John Ritter
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Book I
in the
Cruz de la Cruz Saga

The Desperado Who Stole Baseball bookcover

 

 

The Story behind the Story:
The Boy Who Saved Baseball

This is a story of invasion.

A small quaint community is invaded by a power stronger than itself, an arrogant we-know-what’s-best-for-you foreign culture that did not understand the history or the value system of the little town it decided to invade, tear down, then rebuild in its own image.

I wanted to show a different world. I wanted boys and girls spread out in sleeping bags under the sky, their heads in the hub of a wagon wheel, a mandela, stargazing into the face of infinity, looking for the good. I longed for something upbeat, close to my culture, my hills, the horseback country where I was raised. I wanted to depict the ancient healing land of the Kumeyaay Nation. This one came from my gut, my Indian blood.

The Boy Who Saved Baseball would be a story of good will, of strong will, the oldest story in baseball, the little guy coming to bat in the bottom of the ninth. And it would be wrapped inside the story of how our nation was built, how it crept across the land, the army of invaders, westering, westering, until they were just five miles down the road. The Vikings, the developers, Lake View Mesa II. They all came knocking on Doc’s door. Banging. Barging. Breaking and entering.

Cue the cowboy, Cruz de la Cruz. Over the hills, out of the East, the lone rider on horseback, the crusader, paladin. What could he see from atop his horse that no one else could? An ancient truth? The secret behind the physics of baseball? The heart and soul of the land?

Once lauded as purple mountain majesties, the hills now condemned for taking up space, giving nothing, needing nothing, not even the money made by the bulldozer’s blade. Enter the resistors, the Dillontown Wildcats defending their homeland. Tom Gallagher and Maria Flores, joined by Cruz and Dante Del Gato, whose stories I wrote by instinct, not knowing where I was going, but trusting in the unknowing. For ultimately, this would be a book about trust. About salvation. About good will. The will to live. It’s all in the will.

 

Cruz on a horse

 

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Fenway Fever | The Desperado Who Stole Baseball | The Boy Who Saved Baseball | Under the Baseball Moon | Choosing Up Sides | Over the Wall