The Baseball

As someone who reads a lot, it is rare that I come across a book that actually brings tears to my eyes. In fact, I can only think of one other book that has. The Baseball is a beautifully written story that tells the heartwarming, tear-jerking tale of a man named Dr. Landon Myers, and it is a story that is brought up after many years.

The story is told to his granddaughter, Lucy, who is helping Landon clean up the basement. She finds that one of the boxes has a hole in it and goes to make sure everything in the box is still okay. Out of the hole rolls an autographed baseball. She brings it to her grandfather and from there, he decides to tell her the story of the baseball and of Alex. A story he has not told any of his grandchildren.

The Baseball is written so fluently that I didn’t want it to end. Dr. Myers takes Lucy back to 1975 when he had just divorced his ex-wife Marilyn and they shared custody of their son, Alex. Alex was a huge Cincinnati Reds fan and Landon loved taking him to games. In fact, since the divorce, Landon had really made more of an effort to spend quality time with Alex despite his busy schedule at the hospital. At one game, Alex even caught a foul ball and that ball never left his side afterward. He even had the player who hit the foul ball autograph it. Alex was a great kid. At only sixteen years old, he was schooling his dad on the rules and statistics of his favorite sport. The story, however, takes a heart-wrenching turn when a tumor is found in Alex’s brain.

My favorite part of the story is the relationships between all the characters and how they develop and change throughout the book. The only bad guy in this book is cancer. This story is built around family, the good times and the bad times, the happy times and the sad times. It’s about how different people cope with pain differently and how good things can come out of things that may initially seem like the end of the world. Dr. Landon Myers is a wonderful and complex character who has so much love for his family that the reader is able to feel his hopelessness and also that of his ex-wife as they see their son’s health decline.

I recommend this book for anyone who truly values family, making memories, and living life to the fullest.