Review of "Nine Make a Team," by Mike Neigoff

Review of

Nine Make a Team, by Mike Neigoff

Four out of five stars

 This book of adolescent sports fictions stays in the lane of the standard structure of books in the genre published in the fifties and sixties. There are essentially no girl characters, other than doting mothers, and there is a major lesson for the principal character.

 Ronnie is a student at Adams Junior High School and it is his first year of baseball at the school. His experience is in Little League, where he distinguished himself as a good pitcher. Things are different now, instead of the kindly coach that served as a father figure, the coach now is a disciplinarian, determined to have the players follow his instructions. When Ronnie throws hard after he was told to throw soft, in combination with other disagreements, the coach suspends Ronnie for two weeks.

 Angry and expecting his parents and friends to take his side, Ronnie is surprised when they don’t. They understand that the coach’s point should have been well taken and it was not. This makes Ronnie realize that he was wrong, and he musters up the courage to ask the coach to be reinstated before the scheduled end of the suspension. There is of course the big game at the end of the book.

 As much about following the rules set down by authority figures as it is about baseball, this is a book very much in synch with the times. When sports coaches were authority figures and their decisions were not to be questioned.