the fate of his land rest on the outcome of a single baseball game pitting a team of local ballplayers against an all-star squad from a neighboring community. "Do or die," Doc tells the townsfolk. "If our team wins… the town stays the way it is. If they lose, bring on the bulldozers." With the help of a mysterious newcomer, Cruz de la Cruz, Tom convinces a disgraced former major leaguer and social recluse, Dante Del Gato, to whip the Dillontown team into shape. Del Gato's character, Ritter reveals in an interview for the Baker & Taylor book distributor's newsletter, "was partially based on the real life tragic hero, Ken Caminiti, who was a big league MVP and batting champ in the '90s, but struggled with addictions, leaving the game under a cloud, and was dead by age 41." Once again heralding Ritter's authorial voice, a starred review in Publishers Weekly said the book's prose was "Enthralling...at times stunning," and that, "Ritter delivers a baseball tale of legendary dimension, featuring several larger-than-life characters." Writing in the Summer 2003 edition of The ALAN Review, editor Pamela Sissi Carroll noted, "This uplifting novel is a joy to read and to carry in the mind. Like Ritter's previous novels...[he] addresses the realities that trouble today's teens and the forces that shape and reshape local and national cultures. Yet John H. Ritter's game is unfailingly hopeful and encouragingly positive." Blair Christolon observed in School Library Journal that the work "is peppered with both optimism and dilemmas; it has plenty of play-by-play action, lots of humor, and a triumphant ending." "Baseball in Iraq" Despite the reception and commercial success of The Boy Who Saved Baseball, Ritter could not shake the ever-increasing depression he felt over the suffering caused by the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and subsequent loss of civil liberties at home. He began to use writing invitations to rail against the violent turn the nation had taken. In an essay published in the Summer 2004 volume of The ALAN Review, he wrote, "The idealistic hopes and dreams for a better America, for a more balanced and peaceful world which guided so many of us in the ‘60s and ‘70s has, in the last three years, evaporated into thunderclouds of arrogance, self-indulgence, anger, and fear." He used the invitation from editors M. Jerry and Helen Weiss, to contribute a short story to their