search for a metaphorical children's story paralleling the discriminatory amendment and the religious-based beliefs behind it. Responding to a question in a November 17, 2003, interview by Holly Atkins for the St. Petersburg Times, Ritter hints at the book's meaning: Atkins: "In ‘A Note from the Author’ at the end of Choosing Up Sides you write about where the idea for this novel originated. So although on one level this is a novel about a left-handed future baseball star, it's really about the larger issue of discrimination?" Ritter: "Yes—and religious-based discrimination, to be specific. That's the hardest prejudice to defeat, since it is delivered bearing a religious righteousness. I remember, as a boy, hearing segregation and racism being justified from the pulpit and I could not comprehend this glaring hypocrisy, totally contrary to what Jesus taught. Only later did I realize that the Bible often gets interpreted and reinterpreted in such a way as to reinforce one's own bigotry and social bias. I think it's important for children to recognize this practice as soon as possible and apply their critical thinking skills to it, since it certainly continues today." Around the year 2007, Ritter began to sense a cultural shift toward tolerance, even in the most conservative states where his books are most popular, and began testing the waters toward a public disclosure of his true inspiration. In a January 2007 interview in a newsletter published online by Brodart Books, he was asked, "Do you ever feel that the self-given title of ‘baseball novelist’ is inhibiting, that it corners you into one genre?" Ritter responded, "This might be hard to understand, but being called a baseball novelist actually gives me a certain unique freedom among writers. I slip under the radar of an awful lot of people because of that title, and it allows me to reach an audience who would most likely never pick up a book about religious based bigotry [Choosing Up Sides] or the cowardice of war [Over the Wall] or one that demonizes anti-environmental developers [The Boy Who Saved Baseball], and so on, if I didn’t write under the cover of baseball." At this point, Ritter began to openly acknowledge and discuss the metaphorical underpinnings of Choosing Up Sides in schools and conferences across the country. Over the Wall In April 2000, Ritter published his second novel, Over the Wall. Inspired by his sense of outrage