406

This book is a historical fiction that I have written about the 1960 baseball World Series, specifically about game 7 of that series, that many baseball experts feel was the greatest game ever played in the history of Major League Baseball. The seventh game of that World Series was played on a sunny fall day on October 13, 1960, at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On that date, around 3:00 p.m., Bill Mazeroski, the second baseman for the Pirates, hit a walk- off home run in the top of the ninth inning to win the game. On the second pitch thrown by Yankee pitcher Ralph Terry, Mazeroski hit a ball over the 406 sign in left field, which gave the Pirates an improbable and almost miraculous win over the heavily favored New York Yankees. This home run was the highlight of the many strange and dramatic plays that took place during game 7, which makes that game one for all ages and one that would make for an excellent script for any Hollywood movie. This book, however, is about more than the 1960 World Series. It is also about two nine-year-old boys who meet each other in the summer of 1960 and who become close friends, united by not only baseball but also by a crisis that plagues one of the main character's family. Daniel Pryzinski and Adam Brodziak are the two fictional characters in this book who meet each other by chance during the summer of 1960. Daniel lives in the Polish Hill section of Pittsburgh, while Adam lives in a small rural coal-mining town in western Pennsylvania, sixty miles from Pittsburgh. The two meet each other by chance when Adam's family is invited to stay with Daniel's family while they are attending a Polish Festival in Pittsburgh. While staying with the Pryzinski family, the Brodziaks discover a dark secret. Daniel's father, Peter, is an alcoholic whose drinking problems are so bad that it threatens to destroy the Pryzinski family. Daniel's mother, Pauline, is desperately trying to hold the family together but is on the verge of leaving her husband. She is a devout Catholic, so that decision was one that she did not want to make. Besides, she loved her husband so much that she was willing to do anything to help him recover from his drinking problem. Through the intervention of the Brodziaks and their family doctor, Tom Slevic, they are able to convince Peter to admit himself to an Alcohol Rehab Center in Somerset, Pennsylvania. Although the focus of this book is the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, it is the relationship of the fictional characters that will show the reader how reliance upon family and friends and hope in God and faith can serve to change the lives of so many whose loved ones are affected by alcohol or other types of addiction or substance abuse.