:00

Click the link after your favorite line below to link to a printable samurai wisdom mini-poster. (Requires Adobe PDF Reader.)

A little foolishness, enough to enjoy life, and a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do. (Osho) click here

Go to the battlefield firmly confident of victory, and you will come home with no wounds whatever. (Uesugi Kenshin) click here

Learning is to a man as the leaves and branches are to a tree. (Takeda Shingen) click here

A truly righteous man does good deeds without letting his beneficiary know of his deeds. (Dogen) click here

If a person is determined to accomplish something without fear of the outcome, anything is possible. (Miyamoto Musashi) click here

True victory is not defeating an enemy. True victory gives love and changes the enemy's heart. (Morihei Ueshiba) click here

Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something. (Morihei Ueshiba) click here

Do nothing which is of no use. (Miyamoto Musashi) click here

Perceive that which cannot be seen with the eye. (Miyamoto Musashi) click here

The secret to catching a ball lies with the willow swaying in the wind. (Shiki Masaoka) click here

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Samurai Shortstop - Make Miso Soup

2010-01-02T20:00:00.011-05:00

When the Ichiko students in Samurai Shortstop protest the terrible cafeteria food, Headmaster Kinoshita responds by firing the kitchen staff and putting the boys in charge. From then on, the boys are responsible for preparing the food, serving it, and cleaning up after themselves.

The first dish Toyo, Futoshi, and Junzo make on their own is miso soup, a dish so common in Japanese cooking it's eaten at almost every meal. A simple miso soup and white rice make up the traditional Japanese breakfast. At other meals, more complex miso recipes may be used, including ingredients like noodles, seaweed, tofu, or any combination of vegetables.

Want to try miso soup for yourself? Here's a recipe for Junzo-style Miso Soup, along with illustrated directions! I've included links to wikipedia.org and to foodnetwork.com's excellent online food encyclopedia so you can learn more about unfamiliar ingredients.

Junzo's Miso Soup Recipe

(makes four servings)

4 cups of cold water
5 inches of konbu (kelp)
1/2 cup of bonito flakes
3 tablespooons of miso paste
4 shiitake mushrooms, sliced
2 tablespoons of green onion, chopped

To make miso soup, first you must make the dashi, or soup stock, from which all miso soup is made. Many Japanese cooks will make up large quantities of dashi and freeze it, heating up as much as is needed to make each meal. We're going to make enough for four servings.

Remove a piece of konbu and clean it with a damp cloth, making sure to remove any sand or salt still stuck to it. (It did come from the ocean, after all.)

Heat the konbu in a pan with four cups of cold water. What you're doing now is flavoring the stock. (You're not going to eat that big piece of kelp.)

Just before the water begins to boil, turn off the heat and remove the konbu. Be careful not to let the konbu boil! It will get slimy and bitter, and no one likes that.

Bring the water back to a boil, and sprinkle the bonito flakes over the top. Turn the heat off again, and let the flakes sit on the water until they sink.

If you have a cat, you will receive a visit about the time you open the fish flakes.

When the last bonito flake has sunk, strain the water to remove the flakes. We tried feeding the flakes to the cat, but apparently she just likes the smell.

After you've strained the flakes out, what's left is dashi - your soup stock. It will smell like tuna fish at this point, which makes sense since bonito means tuna.

Bring the dashi to a boil again and add some of the hot soup stock to a bowl with your miso paste.

Use a spoon to soften and stir the miso paste until it forms a thick liquid.

While your miso softens, add your shiitake mushrooms to the boiling soup stock. Boil the stock until the mushrooms are warmed all the way through.

If you would like to vary the recipe, now is the time to do it. Just remember that if you use any hard vegetables, they should be cooked for ten minutes or so.

The mushrooms shouldn't take more than five minutes. Take one out and taste it.

When the mushrooms are cooked through, turn the heat off. Mix in your dissolved miso paste.

Serve it up...

...sprinkle it with scallions, and it's done!

Bon appetit!

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Samurai Shortstop - My Hanko

2010-01-02T19:42:00.007-05:00

If I've signed your book, you most likely have a red image with Japanese characters stamped over my signature. The stamp is called a hanko. In Japan, all official documents are signed with such stamps, so I thought it would be fun to have one for my book signings.

The good folks at The Japanese Connection sell both hand-made and digital hankos. I originally ordered a hand-made hanko from a craftsman whose family has been in the hanko-carving business since the Meiji era. Unfortunately, the craftsman's wife became very ill and he was unable to fill my order. Instead, The Japanese Connection graciously sent me a digital version of my signature, which I then had made into a stamp for my signings.

Japanese may be written using one of four ways: hiragana, katakana, kanji, or romaji. Romaji is the Romanization of Japanese, or, in other words, Japanese words written out in the English alphabet, like konnichiwa (hello) or sayonara (goodbye).

Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, which means that each character represents a unique syllable. Hiragana is the most common form of writing in Japan, while katakana is used to write words that were added to the Japanese language along the way, like "television" or "America."

Kanji are the most complicated of all Japanese characters, and the kind used when creating hanko. Kanji are characters that stand for words or concepts, not letters or syllables. Many kanji can be pronounced as a single syllable though, and these characters may be strung together to sound out a person's last name.

For example, my last name, Gratz, would be pronounced "Gu-ra-tsu" by Japanese speakers. For each of those syllables, there are a variety of kanji that mean different things but are all pronounced the same way. At least six kanji, for instance, can be pronunced "gu," and each means something different: tool, allegory or fable, fox, wild swan, jar, and rainbow.

Many Japanese are fond of word puzzles, and there is a long tradition in creating hanko of choosing kanji that reveal a special meaning or significance to the signer. I was given a list of the various meanings each of the syllables in my last name might convey, and I chose the characters on the right. Can you guess the hidden significance of the kanji in my hanko?

Since Samurai Shortstop makes me a published author, I thought I could be "the trumpet through which the story passes."

