Little Sunset

A copper-haired sparkplug named Little Sunset—offspring of a second-string catcher—lives for the thunderous applause that greets Apache slugger Gus Bergstrom, whose swing arcs like a comet across the drought-parched ballparks of 1910s America. When the boy’s widowed father, Jones, is drafted by the very squad that houses his idol, Sunset vaults from bleacher brat to dugout talisman, red curls bobbing beside pine-tarred bats and spit-shined cleats. Illness strikes the child like a brushback pitch; Bergstrom’s reflexes dull, his timing fractures, and a single misjudged fly ball detonates a manager’s tirade that ricochets through grandstand and heart alike. Disillusioned, Bergstrom abandons the diamond for the ledger books of a half-forgotten hometown, only to be lured back by telegraphed pleas and the memory of a boy who once stitched his dreams into every seam of a baseball. In a final blaze of splintered ash and crowd-thunder, Gus hoists the pennant, and Little Sunset—now convalescent but spiritually colossal—extends forgiveness as casually as tossing a ball back to the mound, sealing a covenant between innocence and the bruised gods of summer sport.