“The last nine-year-old girl to play Big League baseball was Issy Archer of the 1923 New York Yankees.” All great fantasy books begin like this right off the bat because good fantasy doesn’t pussyfoot around with explanations of settings or details of why the rules of history, time, or gravity have been changed. If Ty Cobb and Goose Goslin don’t question Issy’s soaking, sopping-wet spitballs, why should we? And in Sarnia baseball fan Tim (Mudville) Shortt’s zingy fantasy, neither do we wonder why, after games, Issy chummed around with Babe Ruth, her Yankee teammate and best friend.

The storyline would stand on its own as a good short story (perhaps read by Fireside Al on a Sunday morning during the World Series). But this is a star turn combo of text and illustration. Shortt’s marvellous paintings take us instantly to Yankee Stadium, Coney Island, and even the streets of Hemingway’s Paris, where grown-up Issy coaches the corps de ballet de Babe Ruth in a game against reporters from the International Herald Tribune. (That’s the end of the tale, long after Issy has retired from pitching: when a person turns 10, she needs to consider her future.) Just now, Issy’s future involves her scheme to make Babe Ruth take ballet lessons, which provides the corps (pardon me) of the fantasy.

This nostalgic tribute is full of famous names and fond big-headed caricatures of Schoolboy Hoyt, Wally Schang, Herb Pennock, and rivals Topper Rigney and Whitey Witt. But Issy and her beagle-eyed friend Babe Ruth are the most lovingly detailed portraits. Issy is determined and confident – a wonderful model for those young girls who don’t yet realize the impossible impediments standing in the way of a career in professional sports. And the production details are wonderful – pin-striped Yankee blues as a dust wrap, full-colour two-page paintings, and the text set in wide side panels so it doesn’t interfere with the layout.

Though we’re seeing many more baseball picture books these days, there’s nothing quite like this one. I’m giving my copy to a dad who watches baseball in the den with his daughter. Her mom reads her the bunny and fairy fantasies, but this one is for him. It doesn’t matter that his daughter won’t know all the dirt on Ty Cobb or who pitched 29233 straight scoreless innings in the 1916 and 1918 World Series; it’ll give them something to talk about. Then they can watch the video “A League of Their Own” together. I’ll send another copy to my all-star niece, whose lifelong dream is to play professional football. Highly recommended for families (like mine) who watch Field of Dreams each Christmas instead of icky Jimmy Stewart movies. Baseball, it’s a wonderful life.

Suitable for dads of all ages, and for their daughters at about age seven.