Jason and the Baseball Bear

by Dan Elish

Fourth-grader Jason, the only member of his Little League team who can talk with animals, improves his team's chances to win the championship with the help of an elderly polar bear named Whitney

147 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1990

About the author

Dan Elish is the author of eleven novels, including the upcoming KING OF BROADWAY (Olympia Press, 2025). Dan's other books include THE WORLDWIDE DESSERT CONTEST (Orchard Books and Bantam), THE SCHOOL FOR THE INSANELY GIFTED (Harpers), NINE WIVES (for grown-up types/St. Martins), and BORN TOO SHORT (S&S) which won a 2004 International Reading Association Students’ Choice Award for young adult literature.

Dan also writes musicals - many for children (music and lyrics) - but also the script (with Robert Horn) to the musical 13 which played at the Mark Taper Forum and won the 2007 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for best production; the show moved to Broadway in 2008 and is now a feature on Netflix, named one of the best ten films of 2022 by Variety. Dan is also the book writer and co-lyricist of THE EVOLUTION OF MANN which played at the Cell Theater in NYC in 2018.

Dan has also written scripts for TV (notably CYBERCHASE and THE WONDER PETS), and has won scholarships and fellowships to The Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. He was a member of the BMI workshop and a current member of the Dramatists Guild.

Dan lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

Reviews

[Robert Fallows · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember loving this book as a kid and reading it with my 7 year old reminded me why. Good father/son book!

[A.Jay Wagner]

Jason and the Baseball Bear by Dan Elish (1990)