Baseball Saved Us

Title: Baseball Saved Us
Author: Ken Mochizuki
Illustrator: Dom Lee
Publisher and date of publication: ee & Low Books, 1993
Genre: Sports Book, Picture Book (multicultural)
Grade: 1-4

Baseball Saved Us is a story about a young boy and his family. They were Japanese and sent to an internment camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This boy and his family were shipped of to a place in the desert where they lived in barracks and were surrounded by guards and dust storms. The grow-ups and kids just sat around all day doing nothing to do. One day the father decided that to make baseball field so that people would have something to do. They flooded the area to pack down the dirt and make it hard like a baseball field. They had adult teams and kid teams. The young boy was never really that good at baseball but playing in the camp made him better. In the last game, he was up to bat and it was him who would determine the fate of the game. Throughout the season he had always felt like the guard in the tower was looking down on him and noticing that he wasn't that good of a player. So, in the last game he looked up at the guard and was determined to hit the ball. He struck the ball out of the park and the guard gave him thumbs up. Shortly after the boy and his family left the camp and returned to their regular life. He went back to having no friends but he was also a better baseball player. He made the team but soon realized that people didn't like him, they celled him a Jap which didn't make him feel good. At their first game it was his turn at bat and he pretended like the pitcher was the guard in the tower. He blocked out all the noise and hit the ball out of the park.

It was really easy for me to see how Baseball saved this little boy. While in the camp they were bored to death and disconnected from the outside world. Being able to play baseball game him and his friends a sense of community and made them feel like they were real kids again not just some Japanese outcast. When the boy left camp and returned to school baseball saved him again. It allowed him to interact with the ones who made judgments about him. It allowed him to show them that just because he was Japanese doesn't mean that he can't play baseball and be a boy just like everyone. When he hit the ball out the park in the end his team lifted him up into the air and made him feel accepted. All this was thanks to baseball. Who knew it could bring so many people together. Just like Sumiko in Weedflower, she had her garden. Her garden saved her from the ultimate boredom and made the camp a place that she could call home. Having her garden with her beautiful flowers saved the person inside much like baseball did to the people in this story. I thought that the story was going to be more about the camps but whoever I was pleasantly surprised to see how the story played out. it was not as exciting to me as Weedflower but it was still a pretty great story. The book said that the pictures were done with beeswax that had been applied to paper then scratched out the images. Which them allowed the illustrator to add oil paint for color. I would have never guessed that this was the technique used however I love the illustrations. They are so muted in color but compel amazing images. I love how the color scale is pretty much the same except for a blue baseball cap or green grass. Until the very end each picture is the same, in the end however the colors brighten up almost as if the life of this young boy was brightening up.

I would use this book in my classroom to introduce a number of topics. First internment camps and how they affected the Japanese. I could talk about the game of baseball and how it has brought people together throughout history. I also think it is important to pay attention to the idea of team support. In the camps the Japanese support each other but when they return to life outside camp the young boy doesn't seem to be getting much