Very profound, don't you think? ;-)

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Samurai Shortstop - History

2010-01-02T18:07:00.016-05:00

Some of the things that happen in Samurai Shortstop are based on actual events. While almost all the characters are fictional, Ichiko, the First Higher School of Tokyo, was a real place. Read on to learn more about this fascinating time and place in Japanese history...

The Meiji Restoration

When American Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his steam-driven "Black Fleet" into Yokohama harbor in 1853, life in Japan was turned upside down. The ruling Shogunate, which had managed to keep almost everyone from the west out of Japan for nearly three hundred years, was forced to open the country to Western ideas and culture. In the turmoil that followed, a group of powerful samurai overthrew the Shogun and put Emperor Meiji in power.

Meiji realized three centuries of isolation had left Japan far behind its Western neighbors in scientific advancement, and he and his advisors hurried to catch the nation up to speed. Almost overnight, Japan went from the middle ages to the modern era. Streetcars and locomotives were a radical shock to a nation that still walked and rode horses. Inventions and advancements that were discovered slowly in the West appeared all at once in Japan-telephones, electric light bulbs, skyscrapers, gas heating, plumbing, movie theaters, even baseball, were all imported at the same time.

Baseball in Japan

Still a relatively new sport in America, baseball was introduced into Japan in the 1870s by a young American named Horace Wilson, who taught history and English at a Tokyo school. The sport quickly caught on, and Ichiko, the First Higher School of Tokyo, soon became one of the new sport's powerhouses. While baseball programs like Ichiko's were later to have professional coaches, many were originally organized and run by the students themselves, like Toyo's team.

Throughout my story, I incorporated fictionalized versions of several real-life incidents that happened in Japan during the 1890's. In 1891, in front of thousands of baseball-mad fans, an American did in fact climb over the sacred Wall of the Soul at Ichiko. He too was attacked by Ichiko students, and the incident really did damage Japanese-American relations at the time. No goodwill baseball game was actually played, but after several rounds of official apology, the matter was settled.

Though my gaijin Shimbashi Athletic Club is fictional, the Ichiko nine did play a team of American workers from Yokohama in 1896, and that First Higher team also won by the incredible score of 29-4. It was a huge moment for a nation struggling to prove they could play on equal terms with the other nations of the world, and the victory was written about in newspapers from one end of Japan to the other.

The Ichiko team went on to defeat the Americans twice more, by the equally ridiculous scores of 32-9 and 22-6. Ichiko was only defeated when the Americans recruited a professional baseball player from a U.S. Navy ship stationed in Yokohama harbor. Even then, the final score was 14-12.

Today, baseball is by far Japan's favorite sport. The annual National High School Baseball Summer Tournament, begun in 1915 by the Asahi Shimbun, is one of the world's largest amateur sporting events. Dozens of teams from across Japan play a single-elimination tournament in front of almost one million fans, and many millions more stay home from work to watch the televised games. The competition is fierce, but boys who persevere and win are regarded as national heroes, and often go on to play baseball in Japan's major leagues.

Ichiko high school closed its doors on March 24, 1950 during an overhaul of the Japanese educational system. The campus is now used by Tokyo University.

The picture that started everything for me. The man throwing out the first pitch is Ryuhei Murayama, president of the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese daily paper, in 1915. The contrasts of the era are apparent in the men's clothes - Murayama wears a traditional kimono and sandals, while the man behind him wears a tuxedo and top hat.

An Ichiko baseball game around the turn of the last century. Note the industrial smoke stacks--a then very recent addition to the Tokyo skyline.

Ichiko's formidible front gate. These doors were closed during an infamous game between First Higher School and the American Meiji School, prompting an American fan of Meiji to climb Ichiko's Sacred Wall of the Soul. The American was injured in the ensuing chaos, damaging Japanese/American relations.

This scorecard is an actual record of a game between Ichiko, the First Higher School of Tokyo, and the Yokohama Amateur Foreigners Club on June 5, 1896. Though this was not their first meeting, the score of 32-9 is indicative of Ichiko's awesome early displays against the gaijin. The numbers in the columns at the right and bottom are runs scored, not hits. By the time the Americans scored their first run in the fifth inning, Ichiko already had a twelve run lead.

Ichiko students walk the campus.

The Ichiko clocktower.

A typical dorm room in Independence Hall.

An Ichiko tradition: the celebratory bonfire.

The Ichiko school cap.

The Ichiko school flag.

The Ichiko school crest.

(All pictures courtesy of The Ichiko Alumni Club)

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Samurai Shortstop - Chapter One

2010-01-02T17:44:00.016-05:00

Chapter One

Tokyo, Japan - 1890

Toyo watched carefully as his uncle prepared to kill himself.

Before dawn, he had swept and cleaned his uncle's favorite shrine, down to polishing the small mirror that hung on a post at its center. When that was done, he carefully arranged new tatami mats on the dirt floor. Everything had to be perfect for Uncle Koji's seppuku.

Now Toyo sat in the damp grass outside the shrine as his uncle moved to the center of the mats. Koji's face was a mask of calm. He wore a ceremonial white kimono with brilliant red wings - the wings he usually wore only into battle. Toyo's uncle was clean shaven and recently bathed, and he wore his hair in a tight top-knot like the samurai of old. Koji knelt on the tatami mats and crossed his legs, keeping his hands on his hips and his arms akimbo.

Toyo's father crouched next to Koji. Though older than his brother, Toyo's father was slightly smaller than Koji, with a long, thin face and a sharp nose like a katana blade. They used to joke that Koji's nose had been as straight as his older brother's, until it had been flattened one too many times in judo practice. But today was no day for jokes. In fact, Toyo couldn't remember either of them laughing for a long time.

Toyo's father wore a simple gray kimono with the family swords tucked neatly into his sash. The sight was strange to Toyo. For as long as he could remember, the katana and wakizashi had been retired to a place of honor in their home. Carrying them outside like this was illegal, though Toyo's father would soon be using the swords to carry out an order signed by the Emperor himself.

