56 pages • 1 hour read
John H. RitterThe Boy Who Saved Baseball
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: Small Town Decline
Many background aspects of The Boy Who Saved Baseball are based upon past glories. The community of Dillontown came into being due to a gold strike that, 100 years before, created a vibrant, thriving population. Over the course of the 10 decades that followed, the town lost its gold rush, 90% of its population, and any real hope of a future resembling the splendor of its history. As cruelly pointed out by the financier Alabaster Jones, the town is on its way to oblivion. Representative of many small towns whose heyday is in the distant past, there are fewer customers to support the few small businesses that remain, and the pool of professionals who serve the citizens dwindles. Once the community caregiver, Doc is 87 with eyes so bad he cannot read the box scores on the sports page; Graydog, the lawyer, only works part-time, relying on his wife’s business to support the family. Since a well-equipped education is only a bus ride away, the schools—and the jobs of Tom’s parents—also feel the threat of elimination.
Symbolic of the decline of the little town, baseball falters as well, both in the text and in the world of professional sports. Once “America’s pastime,” by the 2003 publication of this book, the game’s luster had faded, tarnished by disputes between owners and players, teams jockeying for richer markets, and the apparent loss of team loyalty resulting from free agent players chasing huge salaries. The diminishment of the game is symbolized by such inexplicable happenings as Dante Del Gato leading his team to the pennant only to disappear before the World Series. The reclusive pariah hides in his compound outside Dillontown, a community where baseball itself slowly disappears. The storied Lucky Strike baseball field, named for the gold rush that built the park a century before, lies in sad disrepair. Even the town’s would-be players flee down the mountain to a new stadium and camp with a successful team, leaving only nine questionable kids to represent the stumbling game in the dying town.
Historical Context: The Golden State and Overdevelopment
Long before the era depicted in the narrative, the background story of California was continually rising property values. The Golden State, fabled for being the one place in the US that escaped the Great Depression, carried the reputation throughout the 20th century as the most expensive source of real property in the nation. Ritter refers to inflated property values repeatedly throughout, playing off the irony that outsiders knew of Dillontown because prospectors found gold there; now Dillontown itself is golden to a new generation that yearns to dig it up.
As he describes this, Ritter weaves in images of the natural landscape around the town that Jerry and Helen, Tom’s parents, strive to protect. They point out that little of the native habitat remains; the original, unblemished countryside is ecologically rare, like gold. Those who perceive earning lots of gold by developing the land must destroy the gold that is the wilderness to do so.
Behind the dueling notions of preservations versus exploitation, Ritter points out that the land is desert. The area Ritter describes, south of San Diego near the U.S.-Mexico border, is geologically desert, like much of the Southern California terrain. These groups struggle to possess and control land that would seem to be the least desirable in any other state.
Adding to the irony is the reality that California property values continue to increase exponentially today. Doc confides to Tom that developers have offered him $6 million for 300 acres of partially developed land. In the two decades following the book’s publication, California property values increased on average around 275%, meaning that the value of Doc’s acres in 2020 would have been around $16.5 million. Thus, the high stakes and conflicts between conservationists and developers continue to increase.
