Review Detail

There is no crying in baseball.

What there is in baseball, however, is narrative. There is heroism, teamwork, character, courage, perseverance, skill and endurance. And so it is with PLAY BALL, the new graphic novel written by Nunzio Defilippis and Christina Weir and drawn by Jackie Lewis. Like lots of other great baseball stories (Field of Dreams, The Natural, A League of Their Own, The Pride of the Yankees, Bull Durham...) you don't even have to like baseball to love the book. PLAY BALL is, to some extent, a sports story I suppose, but far more than that, it's a story about a girl who just wants real life to play fair.

I loved the stark black-and-white art which both evoked newspaper comics and suggested something about the lack of grey area in how too many people think about gender. Dash, the protagonist of this story, is a girl, yes, but she’s also a tremendous athlete, and doesn’t want to play what she describes as a “watered-down” version of baseball. She wants the real deal, and has the talent and determination to do it. For her, this is not a feminist stance or political maneuver. She simply loves the game, and wants to do what she is best at.

At its core, the story is about allowing people to be who they are. Arica, Dash’s sister, is more typically girly. She wants to date baseball players, not be one. Dash needs to learn not to despise her for that, while Arica needs to learn to let Dash choose her own path. The shadow of an absent father, one whose lack of interest is clear to us, if not always to Dash, also speaks of the need we all have to see the people we love clearly – rather than seeing them as we wish they were.

So the story in its most basic form is: Teen girl at new school wants to play baseball (not softball) and despite disapproval of sister, peers and school, makes the team. Saying more would give away the rather satisfying (as in, I actually got teary) ending. So while there is no crying in baseball, for me at least, there was a bit of crying in PLAY BALL.