Koji bowed to Toyo, the ceremony's only witness. Returning the bow from his knees, Toyo touched his head to the ground to show his great respect for his uncle. His father nodded, and Toyo stood and picked up a small wooden stand supporting a short sword about as long as his forearm. The point and the edge of the blade were razor sharp. Toyo strained to keep his legs from shaking as he entered the shrine. Kneeling a little clumsily, he bowed low to the ground once more to present the short wakizashi to his uncle.

When he felt the weight of the sword lift from the stand, Toyo looked up at Koji. His uncle held the wakizashi cradled in his hands as though it were a newborn child. Uncle Koji closed his eyes, touched the flat part of the blade to his forehead, and set the wakizashi in front of him on the mat. He gave a quick smile then for Toyo, the same grin he always flashed right before getting them into trouble.

Instead of making him feel better, the grin deepened Toyo's sense of panic. He didn't want to lose his uncle. Throughout all the preparations he had fought to focus on something else - anything else. His first day of school at Ichiko tomorrow, his coming sixteenth birthday, even baseball. But when this ceremony was finished his uncle would be dead and gone. Forever. None of his strength, none of his compassion, none of his spirit would remain.

Toyo backed away, unable to meet Koji's eyes.

"For my part in the samurai uprising at Ueno Park," Toyo's uncle said officially, "I, Koji Shimada, have been sentenced to die. The Emperor, in his divine graciousness, has granted me the honor of committing seppuku rather than die at the hands of his executioner. I beg those present here today to bear witness to my death."

Koji bowed low, and his brother and Toyo bowed in return.

Toyo's uncle slowly untied the sash around his waist and loosened the kimono wrapped underneath. Pulling the stiff shirt down off his shoulders, Koji exposed his smooth round belly. He tucked the arms of the kimono under his legs, which made him lean forward. Toyo knew this was to help his uncle pitch forward if he should pass out during the ceremony. It would make his father's job much easier.

Uncle Koji closed his eyes and began the poem he had written for the occasion of his death:

"In the darkness after the earthquake,
The Flowers of Edo burn bright and fast
Only to be replaced in the morning
By the light of a new day."

When he was finished, the samurai opened his eyes and put his hands on his stomach, almost as if he were saying goodbye to it. Then Koji took the short sword in his hands and turned the blade toward his gut.

"Brother," Koji said, "please wait until I have finished my task."

"Hai," Toyo's father nodded.

Koji looked past Toyo then, past the little path to the shrine, past the line of trees that circled the clearing. Whether he saw something in the distance or not Toyo didn't know, but the faraway look stayed in Uncle Koji's eyes as he plunged the wakizashi into his belly. Blood covered his hands and his jaw locked tight, but Koji held his grip on the sword, dragging it across his stomach from left to right. Toyo fought the urge to look away. To honor his promise to bear witness, he forced himself to watch as his uncle's insides spilled onto the floor of the Shinto shrine, the body deflating like a torn rice sack.

When Koji had sliced all the way across his stomach, he turned the wakizashi in the wound and pulled it diagonally up through his chest. Never flinching, his eyes remained steady and resolute. The knife reached his heart, and with the last of his strength Koji pulled the wakizashi out, laid it by his side, and fell forward on his hands and knees.

Toyo's father sprang to his feet, raising the long katana blade high over his head.

"Heeeeeeeeeeeiaaaaaaaaaaaa!" Sotaro cried. He brought the blade down with blinding speed and chopped Koji's head clean off his body.

The head rolled to a stop inches from Toyo, the eyes staring up at him. Toyo refused to let his father see his fear. As his father wiped the blood from the katana with a piece of paper, Toyo commanded his legs to stand.

"Did you watch carefully?" his father asked.

"Hai," Toyo said.

"You observed precisely how it was done?"

"Hai, father."

"Good," Sotaro Shimada said to his son. "Soon you will do the same for me."

______________________________________________

Excerpted from Samurai Shortstop by Alan Gratz by permission of Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Putnam. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Copyright © 2005 by Alan Gratz

Learn more about Ichiko and Japanese baseball

See my "hanko," my Japanese signature stamp
Print a samurai wisdom poster
Make miso soup
Download the Samurai Shortstop Readers Guide (PDF)
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Samurai Shortstop

2010-01-02T17:14:00.027-05:00

When its ruling Shogun warlords were overthrown in 1867, Japan awoke from a medieval dream to find itself three centuries behind the rest of the world. Almost overnight, Japan transformed itself from a feudal society into an industrial nation. Black suits replaced kimonos, trains replaced horses, and salarymen replaced samurai.

Two decades later, 16-year-old Toyo Shimada is concerned only with surviving his first day at First Higher School of Tokyo and making the Ichiko baseball team. But Toyo is suddenly introduced to bushido - the way of the warrior - when his favorite uncle refuses to accept the modern world and commits ritual suicide.

Now Toyo must prove there is a place for his family's samurai values in the new Japan - or watch his father follow his uncle's path. Toyo finds a perfect match with bushido and baseball - but will his father ever accept an American game that stands for everything he despises?

Dial Books | May 2006 | Ages 12 and Up

Available in hardcover and paperback

"Fast moving, culturally respectful, and flat-out engrossing, this should lead off the next book talk on sports or historical fiction."

- Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books,
Starred Review

"A memorable chronicle of boys' inhumanity to boys, and a testament to enduring values in a time of social change."

- Booklist, Starred Review

ALA 2007 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults

2006 Washington Post Top Ten Books for Children

Booklist's 2006 Top Ten Sports Books for Youth

Booklist's 2006 Top Ten First Books for Youth

The New York Public Library's Books for the Teen Age 2007

2007 Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Books of the Year

CCBC Choices 2007

2006 Librarians' Choices

2006 Junior Library Guild Selection

2008-2009 Pennsylvania Young Reader's Choice Master List

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Learn more about Ichiko and Japanese baseball
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Make miso soup
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The Brooklyn Nine - History

2010-01-01T22:27:00.062-05:00

The History of The Brooklyn Nine: Inning by Inning

First Inning : Play Ball

Between 1840 and 1859, more than four million people immigrated to America. Thirty-two percent (like my own family, who came later) were German, and an amazing three out of every four of the new immigrants landed in Manhattan. In 1854 alone, more than 300,000 immigrants came to New York--more than the entire population of the city just fifteen years prior.

