The search for the ball that Babe Ruth hit into Lake Ontario – his only minor league home run – becomes the stuff of legend in Gift of the Bambino, Toronto writer Jerry Amernic’s first novel. The novel is set in the Toronto Islands and Hanlan’s Point Stadium, with an extended journey to New York City.

Young Stephen Slack’s grandfather is there when Ruth hits his home run while playing for the Providence Grays against the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1914. Ruth, an excellent pitcher in his youth, was 19 at the time. A brief almost mystical “connection” with the Babe at that moment governs the grandfather’s life thereafter. For the grandfather, the Babe becomes a voice, a vision, a shadow guiding him throughout his own minor league career. The grandfather’s budding baseball career is eventually short-circuited by his inability to hit the low inside fastball, and by the death of his friend and teammate Len, shot by pirates while running liquor from a supply ship to the shore.

Amernic’s writing on the Babe and his description of Prohibition-era New York is exemplary, particularly his extended paean to New York City and the speakeasies of the 1920s. But the relationship between Stephen and his grandfather and the magic of the ball is dripping with nostalgia and heavy with sentimentality and innumerable repetitions (everything important between them seems to be said three times). Even the prologue warns of a straining for the magical that occasionally makes the novel seem intended for adolescent readers. In these sections the language often feels flat and forced, marring what could have been an excellent sports novel.