Extra Innings: Baseball Poems

Bibliographic information:

Selected by Hopkins, Lee Bennett.  Extra Innings: Baseball Poems.  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993, illust.  Medlock, Scott, p. 40.

Brief plot description:

The poems specifically describe outfield players, the Mets, Little League teams, pitching, girls playing ball, catching, Casey, Jackie Robinson, types of pitches, umpires, perfect games, stealing bases, and Joe DiMaggio.  Most of the poems have a normal form while others are not aligned straight.  The poem about Casey was the only poem that required more than one page.  The poem “Overdog” has rhyming in which the first and second lines rhyme in most of the stanzas.  The font is not always the same in each poem, and the poem is on one page with the illustrations on the opposite page.  The illustrations are either in black and white or in color.  Most of them are not finely detailed, while some of them look like paintings.  Some of the illustrations that go with the poems about real life players look like they were based off photographs.

Brief review:

I liked Extra Innings: Baseball Poems because it shows a variety of poems about baseball.    It also is good because it can be used in grades fourth through seventh.  I think the younger grades would enjoy this book as a read aloud while the older tweens would enjoy reading it on an individual bases.  The content in these poems may help some reluctant readers enjoy poetry through sports.  It also illustrates the different kinds of poetry that can be written.  There was one hard word, plaudits that may not be understood by some tweens.  This book of poems includes a contents page and a permission acknowledgement page. 

Genre label:

Poetry

Reading level/interest level:

4^th-7^th grade

Similar materials in style content, theme or characters:

Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888 by Ernest L. Thayer

A Child’s Anthology of Poetry by Elizabeth Hauge Sword