Two massive fires swept through lower Manhattan in this era, the first in 1835 and another in 1845. In the first, the flames consumed 674 buildings before they could be contained, doing an estimated 18 to 26 million dollars worth of damage. Only two people died, however, as the southern tip of Manhattan island was by this time already a purely commercial district. The 1845 fire was equally disastrous, wiping out everything from the East River west to Broad Street and north to Wall Street.

Alexander Cartwright, considered by many today to be the father of modern baseball, was indeed a fireman, and his Knickerbocker Volunteer Fire Department gave its name to the baseball club Cartwright helped found. Taking their cue from rules being used by many less organized baseball games like "town ball," "three-out, all-out," and "one old cat," the Knickerbockers were the first to write down rules that established a standard distance between the bases, introduced foul territory, and, most importantly, ended the practice of throwing the ball at runners ("soaking" them) to get them out.

And Cartwright did indeed leave New York to seek his fortunes in California, eventually going all the way to Hawaii. He introduced the Knickerbocker baseball rules to towns and players all along the way, becoming a sort of Johnny Appleseed of America's game.

19th Century baseball reproductions
Rules and Regulations of the Knickerbocker Baseball Club - 1845

Second Inning : The Red-Legged Devil

By the time of the American Civil War, baseball had grown by leaps and bounds. Previously only an amateur game, players on teams like Brooklyn's Excelsiors, Atlantics, and Eckfords were beginning to be lured away by money to play for other teams, and some teams began putting up fences around their fields and charging admission. "Purists" complained, but professional baseball was here to stay. There were significant changes to the game in this era too: balls could no longer be caught on the bounce for an out, the stolen base was introduced, and pitchers, though still throwing underhand, were adding fancy pitches like curveballs to their arsenals. The New York Game, based on rules that evolved from the Knickerbocker rules, soon came to be the dominant form of baseball played throughout America, especially as Yankees took their game with them as they marched through the South in the War Between the States.

Contrary to popular belief, Abner Doubleday, who makes an appearance this inning as a Union General, did not invent the game of baseball in a cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York. That myth was most likely started by sports star turned sporting goods manufacturer Albert G. Spalding, who was desperate to convince the world that baseball had been a truly American invention with no ties to older games or other countries. Despite zero evidence that Doubleday had ever even seen a baseball, much less invented the game, the idea was presented as fact, a Hall of Fame was built in Cooperstown, and the myth persists to this day. Doubleday was though the commanding officer of many Union regiments, including the "Red-Legged Devils" of the Brooklyn Fourteenth, who continued to wear their peculiar pants long after the Union issued standard blue uniforms to the rest of the army.

My own family's American journey began in 1861, when 19-year-old Louis Alexander Gratz, a German Jew, landed in New York City with ten dollars in his pockets and no knowledge of English. A few months later he heeded President Abraham Lincoln's call for volunteers to fight in the Civil War, and less than a year after arriving in America Louis Gratz was an officer in the Union Army. He fought his way south into Kentucky and Tennessee, reaching the rank of major and commanding a regiment in the Battle of Chickamauga. When the war ended, Louis found himself in Knoxville, Tennessee (my hometown!), where he earned a law degree, married into a prominent local family, and eventually became the first mayor of North Knoxville. I named the main character in "The Red-Legged Devil" Louis in honor of Louis Alexander Gratz.

Brooklyn in the Civil War: Brooklyn 14th, Company G
Brooklyn in the Civil War: Brooklyn 14th Reenactors
Brooklyn in the Civil War: Union Prisoners Play Ball

Third Inning : A Ballad of the Republic

As professional baseball became the National Pastime, Mike "King" Kelly became one of its first great stars. A key player for the powerful Chicago White Stockings teams of the 1880s, Kelly led the league in runs, stolen bases, and batting average for several years. Kelly was widely known (and loved) for his antics on and off the field, which did in fact include traveling with a Japanese manservant and a pet monkey. White Stockings first baseman and manager Cap Anson was never a fan though, and in 1887 Kelly was sold to the Boston Beaneaters for the then unheard-of sum of $10,000.

A true showman, Kelly is credited with being the first ballplayer to give autographs, and the first to sell the rights to his name and image for product advertisement. The song "Slide, Kelly, Slide" became a nationwide hit when it was released on a phonograph cylinder by Edison Studios, and after his playing career Kelly traded in on his fame to star on the vaudeville stage. In many ways though, Kelly's story is as sad as that of the slugger in "Casey at the Bat." Heavy drinking cut short Kelly's playing career and his life. Already washed out of professional baseball, Kelly died when he was just 36 years old.

Kelly's era saw more changes in baseball, including overhand pitching, foul balls counted as strikes, and the widespread introduction of fielding gloves to the game. Big changes were in store for Brooklyn around this time too. The Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883, and in 1894 Brooklyn, until then an independent city, voted (just barely!) to join Manhattan, The Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island as one of the five boroughs of New York City.

The title of this story comes from the subtitle of Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic," which was published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888. Thayer was paid five dollars for his poem.

Mike "King" Kelly - Hall of Fame Page

Fourth Inning: The Way Things Are Now

Hall of Famer Cyclone Joe Williams (later known as Smokey Joe Williams) was perhaps the greatest pitcher of his era, black or white, though he never played a day of Major League Baseball. Though never written down, Major League Baseball owners had what was known as a "gentleman's agreement" not to sign black players to their teams. This institutional racism continued for almost fifty years until Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color barrier in 1947. In the meantime, black stars like Cyclone Joe were left to forge careers for themselves in the Negro Leagues, or overseas in Mexican and Cuban leagues.

