MICKEY MANTLE’S LAST HOME RUN

Falco’s (Grandpa Gordy’s Greatest World Series Games, 2002) coming-of-age historical novel blends baseball and the social upheaval of the 1960s.

New Jersey teenager T.J. plays shortstop on the high school baseball team and is an avid fan of the New York Yankees, particularly Mickey Mantle. However, as the story begins in early 1968, T.J. is reluctant to admit that his hero’s career is coming to an end. T.J., who’s white, hears of the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, and his closest friendship with classmate and fellow ballplayer Jonathan, who’s black, is tested as racial tensions escalate in the community. The boys fight for their spots on the field, test their limits on parent-free trips to games in New York, and learn the limits of sociocultural expectations. The metaphorical role of baseball is evident from the opening pages (“Jonathan said that 1968 was a year when everybody did a lot of respect paying, so he might as well do it for Mick’s playing career”), and Falco writes excellent, detailed scenes of the characters observing and playing the game, which will appeal to fans of good sportswriting. He also does a good job of depicting the boys’ day-to-day relationship (“Jonathan was the king of goofing off, and Frankie was the prince of shooting the breeze”). The book is a bit uneven in its treatment of races, though; one section, for instance, intriguingly describes how Jonathan uses a technique that he calls “blacknosing” to deal with white teachers who are uncomfortable with black pupils, but most observations about race are presented from T.J.’s white-centered perspective (“When Jonathan came over that Saturday afternoon, it must have been the first time a black person other than the garbage man ever walked through our neighborhood”). For the most part, however, this is an emotionally satisfying story of friendship and a well-written sports tale.

A generally solid novel about baseball and growing up in a time of change.