Striking Out

Up until now, Billy Baggs's life has been loaded with nevers. Never been to a movie. Never played baseball with a real team. Never got over feeling guilty for the loss of his brother. But change is in the air. Billy discovers he has a natural talent for baseball, especially as a pitcher. Maybe, just maybe, there's more in store for him than life on the farm. But can Billy convince his father of that? Or is he destined to spend the rest of his life pitching nothing but hay? Teenager Billy Baggs is desperately needed on his family's struggling dairy farm, but he's also an extraordinarily gifted natural baseball player. How he struggles to reconcile his father's desire to keep him on the farm with his coach's interest in getting him on the field is at the heart of this 'meaty story.… The complex characters grow and change in profoundly real ways.''K. '[With] flashes of humor, a wealth of lovingly recounted details evokes the difficult daily life on a small dairy farm.''Publishers Weekly.

1994 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
1994 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)
1993 "Pick of the Lists" (ABA)

Since the death of his older brother, thirteen-year-old Billy Baggs has had a distant relationship with his father, but life on their farm in northern Minnesota begins to change when he starts to play baseball.

Up until now, Billy Baggs's life has been loaded with nevers. Never been to a movie. Never played baseball with a real team. Never got over feeling guilty for the loss of his brother. But change is in the air. Billy discovers he has a natural talent for baseball, especially as a pitcher. Maybe, just maybe, there's more in store for him than life on the farm. But can Billy convince his father of that? Or is he destined to spend the rest of his life pitching nothing but hay? Teenager Billy Baggs is desperately needed on his family's struggling dairy farm, but he's also an extraordinarily gifted natural baseball player. How he struggles to reconcile his father's desire to keep him on the farm with his coach's interest in getting him on the field is at the heart of this ‘meaty story.… The complex characters grow and change in profoundly real ways.''K. ‘[With] flashes of humor, a wealth of lovingly recounted details evokes the difficult daily life on a small dairy farm.''Publishers Weekly.

1994 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
1994 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)
1993 "Pick of the Lists" (ABA)

Children's Literature

Billy's big brother Robert lets him try driving the tractor. Billy's foot slips, his brother is killed and only his natural ability in baseball saves him from his angry father and the poverty of his rural Minnesota life. This is the first book in the series about the baseball star Billy Baggs. It is a powerful story.

In addition to his award-winning Billy Baggs novels Striking Out, Farm Team, and Hard Ball, all of which are ALA Best Books for Young Adults, Will Weaver is the author of two books for adults, Reed Earth, White Earth and A Gravestone Made od Wheat. He is the winner of both the McKnight and the Bush Foundations' prizes for fiction.

Mr. Weaver teaches English and creative writing part-time at Bemidji State University in northern Minnesota. Memory Boy, his latest book for young adults, was recently cited by ALA Booklist.