Gold Winner
“Best First Book: Fiction”
2015 Benjamin Franklin Book Awards.
Silver Winner
“Best Popular Fiction”
2015 Benjamin Franklin Book Awards.
An award-winning, Amazon #1 bestselling novel destined to become a classic.
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 on the edge of your seat. 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 :
Going down swinging is not an option . . .
Survival is the name of the game when two obsessed men teeter on the cusp of madness in a war over a kids’ baseball field in this thriller based on a true story.
Travel baseball promoter Rob Barkus has a full bench. He’s backed by a corrupt board of directors, a sports-fixated high school administration, and a mob of crazy travel baseball parents. He’ll stop at nothing to kill the town’s sandlot baseball league so that his elite travel teams can take over its beautiful Babe Ruth baseball field.
The only obstacle between Barkus and his field of dreams is David Thompson, a Civil War buff and burned-out lawyer. When Thompson steps up to save the crumbling league for his son and the rest of the sandlot players in town, Barkus unleashes a cunning and ruthless attack against David, his family, and his teenaged league of misfit players.
Thompson is outnumbered and surrounded. He’s like a man who walked into quicksand. The harder he struggles to save the league, the deeper he sinks. On top of it all, Thompson is stuck in a family Catch-22. If he surrenders, he might lose his son’s love along with his own self-respect, not to mention losing the game of summer for the sandlot kids in town. Yet if he doesn’t back down, it threatens his marriage and deprives his son of any chance to play on the high school team.
Thompson is on an emotional roller coaster and he can’t get off. He is fighting his own civil war as he struggles to make a difference in the town he cherishes without harming the family he loves.
Standing alone and pushed to his breaking point, he needs to figure out when to fold and when to fight. One thing is for sure: if he finally snaps, he won’t take any prisoners . . .
Get your copy of Saving Babe Ruth today!
Read Saving Babe Ruth as the prequel to the Lawyer David Thompson Series which starts with the The Killdeer Connection as the first book. The Killdeer Connection was selected as a 2017 winner in Amazon’s international Kindle Scout writing competition.
Saving Babe Ruth is an Amazon multiple category bestseller and winner of several awards:
Gold Winner, Benjamin Franklin Award, 2015 “Best First Book: Fiction.”
Silver Winner, Benjamin Franklin Award, 2015 “Best Popular Fiction.”
Readers Views, “Best Regional Fiction 2014/2015: Northeast.”
Finalist, “Best New Fiction,” 2014 USA Best Book Awards.
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. Check out the video below.
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.
Advance Praise and Reviews
Saving Babe Ruth is a “great story.”
~Tom Stevens, Babe Ruth’s grandson.
“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
“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
“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’ 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