As far as I know, Joe Williams never tried to pass himself off as a Native American, though he was half Comanche Indian. Instead he plays stand-in here for a black man who really did try to pass for a Native American to make the Majors. In 1901, Baltimore Orioles manager John McGraw, who more famously went on to coach the New York Giants for thirty years, tried to sign black second baseman Charlie Grant to a Major League contract as an American Indian named Chief Tokohama. McGraw and Grant were busted before "Tokohama" could ever play a game, and baseball's color line remained uncrossed for another 46 years.

Anti-Semitism, prejudice against Jewish people, was also strong in turn-of-the-century America. German Jews who had come to America in great waves in the 1840s-1880s had largely blended in with the rest of society, many "Americanizing" their last names and some even abandoning their religion or converting to Christianity, as my ancestor Louis Gratz did. (Louis covered his tracks so well, in fact, that my family didn't know we had once been Jewish until more than a hundred years later when my grandfather began researching our family history.)

Anti-Semitism certainly existed in America, but not the way it would rear its ugly head in the early 1900s when millions of Russian Jews, driven from their homeland by anti-Jewish hate riots, fled to the United States-particularly to New York City. Unlike their German cousins, Russian Jews refused to conform, clinging to their Jewish religion, their traditional clothing, and their Yiddish language. The cultural backlash against these new Eastern European Jews carried over to all Jews, no matter how long they had been in America or how well-respected they were in their community.

In baseball, the "Dead Ball Era" was in full swing, marking the lowest run-scoring period in Major League history, a swoon that wouldn't officially be broken until Babe Ruth burst onto the scene in the 1920s. The New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs were the class of the National League, with the Cubs winning back to back World Series titles in 1907 and 1908--the last World Series trophy the North Siders would take home for at least the next hundred years. The Brooklyn Superbas meanwhile were far from superb, placing seventh out of eight teams in 1908 with a 53-101 record. Throughout the history of the Brooklyn baseball franchise, they were known by a variety of names: The Atlantics, the Grays, the Bridegrooms, the Superbas, The Trolley Dodgers, the Robins, and finally just the Dodgers.

Joe Williams - National Baseball Hall of Fame Page
Everything Coney Island - The Coney Island Pages

Fifth Inning : The Numbers Game

In 1919 Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, banning the manufacture, transport, and sale of alcohol in the United States. Thus began the Prohibition Era, giving rise to speakeasies, gin joints and blind pigs, and a new generation of American gangsters like Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. While federal agents made a show of fighting bootleggers and drinking, many local authorities turned a blind eye to people breaking Prohibition laws, and the Amendment was repealed in 1933.

The 1920s were also the heyday of overwritten, "purple prose" sports writing, and John Kieran was one of its most famous figures. Kieran wrote for The New York Times sports section for almost thirty years, filling his sports columns with references to Latin, law, poetry, nature, and the works of William Shakespeare. In the hours before ball games, Kieran could be found visiting museums, zoos, parks and libraries, and he had a habit of writing his articles in advance of the actual games. Later in life he put his vast knowledge to the test as a panelist on NBC's long-running radio quiz show "Information, Please!" While I can't say that Kieran ever really conspired to fix a numbers game, he certainly seems like the kind of man who would have appreciated the effort.

One of Kieran's favorite subjects had to have been Babe Herman and the "Daffiness Boys" of the Brooklyn Robins. Given their name as a tribute to popular Brooklyn manager Wilbert "Uncle Robbie" Robinson, the Robins were notorious for their on-field follies. No Robin was more "daffy" than Babe Herman, who routinely led the league in errors, put lit cigars in his pockets, twice stopped to watch a long home run while running the basepaths only to be passed by the hitter and called out, and who did indeed double into a double play. Said a teammate of Babe Herman, "He wore a glove for one reason: because it was a league custom." Another called him "the Headless Horseman of Ebbets Field." Despite-or perhaps because of-his zaniness on the field, Brooklyn fans loved Babe Herman. Years later during World War II when many of the younger players were called to military service, Herman was brought out of retirement to play for the Dodgers. He singled in his first at bat but tripped over first base and was almost thrown out. The Brooklyn fans gave him a standing ovation.

Ebbets Field Specs
Ebbets Field - Preserving Brooklyn's Lost Shrine
Walter O'Malley - The Official Web Site

Sixth Inning : Notes of a Star to Be

America was officially involved in World War II from 1941 to 1945. Millions of men were called on to leave their jobs and fight overseas, and women stepped in to take their place in factories, offices, and schools--and on the basepaths as well. The All-American Girls Softball League was founded in 1943 by Phillip Wrigley, owner of the Major League Chicago Cubs, who wanted a women's league that would eventually play in Major League stadiums while the men's teams were on the road. The league played a cross between softball and baseball until the end of the 1945 season, when the name was changed to The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and overhand pitching and smaller ball sizes were adopted.

Women were selected for their abilities to run, throw, catch, hit, and slide, but they were also expected to be "feminine," and had to attend evening charm school classes with beauty salon owner Helena Rubenstein, who later condensed her lessons into a handbook given to all AAGPBL rookies. The players were paid well by the day's standards, making $45 to $85 a week and often out-earning family members who worked "real" jobs. Four cities near Chicago-Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin, Rockford, Illinois, and South Bend, Indiana-were chosen to host teams, and almost 200,000 fans turned out during the first season to watch the women play ball.

New teams were added in the next few years, and though Wrigley's dream of women playing to packed Major League stadiums never did happen, the league enjoyed great success in small Midwestern towns during and after the war. Attendance peaked in 1948 though, as the return of professional ballplayers from the war and the beginning of televised Major League games in the early 1950s gradually drew fans away. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League played its last skirted season in 1954.

All-American Girls Professional Baseball League - Official Site

Seventh Inning: Duck and Cover

In 1955, the Brooklyn Dodgers won their first and only World Series championship, but by 1957 the end was near for the borough's beloved bums. Jackie Robinson, who had broken baseball's color barrier less than ten years ago and been such a brilliant and revered ballplayer, had already retired. Dodger fans were moving farther and father out Long Island, and there was nowhere for them to park their cars if they wanted to return for a game. Brooklyn owner Walter O'Malley began talks with the City of Los Angeles, and at the end of the 1957 season the Dodgers and their cross-town rivals the Giants moved to California.

