Falls, Ohio, Luke inadvertently becomes involved with the local baseball team, which won the county championship the previous year and hopes to repeat their success. Unfortunately, in addition to viewing left-handedness as a conscious choice, "Pure backwards of what's right and good," Ezekiel also views baseball as a temptation that needs to be resisted, so Luke must practice pitching in secret, by throwing rocks and may apples in the woods. Early on, while Luke is watching a forbidden game, a ball lands at his feet. Throwing it back with his left hand, he amazes the crowd with both distance and placement. The ballplayers and his uncle, Micah, a sports editor for a northern Ohio newspaper, set about convincing Luke that wasting a talent such as his is the actual sin. When Luke decides to pitch for the team, a confrontation with his father ends in a violent beating, which later leads directly to the death of the father, when a crippled Luke is unable to save the man from drowning. Reviewing Choosing Up Sides, Elizabeth Bush described it in the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books as a novel that "pits fire and brimstone Fundamentalism against a rival religion—Baseball—and treats both with cathartic understanding." Patricia K. Ladd wrote in The ALAN Review that Ritter "addresses themes of autonomy and independence common to young adult readers and portrays plot through authentic dialect and well-developed characters", and his uses of dialogue, similes, metaphors, and imagery "add dimensions to the plot that leave readers pondering the book's messages long after turning the final page." Dr. Stefani Koorey in her Voice of Youth Advocates review maintained, "Unlike many sports novels, Choosing Up Sides does more than offer a mere glimpse of the grand old game of baseball—it takes a deeper look at faith, truth, and individuality", going on to dub the tale a "well-designed study of personal choice." For many years, Ritter painted the story the same way book critics did. The IRA Award-winning novel did indeed take a deeper look at faith. As Ritter revealed, nearly ten years later, Choosing Up Sides was actually inspired by a law passed by Colorado voters in 1992 known as Amendment 2 to the Colorado State Constitution, which prohibited enactment or enforcement of anti-discrimination protections for gay, lesbian and bisexual Coloradans. Though later declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, the law's enactment inspired Ritter to