My son just started his first season of T-Ball and he is absolutely loving it! In honor of that I wanted to make a post all about baseball picture books! These are some of the ones we’ve enjoyed with a range from fun and silly books to true stories that are profound and moving.
Although I love sports, baseball isn’t actually one of my favorites. But I have to admit there is a lot of American history surrounding it! There are many baseball books based on true stories throughout history so I split the post into more modern/fun stories and the historical books.
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Fun Baseball Stories
Froggy Plays T-Ball by Jonathan London
I have to start with the one that is specifically about T-Ball! Froggy has big dreams for his first game and things don’t go quite as smoothly as he hoped. It’s an endearing story that kids starting out with a new sport will probably relate to!
Goodnight Baseball by Michael Dahl shows the excitement as a boy and his dad go to a baseball game and then the boy saying goodnight to everything as the he heads home to go to sleep himself. It would make a great bedtime read for baseball lovers!
Ballpark by Eileen Meyer shows a grandpa and a boy going to the ballpark for a game and shows the feel and atmosphere of the experience. I have been to many baseball games in my time and this one definitely brings the nostalgia and feel of being at a game.
Get a Hit, Mo! by David Adler
This one is an easy reader and it is about a boy named Mo who loves baseball. The young, eager Mo who wants to shine, but keeps falling short, is a really endearing character. There are a couple other easy readers about him as well and they are all fun!
Batter Up Wombat by Helen Lester
A struggling baseball team gets excited when they meet Wombat. He joins their team but doesn’t know anything about baseball and the phrases they use (catch a fly, steal the base, run home) and it leads to lots of misunderstandings. It reminded me of Amelia Bedelia with all the misunderstanding the meanings of phrases.
Dino-baseball by Lisa Wheeler
This part of a Dino-Sports series of books about dinosaurs playing sports. The book is basically a play by play of the game which is fun for sports fans!
Historical Baseball Books
All of these are either non-fiction or based on a true story.
Anybody’s Game by Heather Lang
This is a brand new release and I loved this one! I was a little girl who loved playing sports right along with the boys and so the story really resonated with me. It is a biography and tells the story of Kathryn Johnson, who was the first girl to play Little League Baseball. The way it’s written flows like a high interest story and it’s not full of dates and facts, so it doesn’t read like a slow non-fiction at all. Sports were a huge part of my childhood and I can’t imagine being banned from playing while watching my brothers and other boys play instead. I had no idea how long it took for girls to be allowed to play despite so many girls desperately wanting to.
Players in Pigtails by Shana Corey
In the same vein, this one is about a girl in the 1940s who longs to play baseball, but is constantly told girls have no need for baseball. It shows the events that led up to the forming of the first American women’s professional baseball league. There are lots of interesting facts included that I had no idea of before.
The Spy Who Played Baseball by Carrie Jones
This is a brand new release about a Jewish man who played baseball and spied for America during World War II. Spy stories are fascinating to me, so I was particularly interested in this one!
She Loved Baseball: The Effa Manley Story by Audrey Vernick
I thought this story of a woman breaking racial and gender barriers to fight for what she believed in and to broaden the world of baseball was really inspiring and interesting!
I am Jackie Robinson by Brad Meltzer
Jackie Robinson was a childhood hero for me and I chose him for my elementary school biography project. I was excited to have a chance to introduce him to my own kids and this biography was the perfect one to do it with. I love the Ordinary People Change the World series that this book is a part of. Each book focuses on a historical figure and how they started out as just an ordinary kid, but how they changed the world. They are written in kind of a comic book format and are very child friendly.
Dad, Jackie, and Me by Myron Uhlberg
This one was inspired by the authors experiences with his father. I thought it was really neat to hear the story from the perspective of a boy and his deaf father who were early fans of Jackie Robinson. The connection the deaf father felt to Jackie Robinson because of the prejudice they both faced was really neat to see.
Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki
The book is inspired by actual events and tells the story of people in the Japanese internment camps during World War II who were left with nothing to do and so created a baseball field for everyone to play together. The boy in the story faced a lot of persecution when he returned home, but he felt more prepared to hold his own on the baseball field.
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