Gold Winner, “Best First Book: Fiction,” 2015 Benjamin Franklin Book Awards.
Silver Winner, “Best Popular Fiction,” 2015 Benjamin Franklin Book Awards.
Click the Amazon book cover above to see the reviews and to grab a copy!
Available at most ebook retailers.
Paperback edition available at all fine bookstores.
What happens when a town goes crazy over sports? Based on a true story, Saving Babe Ruth shows exactly what can happen. Buckle up for a thrill ride that will have you laughing and thinking. The novel will show you the real deal in an entertaining way. Saving Babe Ruth has received rave reviews from literary critics (scroll down) and readers alike.
Saving Babe Ruth is so much more than about baseball though. Its second place finish in the Ben Franklin Awards for “Best Popular Fiction” in 2015 means the novel has wider appeal beyond baseball fans. The book is also about a family struggling to stay together. It’s about a town drowning in secrets and double lives. It’s about kids struggling to find an identity in life with very few options available to them. It’s about crime, corruption, and greed. It’s about a pair of men who take the world on to try and make it a better place. It’s also a story about a team of misfits who struggle on the baseball field and off the field. And Saving Babe Ruth is a novel so controversial that it’s causing a stir in the professional sports world too. Keep reading.
Here’s the story line for Saving Babe Ruth:
Based on a true story, Saving Babe Ruth is an award-winning novel about a family headed by David Thompson, a burned-out lawyer and Civil War buff. When he learns that the town’s youth baseball league is going to fold, David’s love for the sport and for his son, Christy, inspire him to try and save it for the kids in town. David puts his fading career on hold as he struggles to resurrect this dream while at the same time trying to save his marriage to his wife, Annie.
Though Christy and Annie want to see him save the league, David finds himself in way over his head. The more he passionately tries to save it, the more he ends up hurting Christy and Annie. It’s a catch-22 that leaves his family wounded and David tormented, wedged between his desire to revive the league so he can live with himself, and the desire to heal his family so they can live with him.
When David starts to keep secrets from Annie to satisfy these desires, he weaves a web of deceit that further fractures the family. At the same time, the town wrestles to keep its own secrets under wraps while it almost bursts with people leading double lives. They want David and the league to fail, and they’ll stop at nothing to get what they want, even if they have to go through Christy and Annie to get it.
With the help of Johnny McFadden–a newfound friend who’s addicted to baseball–David concocts a plan to defend the league and his family. The pair will have to navigate through a maze of backroom politics, corruption, scandal and crime that extends to the professional sports world. David will have to call upon all of his legal and survival skills to try and turn things around.
Saving Babe Ruth is also the inspiring story about a baseball team full of teenage outcasts struggling to believe in themselves. When the time is right, they’ll face the prospect of having to fight crazy with crazy to save baseball for themselves, their town and beyond.
The novel reveals the underbelly of youth sports that’s hurting communities nationwide today, but readers and reviewers say you don’t have to be a fan of baseball or sports to enjoy the story. Its themes, including one of community responsibility, are beginning to resonate. The story is so powerful that one of the nation’s leading professional sports agents has threatened a lawsuit over the book. The novel has even caused one town to come to a standstill to hold an emergency board meeting over it.
New York Times bestselling author Margot Livesey says Swyers “has created a man for all seasons” in David Thompson and calls Saving Babe Ruth “an absorbing and compulsively readable novel.”
Saving Babe Ruth is the winner of a number of accolades, including the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Book Award for “Best First Book: Fiction.”
If you like fast-paced and humor-laced stories mixed with some history, don’t miss this family’s fight to stay together as it confronts a youth sports underworld loaded with captivating characters.
Saving Babe Ruth recently made news when one of the nation’s top pro sports agents threatened a lawsuit over it, causing his double life to be revealed. See the trailer below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prF7iOmq1vk
Read the October 29, 2014 post that went viral: “Novel Saving Babe Ruth Will Triumph Over Threat From Nationally Known Sports Agent and High School Principal, J.R. Rickert.” Here’s the link.
Also read the August 3, 2014 post: “Swyers Interview with Smith Reveals Controversy Behind Saving Babe Ruth.” Click Here to Read.
