Baseball Fever (1981) by prolific children’s author Johanna Hurwitz is intended for upper elementary readers. The novel centers on the relationship between a father and son who find themselves at odds over their seemingly contradictory extracurricular interests. Despite clearly having a loving bond, the two try a variety of interventions before they come to the rather predictable conclusion that different people can like different things. Ten-year-old Ezra Feldman has always been obsessed with baseball. Together with his friends, David and twins Bruce and Louis, Ezra spends his free time in Flushing, New York, daydreaming about the game—and particularly, about his favorite team, the New York Mets. It’s easy to root for the Mets, especially since the Feldmans live right next to Shea Stadium. Not only does he love the sport, but ever since getting a baseball encyclopedia as a birthday present, Ezra has been memorizing all kinds of baseball facts. The one person in Ezra’s life who simply cannot understand why anyone would fill his head with baseball trivia is Mr. Feldman, Ezra’s father. Mr. Feldman is a brilliant man who speaks six languages and has a doctorate in history. To Mr. Feldman, it seems that Ezra is simply rotting his brain instead of using it for something more intellectual, like reading books or playing chess—Mr. Feldman’s own particular interests. In fact, one of Ezra’s other presents was a chess computer game—but Ezra has never even tried playing it because he’s been so consumed with the encyclopedia. Instead of trying to see the game from his son’s perspective, Mr. Feldman constantly expresses his disdain to both Ezra and the other boys. When they come over to the house, Mr. Feldman can’t make normal conversation. He needles them by asking whether they’ve read any good books lately and makes not particularly funny fun of baseball terminology (for instance, mocking the word for a left-handed pitcher, “southpaw,” with the comment “How about a westpaw?”). Ezra’s mom finds herself caught in the middle between the two. She would love for Ezra to play baseball so he can do what he enjoys, but she also wants to make Mr. Feldman happy. Unsure of what to do, Ezra asks for help from his 19-year-old brother, Harris, who is a student at Princeton University and with whom Ezra has a surprisingly close relationship given their age difference. Harris reveals that at one point, Mr. Feldman and he had a similar inability to see eye to eye. When Harris was still in high school, he was a chemistry fanatic with his own lab set up in his bedroom and the ability to memorize the periodic table by age ten. Mr. Feldman was worried that Harris was missing too much by being constantly indoors, so he insisted that Harris pick some kind of physical activity to engage in. Harris realized that the best way forward was to compromise, so he joined the running club at school. Now, he is grateful that Mr. Feldman made him try something he wouldn’t have on his own—Harris is on the cross-country team at Princeton and is training for the New York City Marathon. Harris’s suggestion is for Ezra to try to take the same tack. Maybe he could try playing chess a bit more to show Mr. Feldman that baseball hasn’t entirely rotted his brain. Ezra decides to take Harris’s advice. He practices chess on the computer game he received for his birthday, but Mr. Feldman still doesn’t seem to take Ezra’s love of baseball seriously. Things change when the Feldmans visit Harris at Princeton and meet an old, wise, and brilliant scholar clearly modeled on the real-life Albert Einstein, who taught at Princeton in the second half of his life. When the professor turns out to also be a baseball fanatic, Mr. Feldman realizes how narrow-minded he has been all along. He decides that if Ezra is going to give chess a shot, he should also give baseball a go. Thrilled, Ezra takes his father to a double-header game. Although this experience doesn’t sway Mr. Feldman’s beliefs completely, he agrees that the national pastime isn’t total nonsense. Similarly, although Ezra hasn’t exactly replaced baseball with chess, he is happy to keep playing until maybe one day he can beat his father. The novel ends on a happy note, with both Ezra and Mr. Feldman realizing that different tastes don’t need to be judged. Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Feldman allow Ezra to start playing on his local baseball team with the rest of his friends.

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Johanna Hurwitz

Middle grade

Novella

Fiction

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Plot Summary

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