Baseball at Jefferson High

In my recent novel Teen Targets, co-authored with our granddaughter Audrey Deichmann, protagonist James Baker plays varsity baseball as an 11th grader at fictional Jefferson High in Charlottesville in the wartime year of 1943.

Some of the players are based on people I know. For example, Bob James is the name I have used in previous novels for our son, Bob Sargent. In Teen Targets, Bob is a 10th grader who can play catcher, but he also plays the outfield, and he’s a good hitter. Scott Matthews is a longtime friend from Michigan, and Scott plays third base. We first met as teachers at Frankfort High in 1966-67, where Scott taught Biology and Chemistry and I taught American History and coached varsity basketball.

As a longtime history professor, I prefer writing historical fiction such as Teen Targets. In this sequel to Teen Spies, the reader finds Jefferson’s 1943 baseball season shortened to seven games due to America being in the middle of World War II. Rationing affected needed fuels and goods such as gasoline for cars and trucks, rubber for tires, textiles for clothes, most canned goods, and more. The armed forces received top priority for food, raw materials, and fuels.

Baseball is important in Teen Targets. James tells readers about going to high school and playing varsity baseball, and his experiences are based on my own years at Kearsley High and in summer baseball leagues in Flint, Michigan. Readers find that James is a left-hander who bats right-handed (like me). He throws what in the time was often called a “drop ball,” but today a version of the pitch is called a “sinker.” That pitch does two things: It breaks in the same way as the pitcher’s curve would break, and the drop ball sinks about two feet right at home plate.

Coach Spencer tells his players to move up about six inches in the batter’s box to have a better chance at hitting the curve or sinker, before the pitch breaks, or drops. Still, because of the break, players often get their bats on the lower part of the baseball, and pop it up, or hit on the upper part of the ball, and ground one to the infield. That’s why the drop/sinker is effective. In my case, when I got two strikes on a batter, all he would see after that was my drop.

I learned how to pitch the drop when I was 13, the summer following the eighth grade. Along with the drop, I threw a wide-breaking curveball, and a fair fastball. My fastball worked in high school, but I didn’t have enough speed for college baseball. Still, I was a lefty, and the large majority of pitchers were right-handed.

In Teen Targets, readers will see that Jefferson’s savvy catcher Herb Jenkowski has the skill to call the right pitch for the right situation, and James has the talent to throw that pitch and save Jefferson when the game is on the line.