As devastating as the move was to fans in Brooklyn, there were far bigger things happening in the United States in 1957. In Little Rock, Arkansas, federal troops had to be called in to escort nine African-American students to Little Rock Central High School in what would later be seen as one of the most important events of the Civil Rights Movement. Tensions were also high in the "Cold War" between the United States and Russia, and the launch of Sputnik (Russian for "satellite") caused a panic. The simple satellite spent three months in orbit and did nothing but transmit a beeping sound so that it could be tracked, but it fired the starting gun for the Space Race. American schools began to focus more on math and science, fallout shelters were dug in backyards, and nuclear bomb drills, introduced in the late 1940s when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear device, became common again.

"Duck and Cover" was an educational film shown to American students. Years later, critics argued that ducking and covering would provide little real help in the event of a nuclear attack, and that the film did nothing more than heighten children's fears. That didn't stop the film from being shown over and over again to students from the late 1940s all the way, incredibly, to the 1980s. My father, a boy in the 1950s, remembers duck and cover drills in his own school.

Watch Duck and Cover on YouTube
Hear a recording of Sputnik's broadcast signal from space

Eight Inning: The Perfectionist

Kids have been playing Little League baseball since the league was officially founded in 1939, although not all youth baseball teams are official Little League programs. Rules vary from league to league, with some (like the Fulton Street Pawn and Loan team in this inning) playing a full nine innings, and others playing as few as six. The 1970s and 1980s saw the beginning of polyester uniforms and metal bats in youth baseball, and by this time millions of young people, both boys and girls, were playing organized ball.

As I write this, there have been only 17 official perfect games in the history of Major League Baseball. By comparison, more people have orbited the moon than thrown perfect games in the Majors, and no pitcher has ever thrown more than one. The most famous perfect game in Major League history has to be Yankee Don Larsen's victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers in Game Five of the 1956 World Series, still the only perfect game (or no hitter, for that matter) in postseason history.

The ninth inning of Michael's perfect game in my story is loosely based on the ninth inning of the perfect game thrown by Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1965. I've tried to evoke the poetry of Dodgers radio announcer Vin Scully's call of that game, including a nod to my favorite line from that broadcast: "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world."

I was nine years old the year this story is set, and the 80s became the decade that shaped my young life. Though I know I'm not alone, films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark had a profound impact on me as a boy, and I love including them here, if only in a small way. Michael and David in this inning are named for me and my brother John; Michael and David are our middle names.

Sandy Koufax's Perfect Game
Vin Scully's radio call of the ninth inning

Ninth Inning: Provenance

Five years after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants left for the West Coast, the New York Mets were added to Major League Baseball as an expansion team. Headquartered in Queens, the Mets never fully replaced the Dodgers in the hearts of Brooklyn fans, even though their team colors--blue and orange--were meant to pay tribute to Dodger blue and Giant orange. The Mets logo also incorporates buildings from the Brooklyn skyline as well the Brooklyn Bridge, which, like the team, was created to connect the boroughs.

The expansion Mets were terrible in their early years, losing more games in their first season than any team since the 20-134 Cleveland Spiders of 1899. To many abandoned Brooklyn fans, the awful Mets were like the return of Babe Herman and the Daffiness Boys, and support for New York's "loveable losers" grew. Fans' loyalty was rewarded when the "Miracle Mets" went from last place in 1968 to World Series champs in 1969 on the strength of young pitching talent like Cy Young Award Winner Tom Seaver, and the Mets enjoy continued popularity throughout the five boroughs to this day.

In 2006, a Babe Herman Pro Model Signature Bat was sold to a collector at auction for $1,508.00. Tobacco stains and cleat marks proved it had been used in games, but there is no way to know if it was the same bat Herman used to hit into the famous double/double play. Oddly, the bat does bear the remnants of three mailing stamps on the barrel, and faint, illegible writing that may be the address of Spalding, the bat's manufacturer. How or why the bat was mailed back to the factory no one knows.

Babe Herman bat auction page

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The Brooklyn Nine - Chapter One

2010-01-01T22:12:00.005-05:00

First Inning: Play Ball
Manhattan, New York, 1845

Nine months ago, Felix Schneider was the fastest boy in Bremen, Germany. Now he was the fastest boy in Manhattan, New York. He was so fast, in fact, the ship that had brought him to America arrived a day early.

Now he stood on first base, waiting to run.

"Put the poreen just about here, ya rawney Dutchman!" the Striker called. English was difficult enough for Felix to understand, and almost unintelligible when spoken by the Irish. But the "Dutchman" at Feeder-another German boy like Felix-didn't need to understand Cormac's words to know where he wanted him to throw the ball. He lobbed it toward the plate and the mick slapped the ball to the right side beyond first base.

Felix ran full out. His legs churned in the soft mud but his shoes gave him traction, propelling him toward second base. He was a race horse, a locomotive. The world was a blur when he ran, and he could feel his blood thumping through his veins like the steam pistons pounding out a rhythm on the fast ferry to Staten Island. Felix flew past the parcel that stood for second base and dug for third.
"Soak him!" one of the boys called. Felix glanced over his shoulder just in time to see an English boy hurl the baseball at him. He danced out of the way and the ball sailed past him, missing his vest by less than an inch. Felix laughed and charged on to third, turning on the cap there and heading for home.

"Soak the bloody devil!" one of the other micks cried. The ball came at Felix again, but this time the throw was well wide. He pounced on the rock at home plate with both feet and celebrated the point.

"Ace!" Felix cried. "Ace, ace, ace!"

"No it weren't," called one of the buckwheats, a boy just back from the Ohio territory. "You missed second base!"

Felix ran straight to second base to argue, and was met there by the boys on both teams.

"You're out, ya plonker!" said one of the micks.

