Gr 7 Up –Readers who have been enduring football season just to make it to baseball spring training will be happy to find this on the shelves. Each player is given the full biographical treatment, including “The Greatest Career Moments,” which are accompanied by QR codes linking to videos of the specific plays. A chapter dedicated to player quotes rates the sound-bites on their originality; some are more cliché than others. It would be an interesting research project to analyze the ingenuity of these short speeches. Text-dependent questions and research project suggestions cap off each chapter. Each book concludes with a chapter about charitable work and personal details. While mostly good, there is some questionable formatting that complicates reading. “The Greatest Career Moments” are inserted into chapter one of each book, breaking up the narrative (in the case of Justin Verlander, splitting a sentence with a nine-page break).

VERDICT Cherry-pick based on local popularity.