Thirteen-year-old baseballer Midge and his superstar best friend Cairo Kelly are no strangers to the principal’s office, logging in a record 55 visits between them. Yet both boys have a good moral compass (their misdeeds being more rambunctious than delinquent). Harold Mann is their friend, a mild-mannered school custodian by day who morphs into an awesome umpire during the baseball season. A crisis arises heading into the playoffs when the league imposes a mandatory certification exam on all of the umps. Mann point-blank refuses. Our energetic heroes cook up scheme after scheme, ratcheting up the stakes each time, in an effort to get Mann back behind home plate.

Kelly has all the right story stuff. He has secrets, he’s the poor son of a single immigrant mother, a brilliant athlete and is both a “kid and chick-magnet.” In her only misstep, Butcher casts Kelly as being shunned by the entire adult community, from shopkeepers to teachers. Given Kelly’s charms and his mild transgressions, this strains a bit.

Yet, it is book-hating, baseball-loving Midge, our thoroughly likeable narrator, who steals this book. They’re equal opportunity trouble-makers. Midge’s voice is just self-aware enough to convey the story lucidly while avoiding being either too clever or too cool for words. He even startles himself as things heat up, saying, “Here I was fighting for a principle and until a couple of days go, I didn’t know I had any.” Most of the adults are refreshingly real and lessons are learned all around. More importantly, Butcher, a teacher turned writer, has in this, her second book, created a winning narrator, an interesting protagonist, and plopped them into a story framed by well-written baseball scenes – a good game all around.