"The heck I was!" said Felix. He stepped forward to challenge the Irish boy, who stood a head taller. The Irish boy laughed.

"You sure you want to get them fancy ones and twos there muddy, Dutchman?"

The mick was on again about Felix's shoes, which were better than everyone else's. Felix's father, a cobbler, had made them for him-sturdy brown leather lace-ups with good thick heels. They were the only thing he still had to remind him of his family back in Bremen.

The boys looked down at Felix's shoes. That's when they all saw Felix's footprints in the wet earth. He'd missed second base by a foot.

"Three out, all out," the buckwheat said.

Felix snatched the ball from the boy's hand and plunked him hard in the shoulder with it.

"Run!" Felix cried.

The lot became a battlefield as both teams went back and forth, tagging each other and dashing for home to see who would earn the right to bat next. Felix had just ducked out of the way of a ball aimed for his head when someone grabbed him by the ear and stood him up.

"Felix Schneider!" his Uncle Albert yelled.

The game of tag ground to an abrupt halt and the boys shirked away as Felix's uncle laid into him.

"I knew you would be here, you worthless boy! You should have been back an hour ago! Where is the parcel you were sent to deliver?"

Felix glanced meekly at second base.

"You've buried it in the mud!?" Felix's uncle cuffed him. "If you've ruined those pieces, it'll mean both our jobs! My family will be out on the streets, and you will never earn passage for yours. Is this why you stowed away aboard that ship? To come to America and play games?"

"N-no sir."

Uncle Albert dragged Felix over to the parcel.

"Pick it up. Pick it up!"

"I didn't step on it, see? I missed the bag-"

His uncle struck him again, and Felix said nothing more. With his speed he knew he still had plenty of time to deliver the fabric pieces, and time enough to go to the Neumans', pick up their finished suits, and get them to Lord & Taylor by the close of business too. He also knew his uncle wouldn't want to hear it.

"Now go. Go!" Uncle Albert told him. "If you were my son, I'd whip you!"

And if I were your son, thought Felix as he dashed off with the parcel, I'd run away to California.

Felix ran to where the Neumans lived on East 8th Street off Avenue B, in the heart of "Kleindeutschland," Little Germany. Their tenement stood in the shadow of a fancier building facing the street on the same lot. The Neumans lived on the fourth floor, two brothers and their families squeezed into a one-family flat with three rooms and no windows. Felix hated visiting there. It made him think of those preachers who stood on street corners throughout Kleindeutschland yelling warnings of damnation and hell. As much as he disliked his uncle, Felix knew that but for Uncle Albert's job as a cutter their own Kleindeutschland flat would look like this. Or worse.

One of the Neuman boys, not much older than Felix, met him at the door. Felix only knew him from deliveries and pick-ups-he'd never seen any of the Neuman boys playing on Little Germany's streets or empty lots.

"Guten tag," the boy said.

"Good morning," said Felix. He held out the parcel. "I've got your new pieces."

The boy let Felix into the room. It was hot and dark, and Neumans young and old sweated as they sewed cut pieces of cloth into suits around the dim light of four flickering candles. Herr Neuman, the family "foreman," came forward to take the package from Felix.

"Danke schön," Herr Neuman said.

"You're welcome," Felix said. "Bitte."

Herr Neuman set the parcel on a table and opened it, counting out the pieces. He nodded to let Felix know everything was in order.

"Do you have anything for me to take back?" Felix asked. "Haben Sie noch etwas fertig?"

Herr Neuman held up a finger and went into another room. Felix waved to one or two of the women who looked up at him with weak smiles. Felix knew this wasn't what they had expected when they'd come to America. It wasn't what any of them had expected. Felix's own father had talked of New York as a promised land, where everyone had good jobs and plenty to eat. "Manhattan is a city of three hundred thousand," he'd said, "and half of those are men who will need a good pair of shoes." Herr Neuman, a skilled tailor, had probably said the same thing to his family about the men in Manhattan needing suits.

What neither of them knew, of course, what none of the tailors and cobblers and haberdashers had known, was that those hundred and fifty-thousand men needed only five men to sell them suits and shoes: Mr. A.T. Stewart, Messrs. Lord and Taylor, and the brothers Brooks. They owned the three largest clothing stores in New York, massive, three and four story buildings Felix had gotten lost in more than once. Each had separate departments for men, women, and children, an army of clerks and fitters, and tables and tables of clothes, each outfit made not by a single tailor but by teams of men and women paid a fraction of what the suit cost. Felix, his Uncle Albert, the Neumans, they were all just cogs in the great department store machine. Uncle Albert did nothing now but cut cloth all day, but he was better off than the Neumans and hundreds of other families who sewed collars by candlelight sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. If they worked quickly, the Neumans might make twenty dollars a week sewing suits. Uncle Albert earned that by himself as a cutter.

Herr Neuman returned with a package of finished suits tied up with a string, and Felix left quickly under the pretense of hurrying them back to Lord & Taylor.

Felix ran past Tompkins Square Park to the Bowery, leaving Kleindeutschland and its crowded tenements and beer halls in his wake, but when he hit Broadway he slowed. This was Felix's favorite part of the city. Here the pigs being driven to market strutted down the sidewalk alongside flashy American women wearing their big, brightly-colored dresses and ribbons. Gentlemen in serious gray suits hurried by with pocket watches in hand while 'b'hoys' with curled moustaches and red shirts and black silk ties mocked them from painters' scaffolding and butcher shop doorways. Newsboys and street preachers shouted over each other on the corners. Buildings were torn down and rebuilt faster than Felix could keep up with them, and shootouts sometimes erupted in the streets. This wasn't the New York of the Germans or the Irish or the English, it was the New York of Americans, and Felix tucked his package under his arm and fell into step with the bustle of the young city.