Click the Amazon book cover above to see the reviews and to grab a copy!
Advance Praise and Reviews
“You don’t have to be a baseball fan but only a fan of human drama to relish this story of intrigue and dedication on and off the diamond.”
~Carl Strock, former columnist for The Daily Gazette and author of From D’burg to Jerusalem
“Saving Babe Ruth is a novel based on a true story…. It’s rare to see a thriller format embedded in a book about a ball game. Most such approaches create a ‘whodunnit’ mystery and leave the elements of a good thriller piece out of the picture entirely. Not so Saving Babe Ruth, which blends its thriller with a focus on the politics and processes of youth sports and centers on how a baseball team of outcasts struggles to make a name for themselves against all odds.
Oh, and if you expect cut-and-dried scenarios, think again: that’s evident from the novel’s startling opening: ‘Armed with an 1859 Sharps carbine, David Thompson gazed beyond the baseball field, across the asphalt and slate-shingled suburban homes of Indigo Valley, wondering how these twenty-one thousand residents would feel if they knew that baseball was dying…. He felt certain Annie would think he had lost it if she knew he was at the kids’ baseball field armed with a gun.’
Now, David’s solutions to problems are anything but conventional – and, they work. At least, they worked in his law office to some degree. But here on the baseball field where anonymous letters, parental interactions, a board of education concerned about school statistics, and student concerns intersect, who can say which unconventional approaches will work and which won’t?
All David knows is that it’s up to him to turn around not just a team, but a town. What it takes to achieve this goal is entirely up to him.
Saving Babe Ruth is all about the corruption of power, the bigger picture, young players struggling to succeed, and the progressive involvement of an adult who comes to realize that there’s much more at stake than simply building up a team.
Wry humor is woven into encounters (you have to look for it; but it’s there!), there’s a healthy dose of special interest intrigue that pops up in daily interactions . . . and David finds himself more than mired in the quicksand of dangerous associations when he probes beyond the Babe Ruth league’s transparent surface.
The result is a fast-paced, changing baseball novel that is especially recommended for sports fans and those who enjoy thrillers filled with unexpected moments!”
~Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“Tom Swyers hits it out of the ballpark with Saving Babe Ruth. Like any good baseball game, there’s something for everyone, a little history, some family conflict and personal revelation. Bases are loaded and it’s the bottom of the ninth as you read this novel.”
~Amy Wallen, bestselling author of MoonPies and Movie Stars
“Tom Swyers has created a man for all seasons in David Thompson. Faced with increasingly difficult choices on behalf of his baseball league, his town and his family, Thompson rises magnificently, and surprisingly, to the occasion. Saving Babe Ruth is an absorbing and compulsively readable novel.”
~Margot Livesey, author of New York Times best seller The Flight of Gemma Hardy
“His writing style is engaging and his plot intriguing…. His dialog is sharp and intentional, consistent with the storyline. Hidden nuances add subtle humor as well as reveal sensitivity to the propensity of character flaws to produce obsessive behavior patterns. A cycle of conflict resolution only brings with it a new series of incredible hurdles. Saving Babe Ruth is entertaining, informative, and memorable, likely gaining Tom Swyers a spot on 2014’s award-winning debut authors.”
~Richard Blake, Reader Views
“Tom Swyers has written a compelling, realistic novel based on true events. This is a page turner with excitement and mystery driving readers through to the conclusion.”
~Rosi Hollenbeck, San Francisco Book Review
“Tom Swyers debuts with a novel that is truly one of a kind. Saving Babe Ruth is a truly original story that possesses many great elements of story telling.”
~R.C. O’Leary, author of the legal thriller, Hallways in the Night
“Tom Swyers’ novel has you rooting for the underdog from his scrappy beginning to the end of the big game.Throughout the book, Swyers’ love of the game is obvious, which gives the story a strong foundation. The characters are well-written. David brings to mind a mid-nineties Kevin Costner who retains his wholesomeness even when he’s firing a historical weapon at his rival….Overall, Saving Babe Ruth is a fun read with a lot of heart and is perfect for both baseball and thriller fans.”
~Alyssa Gnall, Portland Book Review
