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Brothers at Bat: The True Story of an Amazing All-Brother Baseball Team

Brothers at Bat:  The True Story of an Amazing All-Brothers Baseball Teamby Audrey Vernick, illustrated by Steven Salerno
Houghton Mifflin, 2012.  40 pgs.  Nonfiction.

    The really amazing thing about the Acerra family baseball team is that with nine boys on a baseball team, the Acerra family had seven kids left over.  Actually, all twelve of the Acerra boys played on the team--nine on the field and three in the dugout at any given time. Not only were there plenty of Acerra boys for a team, there were plenty of good ones--Jimmy had a knuckleball hardly anyone could hit; Anthony hit a couple of home runs into the Atlantic Ocean from a waterfront stadium. At one time, the Acerra boys ranged in age from 32 to 7, and the oldest nine boys started their own semi-pro baseball team. As the longest-playing all-brother baseball team in history, they were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown where you can see their pictures today if you should be so lucky as to go there.  Audrey Vernick's text and Steven Salerno's pictures work perfectly together to tell a wonderful story of sports in America.

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