Uncle Albert had warned him not to dawdle on the way so he hurried along-fully intending to do his dawdling on the way back. At Lord & Taylor Felix delivered his package and picked up another, then made his way farther north on Broadway, adopting the American swagger of the lords, ladies, and swine. Felix found it easy to lose himself in Broadway's foot traffic, to be swept up by the rush and hurry of Manhattan, to hear the clatter of iron horseshoes on cobblestones and the catcalls and insults of the city's famously rude cabbies like a lullaby. On Broadway Felix was not a poor German Jew from Bremen walking the streets of a strange metropolis. Here, he was a New Yorker.

Felix made his way up Broadway to Madison Square, then down East 27th Street to the corner of Fourth Avenue where the New York Knickerbockers played baseball. He had found them by accident one day, following an oddly-dressed man wearing blue woolen pantaloons, a white flannel shirt, and a straw hat, and now he went by the lot every time he ventured this far north in case a game was underway.

Felix had been overjoyed to discover grown men playing at the same game he and his friends played-only it wasn't exactly the same game. The Knickerbockers played three-out, all-out, but with more gentlemanly rules. For one thing, they didn't chase each other in between innings to see which team would bat next. For another, they didn't "soak" runners, trying to deliver the ball to the next base before the he could advance instead.

A game was underway when Felix arrived, and he joined three other spectators on a bank nearby, using the parcel with the cut cloth pieces as a seat cushion. The Striker at bat called for his pitch and smacked it to the outer field, where it was caught on the bounce.

"Hand out!" the Feeder cried, and the Striker tipped his cap and jogged merrily back to the sidelines.

Felix would have given all the sauerkraut in Kleindeutschland to be out there on the field with them. A new Striker took his place, and Felix imagined himself standing there in the blue and white uniform of the Knickerbockers, ready to deliver a base hit for his team.

The Striker bounced the first feed wide of first base, but strangely did not run.

"Foul ball," the Feeder called, and the Striker returned home to bat again.

This is new, Felix thought, and he watched as the Feeder pitched again and again until the Striker was able to hit the ball in the field between first and third base. Letting "foul balls" go would certainly save a lot of chasing, Felix realized, and let the fielding team concentrate its defenders in front of the batter, instead of all around him. There was still a catcher, he noted, but mainly to receive the pitches the Striker chose not to hit.

This was less and less the three-out, all-out Felix knew, but he liked it.

The next Striker put a well-placed ball in between two of the outlying fielders and scampered toward second. The ball was thrown back in quickly, and appeared to reach second base at the same time as the runner. Neither team could tell whether the Striker was out or not, and the top-hatted judge at the table beyond third base admitted he hadn't a clue. The judge came forward to examine the evidence, then threw his hands up in exasperation.

"Let us ask the young squire with the very nice shoes," one of the Knickerbockers said. With a start, Felix realized the player was talking about him. The judge and three of the players came over to where he sat.

"I-I think the ball beat the Striker," Felix told them.

"There we have it then," said the Feeder.

"Agreed," said the man in the top hat. "Umpire's decision: hand out."

"Three-out, all-out," the Feeder said, smiling. The Striker tipped his cap and jogged out onto the field to take his position at a base, but the Feeder remained on the sidelines and extended his hand. Felix shook it.

"Alexander Cartwright," the Feeder said. "And on behalf of the New York Knickerbocker Volunteer Fire Fighting Brigade, I'd like to thank you for your honest and impartial observation. I've seen you here before, haven't I?"

Felix didn't answer. He was transfixed by something over Cartwright's shoulder, a towering plume of smoke billowing up from the rooftops of the city to the south of them.

Manhattan was on fire.

______________________________________________

Excerpted from The Brooklyn Nine by Alan Gratz by permission of Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Putnam. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Learn more about the real history in The Brooklyn Nine

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The Brooklyn Nine

2010-01-01T22:00:00.037-05:00

1845: Felix Schneider, a 10-year-old immigrant from Germany, cheers the New York Knickerbockers as they play Three-Out, All-Out.

1864: Union soldier Louis Schneider plays baseball between battles in the Civil War.

1893: Arnold Schneider meets his hero King Kelly, one of professional baseball's first big stars.

1908: Walter Snider, batboy for the Brooklyn Superbas, tries to sneak a black pitcher into the Majors by pretending he's Native American.

1926: Numbers wiz Frankie Snider cons a con with the help of a fellow Brooklyn Robins fan.

1945: Kat Flint becomes a star for the Grand Rapids Chicks in the All-American Girls Baseball League.

1957: Ten-year-old Jimmy Flint thinks bullies and Sputnik are enough to worry about-until the Dodgers announce they're leaving Brooklyn.

1981: Michael Flint finds himself pitching a perfect game during the Little League season at Prospect Park.

2002: Snider Flint tracks down the strange story of a bat that belonged to one of Brooklyn's greatest baseball players.

One family, nine generations. One city, nine innings of baseball.

Dial Books | March 2009 | Ages 8 to 12

Available in hardcover and paperback

Ian Chipman, Booklist, Starred Review

"With an impressively cohesive mix of sports, historical fiction, and family history, Gratz has crafted a wonderful baseball book that is more than the sum of its parts."

The Horn Book

"The fictional voice is sure and engaging, polished without being slick—an entertaining and compelling look at the deep roots of our national pastime."

Kirkus Reviews

Booklist's 2009 Top Ten Sports Books for Youth

Booklist's 2009 Top Ten Historical Books for Youth

2009 Junior Library Guild Selection

Chicago Public Library Best Books of 2009

Library Media Connection 2009 Editor's Choice Award

2010 Kansas State Reading Circle Catalog - starred selection

Nominated for:
2009 Cybils Middle Grade Fiction Award
2010 Michigan Thumbs Up! Book Award
2010-2011 North Carolina YA Book Award
2011 Grand Canyon Reader Award (Arizona)
Children's Literature Association of Utah 2011 Beehive Award
2011-2012 Oklahoma Sequoyah Book Award
2011-2012 Indiana Young Hoosier Book Award
2012 Garden State Book Award
2011-2012 Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award (Minnesota)
2012 New York State Reading Association Charlotte Award

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Learn more about the real history in The Brooklyn Nine