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The Pitcher William Hazelgrove Books

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The Pitcher William Hazelgrove Books

The Pitcher
William Hazlegrove
Koehler Books, Sep 1 2013, $15.95
ISBN: 9781938467592

In Florida, Ricky Hernandez lives with his Mexican-Puerto Rican mom while their abusive patriarch Fernando shows up when he needs money or the need to batter her. Ricky excels at nothing as his dyslexia makes school impossible and his heritage makes life impossible. However, at a carnival he learns he has a great pitching arm. His mom Maria would do anything to help her son succeed, but is unhealthy, unemployed and uninsured.

Maria dreams of his fastball enabling her son to make the high school team though she is aware that the parents of her son's rivals for a spot hire professional coaches to instruct their children; she does not have the money for medical care that she desperately needs. Still to help her Rickey she becomes assistant coach on his baseball team, but believes her son needs a mentor. When Rickey enters the forbidden zone of a drunk to retrieve a ball, he meets the bellicose Pitcher. Determined Maria turns to the reclusive former World Series Pitcher to help Rickey with fundamentals. The twenty-five years MLB Pitcher wants to be left alone in his garage, but instead Maria showers him with kindness.

Filled with morality themes, The Pitcher is an enjoyable character driven tale mindful of the movie The Sandlot. Filled with sliders and curves, young adults and baseball fans of all ages will enjoy taking the mound as Maria brings her fastball to the game of life and by doing so she helps Rickey and the retired Pitcher.

Harriet Klausner


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The Pitcher William Hazelgrove Books Reviews

Junior Library Guild Selection for Fall
Bestseller List for Hispanic Fiction
Bestseller List for Baseball

No wonder this book was on these three lists! This book is a winner all around. Well-written, relevant to today's societal issues, this book will engage sports fans and non-sports fans alike. Written with early teens as his audience, William Hazelgrove tells the story from Ricky Hernandez' point of view.

Ricky's dream is to be a Major League Baseball pitcher....but first he has to make the high school team because if "you don't make the high school team, then it's game over." Ricky

has been working hard at his pitching. He's got a 75 mile and hour fastball, but no control. Ricky's mom Maria is the assistant coach of Ricky's baseball team and helps him practice every day. She tries to teach him how to pitch, but not being a pitcher herself, she tries to teach him out of a book. Tryouts are coming at the end of summer, and Ricky has to be ready. So Maria sets out to get the Pitcher (their neighbour, an MLB pitcher who won the World Series) to coach Ricky.
While this book is written about baseball, it really is about more than that. I liked how the author was able to weave in multiple themes. This was a complex novel and the author did a good job weaving the parts together. Maria has lupus, and without a job, there is no way to pay the doctor's bills. Besides, there's no time to keep going to the doctor when she's doing all she can to help Ricky realize his dream. The Pitcher lives in his garage drinking beer and watching baseball all day long. Ricky lives in a difficult situation - his mom's ex keeps coming around demanding money and abusing them, he has dyslexia, and the other pitcher on his team is out to get him.

You will run the entire gamut of emotions when you read this story. It pulls at the heartstrings, but gets down to the truth. Success takes work, never give up.

I found this book to be quite enjoyable, and I wouldn't be surprised to see this book on the grade 6-7 classroom reading lists. One caution however - this book does contain some foul language.

I gave this book 4 stars.

Disclaimer I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for a fair and honest review. A free product does not influence my opinion. All thoughts are my own.
The good news about The Pitcher is that it is not nearly as bad as William Hazelgrove's last book, Rocket Man. The Pitcher seems to have enjoyed the attention of an editor, at least the partial attention at any rate; the errors, both in grammar and content are fewer here, but still far more numerous than any published text should have.

That's it for the good news.

It would seem that Hazelgrove put his finger in the air and decided that the young adult market was the prevailing wind, and set about writing a YA novel. It is painfully apparent that this book is no labor of love, no heartfelt effort at writing for an appreciated audience; rather it seems a crass effort to cash in on what is selling at the moment. While YA titles are by definition written for a young audience less adept at reading than adults, this does not mean that YA books should be written downwards; the basic rules still apply tell your story, describe action but do not supply motivations -- allow the reader to come to her own conclusions. The Pitcher is written from the point of view of its adolescent protagonist, Ricky Hernandez, leading Hazelgrove to take the easy road of spelling out emotion, motivation and anything implicit in the form of direct or internal monologue from young Ricky. Young adult is about encouraging readers. Spelling everything out for them is insulting and wholly misses the point.

