March 18 marks the start of Major League Baseball’s 2025 season. Over the last decade, reporters at the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times have lamented the sport’s dwindling popularity among young people. Accordingly, MLB has made efforts to entice younger fans, from implementing its Play Ball initiative to tweaking the rules to pick up the pace of games. MLB might also do well to look to the world of kid lit. Several recent middle-grade novels offer compelling perspectives on the great American pastime—books sure to have even nonathletes heading to the stadium, buying some peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and rooting for the home team.

For Cato, a Black 12-year-old growing up in Jim Crow–era North Carolina, every element of life is ruled by segregation, even baseball—until he and his teammates find themselves preparing for a game against the all-white Marlins. Amid racist attacks roiling the town, Cato slowly learns the truth about the death of his father, a pitcher for the Negro Baseball Leagues. Both action-packed and thoughtful, Sandra W. Headen’s Warrior on the Mound (Holiday House, 2024) draws from actual events for a rich look at history.

Pop culture has long portrayed artists and jocks as strange bedfellows—a trope that’s countered in the late Patricia MacLachlan’s posthumously published Painting the Game (McElderry, 2024), a spare yet potent story that follows 11-year-old Lucy as she learns to throw a knuckleball. She’s cheered on by her father, a minor league pitcher, and her mother, a painter who compares her artistic endeavors to the effort that goes into perfecting a pitch—an insight that highlights the beauty and grace of the game.

Softball becomes an anchor for twins Jac and Aggie after they move to Los Angeles and join a makeshift team of neighborhood kids. A modern take on A League of Their Own, Robin Benway’s The Girls of Skylark Lane (Harper/HarperCollins, 2024) features deftly rendered characters who support one another through crises big and small; friendship and sisterhood are at the core of this tenderly told tale.

Set in 1990, after the U.S. invasion of Panama, Tamika Burgess’ Danilo Was Here (Harper/HarperCollins, Jan. 21) centers on a young Black Panamanian athlete recruited to play in California. After traveling to the U.S., Danilo searches for his father, who emigrated to America seeking work but recently stopped calling. Burgess offers a remarkably nuanced depiction of the game as Danilo falls out of love with baseball, largely because of his disillusionment with his father, a passionate athlete who almost went pro. Danilo’s trajectory will speak to kids dealing with complicated emotions around sports—especially those feeling pressure to perform.

Timothy “Pumpsie” Strickland, the Black tween protagonist of Andrea Williams’ Inside the Park (Harper/HarperCollins, Feb. 4), ends up trapped overnight in the Nashville Wildcats’ stadium. What initially seems like a dream for the hardcore baseball fan swiftly turns frightening as he realizes he may not be alone. Williams balances thrills with introspective moments as Pumpsie contends with feelings of inadequacy and the pressures that paralyze him whenever he steps up to bat.

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.