Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Introducing Ezra
Ezra Feldman's father knew six different languages. He had a doctorate in history, and he could do hard arithmetic problems in his head. His hobbies were reading history and sociology books. He had a photographic memory and could play a whole chess game without using a board. He just moved the pieces around inside his head. In short, he understood all sorts of long and complicated things. But there were two things he didn't understand at all. He didn't understand Ezra, and he didn't understand baseball.
Ezra was almost ten years old, and he liked baseball more than anything else in the world. He listened to baseball games on the radio, and he watched baseball games on television. When he read books, they were books about baseball. When he talked, he talked a lot about baseball. At night when he slept, he often dreamed about baseball.
"Ezra would eat and drink baseball if he could," his mother said laughingly.
"Why do you want to look at that?" Mr. Feldman would ask, whenever he saw his son entranced before a baseball game on TV. "That's nothing but a lot of grown men taking turns hitting a ball with a stick. What a waste of time!" he complained. He had no patience for any sports.
Ezra had an older brother named Harris. He was nineteen years old and away at college. When Harris was nine, going on ten, he hadn't been interested in baseball. He had spent his time doing experiments with his chemistry set, and by the time Harris was
ten he had memorized the entire periodic table. Mr. Feldman couldn't understand how two boys with the same parents could be so different.
"Don't forget,we didn't live in Flushing when Harris was young," Mrs. Feldman reminded her husband. Flushing was where Ezra lived, and it was also the home of Ezra's favorite team, the New York Mets. Shea Stadium, where they played, was within walking distance from the house Ezra's parents had bought four years before. Harris had spent his formative years in Mahwah, New Jersey, where there was no baseball team.
A typical conversation between Ezra and his father went this way:
"Dad, watch out! You're blocking the TV screen. The bases are loaded, and there are two men out. The man at the plate has three balls and two strikes. This is the payoff pitch coming up."
"I can't understand a word you're saying," Mr. Feldman would grumble. "Why should a boy
