As the baseball season advances, fans young and old follow the fortunes of their teams in cycles of despair and joy. And all of them are potential consumers of the many new books about baseball records, players and strategy. Among the current crop of nonfiction books, the most innovative is Nathan Aaseng`s Baseball: It`s Your Team (Lerner, $8.98). The author picks 10 teams that have had problems, discusses alternate solutions and asks the reader to make a choice. He then describes what actually happened in each case. Here, at last, is the reader`s chance to show superiority over managers and owners; the book should appeal to readers in the middle grades and up. Way up.
Almost as broad an audience exists for Tom Seaver`s Baseball Card Book, written by Seaver with Alice Siegel and Margo McLoone-Basta (Messner, $8.79;
paper, $6.95). The White Sox pitcher provides a nostalgic memories of his boyhood addiction to card-collecting. The book also includes information about the production, collecting and value of cards.
In Harvey Frommer`s Baseball`s Hall of Fame (Watts, $9.40), 50 brief biographical sketches of great players are preceded by a description of the national Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
Vying with sports books in popularity are those books that challenge and develop the intellectual or deductive abilities of children and young people. A good starter for children in the middle grades is Marvin Terban`s Too Hot to Hoot: Funny Palindrome Riddles (Houghton/Clarion, $11.95; paper, $4.95). It begins simply, asking such questions (after explaining what a palindrome is) as ”What`s a palindrome for a very young dog?” and progresses to more difficult letter, word and number palindromes. Slightly more difficult is an exercise in mathematical logic, Anno`s Hat Tricks, by Akihiro Nozaki, illustrated by the internationally acclaimed artist Mitsumasa Anno (Philomel, $11.95). It, too, has posers of increasing difficulty; the author, a mathematician, explains the reasoning for each solution.
Young adults are the audience for Tom McGowen`s War Games (Watts, $9.40), which describes the two kinds of war games (board and figure) and gives suggestions for setting up new games, developing a set of rules and devising strategy for competitive play.
The magic and mystery of challenging games are also found in fantasy and science fiction. Although single titles and series books prevail, there occasionally appear short story anthologies (not, in general, a favored format of the young) that capture and hold the attention of readers. Three such, for children of progressively sophisticated reading levels, are Uninvited Ghosts and Other Stories, by Penelope Lively, illustrated by John Lawrence (Dutton, $10.95); Warlock at the Wheel, by Diana Wynne Jones (Greenwillow, $10.25); and Young Monsters, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh
(Harper & Row, $11.89; paper, $7.95).
The first has stories, often humorous, that range from a tale about a family of clumsy ghosts to the more eerie situation of an extraterrestrial visitor. There`s a similar range in the Jones book, from the hilarious title story about the warlock who steals a car and finds the back seat occupied by an imperious, demanding child to the touching ”Dragon Reserve, Home Eight.” Ghouls, vampires, werewolves, and other creatures of the occult are the protagonists in the chilling collection of monster stories. There`s a shudder for everyone, or a snicker.
The animal story has a special appeal to the read-aloud group, aprticularly when it is combined with other preschool/primary appeals such as humor, action, pictures and reflections of familiar situations.
The story of his pet is told by a very small boy in Our Dog, written and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury (Dial, $5.95) as he deplores his pup`s tendency to roll in the mud just after a bath. In the following books, animals pursue some of the activities of people but act more or less like their own kind. One of the latter is Otto is Different, by Fritz Brandenburg (Greenwillow, $11.75). The pictures by James Stevenson show Otto as young octopus who can simultaneously sweep the floor, play the piano and do his homework, all because he has eight limbs. There`s no concession to their animal natures or forms in Denys Cazet`s Saturday (Bradbury, $10.95); Lee Lorenz`s A Weekend in the Country (Prentice-Hall, $11.95); Jerome the Babysitter, by Eileen Christelow (Houghton-Clarion, $12.95); and Willy the Wimp, by Anthony Browne
(Knopf, $7.95). Only the illustrations in the first book show that a visit with loving grandparents has a canine cast, and in A Weekend in the Country the two animals (Pig and Duck) who try to wangle an invitation (from a reluctant moose) suffer from and complain about city heat just like people. The babysitter Jerome and the charges with whom he copes are all alligators, and super-polite Willy the Wimp is a chimpanzee. These books, illustrated by their authors, are brisk and funny and hint at a ”moral.” It`s much easier for the read-aloud audience to accept a bit of didacticism from animals,
”ourselves in fur,” as the late May Hill Arbuthnot called them, rather than from boys and girls who are silly or who misbehave.
