The Great Baseball Card Hunt (A Southside Sluggers Baseball Mystery)

Teammates Rachel, Zach, and Andy try to solve the riddles that lead to a hidden cache of rare baseball cards

Grade 3-5-- The Southside Sluggers, a coed baseball team of fifth graders, has a new player who doesn't know the meaning of teamwork. Between games, the children embark upon a search for rare baseball cards, hidden by the youth league's commissioner in celebration of his retirement at the end of the season. In the end, the team learns to play harmoniously. Greenberg clearly intends to teach the value of working together and cooperation, but readers will not like being hit over the head with this fact chapter after chapter. While he employs a clever device of having the players solve four riddles as clues leading to the location of the rare old baseball cards, he produces some real blunders. (In one case, a librarian describes the boy who checked out a specific book and says that she would look up his name for the Southside Sluggers if the computer were not down.) Illustrations are cartoonlike and of marginal appeal with all characters sporting bulbous noses and looking alike. --Blair Christolon, Prince William Library, Manassas, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.