It is true that all stories have already been told, but The Pitcher fails in adding anything new to the come-from-behind underdog tale. Worse, Hazelgrove seems to have taken from Hollywood a sample of these tales, crammed them together between the covers of a book and, dusting his hands off, called it a day. Karate Kid + Bad News Bears + Grand Torino + The Sandlot + For the Love of the Game + heavy dose of schmaltz does not equal a quality story; it is shameful laziness. As with Rocket Man, Hazelgrove again demonstrates that he never encountered a trope he did not want to simplify further and overuse. And, as in Rocket Man, the characters are at once thinly drawn and clunky. Ricky's mother (single, naturally) for example is a saint among literary saints; she can do no wrong and possesses more determination and grit than a thousand normal mothers combined, all while suffering untreated lupus. Why untreated, you ask? Because, as with cheap tropes, Hazelgrove cannot resist artlessly injecting social and political issues into his writing. Certainly, social ills and politics have a place in literature, but they should not be shoehorned into a story just because the author wants to show how he has been paying attention to cable news. After a while, Hazelgrove's heavy-handed inclusion of social problems and clichés begin to read like a comic book
Bigots against illegal immigration--POW!
Healthcare woes--ZING!
Rich people treading on the poor--BOOF!
Abusive, absent fathers--ZOWIE!
Alcoholic with a tortured past--BLAMMO!
Dyslexia--BAM!

Hazelgrove continues his tradition of beating his readers over the head with awfully named characters the authoritarian, racially biased middle school dean (dean? in middle school?) is named Freedom. Get it? Freedom, because it is the opposite! We are also offered gems such as a PE teacher named Mr. Truss and a whole family of antagonistic bigots named Payne.

Then there are the odd constructions. I read the phrase "under the garage" in a dozen different sentences before I understood that Hazelgrove meant "under the garage door." Consider, for example, "The tips of these old brown shoes appear under the garage." What, Wizard of Oz style? Or equally puzzling, "Mom hesitates, then leans down and rolls the baseball under the garage like a thank you card." Now the garage is on piers and that is where thank you cards are traditionally delivered? Who "ashes" a cigarette instead of flicking the ash away? And who "rolls" their shoulders instead of the more universally understood shrug?

I wonder why Hazelgrove could not be bothered to learn that motorcycle windscreens are made of plastic, not glass. This detail would not be very important, and the author could be excused for making the mistake, if the windscreen material was not, well, material to the scene in which it is featured. Similarly, when Ricky, who lives and breathes baseball, describes the space between pitcher and batter as "70 feet" one wonders if the extra nine and a half feet he is contending with are not part of his problem pitching. Again, the difference of a few feet would be forgivable if every other scene at ballgames were not described in excruciating, boring detail.

There are copious examples of horrible, stilted, unrealistic dialogue and questionable word use for the characters. When did a teenage boy last describe his mother's outfit as an "off-the-shoulder-number"? And if you must, for the sake of the story, use a racial slur, at least use a real one. "Beano?"

For fans of the speedy happy ending, however improbable, The Pitcher will not disappoint. SPOILER ALERT!!!

Everything turns out just fine in the end. Ricky wins the big game, the bully is defeated, Mom gets all better and two lonely people find love, all in the space of the final few pages of the story. Blech.
The Pitcher
William Hazlegrove
Koehler Books, Sep 1 2013, $15.95
ISBN 9781938467592

In Florida, Ricky Hernandez lives with his Mexican-Puerto Rican mom while their abusive patriarch Fernando shows up when he needs money or the need to batter her. Ricky excels at nothing as his dyslexia makes school impossible and his heritage makes life impossible. However, at a carnival he learns he has a great pitching arm. His mom Maria would do anything to help her son succeed, but is unhealthy, unemployed and uninsured.

Maria dreams of his fastball enabling her son to make the high school team though she is aware that the parents of her son's rivals for a spot hire professional coaches to instruct their children; she does not have the money for medical care that she desperately needs. Still to help her Rickey she becomes assistant coach on his baseball team, but believes her son needs a mentor. When Rickey enters the forbidden zone of a drunk to retrieve a ball, he meets the bellicose Pitcher. Determined Maria turns to the reclusive former World Series Pitcher to help Rickey with fundamentals. The twenty-five years MLB Pitcher wants to be left alone in his garage, but instead Maria showers him with kindness.

Filled with morality themes, The Pitcher is an enjoyable character driven tale mindful of the movie The Sandlot. Filled with sliders and curves, young adults and baseball fans of all ages will enjoy taking the mound as Maria brings her fastball to the game of life and by doing so she helps Rickey and the retired Pitcher.

Harriet Klausner