Getting To First Base With Danalda Chase

by Matt Beam

After the party, and for the rest of the summer, I couldn’t stop thinking about girls and baseball. I was beginning to think Ralph was right about the connection between the two. Both look pretty simple from the outside: there’s a ball, you hit it, you run; there’s a girl, you like her, you take her out. But in the end, they both end up being way more complicated. Life is changing for Darcy Spillman. Being the quiet, baseball-crazy kid was fine in primary school when you had two best friends to hang with, but the rulebook is different in junior high. Ralph’s defected to the in-crowd. Nerdy Dwight finds a new friend who’s even nerdier. But Danalda Chase, the impossibly pretty, totally cool girl, is suddenly very interested in Darcy, and he’s not sure what to do. He can’t ask his grandpa, who’s been acting very strange lately—and the only thing Darcy knows is baseball. Maybe the rules of the game will work for his social life? In a funny, often poignant and always intelligent story, Matt Beam mines the classic connections between baseball, love and life. With its combination of sensitive hero and baseball lore, Getting to First Base with Danalda Chase will resonate with both boys and girls.

Genres: Young Adult

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Matt Beam was born in Toronto in 1970. He was a sports fanatic as a young boy, playing everything from baseball to wall ball, ice hockey to road. His favourite writers at the time were Gordon Korman, John Christopher, and Susan Cooper. He seriously disliked (and still dislikes) turnips, bubble gum and the smell of new cars.

After a fun and fruitful childhood and his chock-o-block teen days, or as he likes to call them, "his research years," Matt got serious and studied history at Dalhousie University. After 4 years of heads-down work, Matt decided it was time to have some more fun. Over the next five years, he went to Guatemala, Vancouver, Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand. Down under, he earned a degree in education, and hopped across the ditch to NZ, the land of the Kiwis, sheep and the All-Blacks, where he taught grade 8 for a year, before finally deciding to return home to follow his (almost) lifelong dream of becoming a writer.

Matt has been writing fiction since the winter of 1999. When he started he had no idea what he was doing. He's only recently been upgraded to the uncertain status of having some idea of what he is doing. How boring would life and writing be if you had it all figured out.

Reviews

[Nat]

This was a quick, fun read. I liked reading this type of story from a boy's point of view, especially a young boy's. Darcy equates love & baseball as the same thing and learns in chasing after the popular girl Danalda Chase, getting what you want really isn't all that it's cracked up to be. It was nice to see the parents have some involvement with the plot and the side plot with the grandfather was touching and sad at the same time. It's a nice book.

[Salsabrarian]

Booktalk: No doubt about it, Darcy Spillman lo-oves baseball. He talks baseball with his buddies everyday, reads biographies of ball players and hates it when the World Series is over because it means one thing: no baseball all winter. But now that Darcy is in junior high there's other stuff getting in the way of baseball: harder homework, cliques and a certain beautiful blonde named Danalda Chase. Darcy knows a lot about baseball but not much about girls. He thinks "getting to first base" means you've hit a single. Well, yeah, that is true, but not when we're talking about girls. Darcy needs a coach, someone to help him read the signals and not go down swinging. Because when it comes to girls, you never know when a spitball might be coming. Darcy definitely needs a game plan for GETTING TO FIRST BASE WITH DANALDA CHASE.