The Ballplayer's Son

<p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>By the time The Brawl Heard 'Round the World blew up baseball on a hot Sunday in 1953 young Dell Franklin had been a regular in Pacific Coast League clubhouses for three years. His father former major leaguer Murray Big Moe Franklin was in the middle of the fight near the end of a nearly 20-year career in professional baseball with a chip on his shoulder that had been there even longer. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Big Moe's passion for the game was matched only by his fierce pride and determination to shape his son Dell into ballplayer and a man. Before long Dell's skills with a bat glove and on the bases advanced well beyond his years and Dell's own baseball career was launched as he developed into one of the top high school players in the baseball hotbed of Southern California. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>But other forces were at work both inside and outside young Franklin forces that began to pull Dell away from his baseball destiny as hard as his dad's legacy and his own fierce love of the game were pushing him towards it. </span></p><p><br></p><p><strong style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)><em>The Ballplayer's Son</em></strong><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> is full of passion grit and heartbreak. It is the story of baseball in the hard-nosed 30s 40s and 50s of a Jewish ballplayer who dealt with bigotry head on of a devoted dad's burning desire to play in the major leagues. And it is the story of a son who both feared and idolized his father whose personal journey went from soaring self-confidence to utter despair on the journey to find himself even if it was a self he barely recognized.</span></p>