Customer Reviews

Hard Ball : A Billy Baggs Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is about a boy named Billy Baggs who lives in a rural part of the town. To put it mildly, he lives on a farm, and rides 2 hours each day to school. Billy's latest problem is the pitcher on the Town Team. Actually, it's the fact that King likes the same girl Billy likes. After King and Billy get in a fight, the Coach of the baseball team comes up with a way to solve the boys' problem. Or so he thought. I think that Will Weaver did an excellent job on this book. The characters are all very real, and have real problems that could exist in real life. The solution to the boys' problem was creative, but I do think that the strike between the parents was a little ridiculous. The setting could be anywhere and apply to anyone, and I applaud Mr. Weaver on that.

This is the best baseball book in the series of Billy Baggs. I would recommend it to 5th graders through 9th graders. It has some bad words, but the story is creative. Baseball fans would love it. All my friends who liked baseball had it. I started reading and couldn't stop. I finished in a week because it is great! Will Weaver has wrote the best baseball book.

I thought this was a well written novel. I thought I was going to read about baseball, but it seemed that the whole book was based on the life of two young men that had problems with their fathers. It was a pleasent surprise because I can relate with King kenwood. When I have sport activities my father is always yelling at the offical even when the offical is wright. I commend King on how he could make the change from town life to country life. I was disappointed in the fact that Billy and Suzy were starting to get in a relationship and then they hardly even talked to each other. I think the coach is the one that kept the boys friendship alive. If it wasn't for him the boys never would have lived after their fight so they could show their fathers how they were hurting their lives. I think anybody would love this book because it has a little about baseball, but it is mainly about the relationship between father and son.

I have to say, this book is the best about Baseball that I have yet read, and believe me, I've read alot of them. Hardball is the third book in a series of novels featuring farm boy Billy Baggs who has to deal with, puberty, his father's jailing and parole and school. The book shows increased relationships between Billy and Suzy than the previous two. However, this book kind of leaves readers hanging. What will happen to Billy and Suzy? Will Billy and King ever become friends? I don't know. I hope Will Weaver will write another book to finish things off.

The book HARD BALL by Will Weaver is I think one of the best books I have every read. The main character is Billy Baggs he live on a farm with a well loving mother but his dad sometime seems like he doesn't love him and is an abusive father. Billy is 14;he lives on the farm, and loves to play baseball. He is a pitcher for his farm, which is not a real legal they just play the town team. He is also hopping to pitch for his school team. His has had a big crush on this girl that he think he has no chance with. After they go to a baseball game together they start to like each other. The thing is the girl Billy likes (Suzy) is protected by the one person Billy true hates. Suzy grew up with a king Kenwood and less just say Billy and king's family don't get a long well. King catches Billy and Suzy making out in Billy's barn and king and Billy have a big fight over it. The coach and both of the kids parents decided that the best for this not to happen again was to make them become friends so they had to spend more time together so they had to suspend the whole week together which include of sleeping over at each others houses. But this would never help the fathers become friends because they were enemies as well. The author used the many literary elements some of the ones were similes metaphors and those were the only ones I picked up on.

This has to be one of the best novels I've ever read. I'm only a mild reader, so to find a book this pleasing is very unusual for me. I would definitely suggest to everyone, but especially those who enjoy a great plotline and an excellent mixture of topics.

I read the book Hard Ball, by Will Weaver. The main characters are Billy Baggs, King

Kenwood, Suzy Langen, Coach Anderson, Mr. and Ms. Baggs, and Mr. and Ms. Kenwood.

Billy Baggs is a farm boy who has had a rivalry against rich townie and ace pitcher King

Kenwood. They both like this girl named Suzy Langen. Billy has liked her for a long time and

so has king. Their fathers haven't been friends either because King's father got Billy's dad put

in jail.

The summer before Billy and King went into ninth grade the rivalry blew up into violence.

Coach Anderson desperate to keep the peace between what he believes to be his star players

comes up with a plan. Anderson's plan is to discipline with out beating them. It was all up to the

parents of Billy and King.

Anderson's plan was that if Billy and King wanted to play for him they would have to

spend one-week together, 24 hours a day. Both Billy's and King's parents a greed. As Billy

and King are spending their week together they figure that their problems might lie closer to

home between their fathers and them.

I think this was a good book and I would recommend it to any teenagers or young adults.

It is a sad fact of life that people will always be segregated into classes and that segregation seems to be first solidified in high school. Children that played together when young gravitate away from each other never to return or reconcile. In this case, the split is along economic and cultural lines. Billy Bagges is a farm boy with an incredible fastball, so good that he is considered pro material in his first year of high school. Billy's family is poor, so he has little in the way of equipment to work with and he has to find time within his work on the farm to practice baseball and study his schoolwork. His nemesis is Archer Kenwood, a wealthy city boy with all the benefits that wealth provides. Both boys are competing for the attention of Suzy, a wealthy city girl that ignores some of the city/rural distinctions.
The farm kids have a baseball team and they have games against a team made up of the city kids. The team of farm kids is a tough group, including two that are migrant Mexican workers and two tough farm girls. While it is limited in scope, the inclusion of these characters allows some expression of how difficult life is for these people. The timeframe is the late sixties, when Mexican migrant workers moved to the upper plains states in the summer to work in the sugar beet fields.
While there is a battle between Billy and Archer, the real and more fundamental conflict is between urban/rural and rich vs. poor. The high school baseball coach needs both boys on his team so he comes up with a novel way to force the boys to work together and see how each lives his life. The tactic works, although there are some tense moments between the overbearing fathers of both the boys.
There are a lot of interesting characters in the book; two secondary characters that were particularly amusing are the redheaded Erickson girls, Heather and Gina. Heather is sixteen and has a baby and Gina is described as "thirteen but looked eighteen, at least on top." They are fiery girls, stars on the farm team and a bit immodest, to say the least. There is no actual sex in this book, just some cleavage baring and nude swimming. It is certainly more than enough to activate the sexual juices of the adolescent male reader.
This is a great book because it is about much more than sports; it is about life, the essential unfairness yet the thrills that are there for all of us to strive for. Sometimes it is necessary to confront things that are difficult to face, yet we have to if we are going to achieve.

I give this book 4 stars because the author explains the area they are at so well I feel like I am there. I also liked it because it had some very funny parts. This book caught my I when i first saw it becasue it is about baseball and baseball is my all time favorite sport.

I think you should read this book because it teaches you not to like someone just becausewhere they come from. It's about a fram boy that has to leave in the city for a week and acity kid that has to live in the city so they can paly for there baseball team at school.which they both fight over a girl which you tries to protect the other one and one tries to go out with her. over the week there relationship get strong and the under stand each other