Official Media Release:
Teresa Strasser just wasn’t doing grief “right.”
She was just devastated. Her wires were all crossed up. She felt stunned all the time. Felt anxious. Cleft. Guilty for living. And that guilt and anxiety seemed both cosmic and tangible at the same time. You see, grief is cumulative. And as she mourned the death of her beloved older brother Morgan—who had died of spinal cancer at age 47, leaving behind his young family—Teresa’s mother also passed, four months to the day after her brother. Amidst the tailspin that followed there was only one thing that buoyed her. One thing that gave her limitless hope and distraction in equal measure over the course of the worst spring of her life.
Little League baseball.
That fateful spring, Teresa’s oldest son came into his own on the fields of the Arcadia Little League in Phoenix, Arizona. Declared “the chosen one” by one league official, Nate helped lead his team—The Purple Pinstripes—in a magical season that lifted everyone’s spirits, not just the ones still lost in grief. At nine years old, his emerging athleticism and competitive nature blossomed under the Arizona sun and clearly reminded Teresa of her brother, who too had starred in Little League baseball decades before. Nate’s good play also lured her estranged, baseball-obsessed father back into her life on practice-to-practice, game-to-game basis. Over the course of that spring—while Teresa celebrated every hit and every strike with her dad by her side—she came to accept that it was hard to predict the whims and bounces of a baseball and that there are forces in life that we just cannot control. Yes, grief is a part of life and healing will eventually come, but if given a choice between grief or baseball, she and her dad would take baseball every time. Together.
That spring is the focus of Teresa’s new memoir “MAKING IT HOME: Life Lessons from a Season of Little League” (Berkley, June 6, 2023), a refreshingly frank and funny look at how a Little League mom and her broken-down, eccentric, old, retired mechanic dad became a grief group of two while bearing witness to a full season of pregame nerves and pitcher meltdowns; circus catches eternal concerns about all manner of “yips.” Dueling with the baseball gods, Teresa and her dad rooted with full voices and whole hearts sitting side-by-side in folding chairs behind home plate being fools together—recused from reasonable human behavior for that one spring—unhinged by a simply perfect season of Little League baseball and entertaining the vast possibilities of karma, redemption, and hope because Nate. Threw. Strikes. Who had it better than they did that spring? No one.
Together in Phoenix for the first time since she was a little girl after her parents divorced and divided the family, Teresa’s father was the only other person in the world who knew Morgan like she did. But there were old wounds and resentments that weren’t easily overlooked. Teresa admits that “forgiveness was a Koufax curveball she just couldn’t hit” with her parents after years of neglect and poor judgment, but grief needed a witness. Baseball gave them the excuse to be together and offer solace to each other, if only for nine innings at a time. They became a congregation of two in a chapel of chalk lines and regulated dimensions, where fair was fair, and foul was foul, and rules were rules. Baseball was their bubble. Their oasis. Every hit was a rebirth. Every strikeout new growth.
Teresa Strasser’s playful, wise-cracking prose presents both the heartbreaking and heartwarming with equal magnitude while painting a vivid picture of how hope and mortality; grief and euphoria can coexist harmoniously with Little League baseball at its core. Teresa offers the context of her challenging childhood by revisiting some tough memories but offers her father a late in life “do over” which he pays forward to Nate and his little brother Andrew by being there for them as much as possible, mostly on two wheels. Baseball gave them both belonging and purpose that spring. Baseball didn’t promise you a happy ending, but it always left room for one. And when The Purple Pinstripes vie for the Little League “Minors” championship that season, they quickly realize that “survive and advance” meant more to them than the games on the diamond.
Both magical and hysterical, MAKING IT HOME confirms that baseball is an invisible string that connects us all. It can’t be seen, but it can’t be broken either. It has the power to resurrect the dead. And your heart. And bring a family back together.
A “Must-Read” Best Book of 2023—USA Today
“Baseball has always been a way for people to come together.
In Making It Home Teresa and her father used baseball to come together and work through some of the most difficult circumstances we can imagine. This is a story about a team that becomes a family
and a family that becomes a team. It is a wonderful book that powerfully captures how we work through life’s challenges
with baseball as a backdrop.”
—Cal Ripken, Jr.
About the Author
Teresa Strasser is an Emmy-winning writer (Comedy Central) and Emmy-nominated television host (TLC). She has been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Arizona Republic, The Jewish Journal, HuffPost, and The Today Show. Her first-person essays have garnered three Los Angeles Press Club Awards, including Columnist of the Year. She’s appeared on The View, CNN, Good Morning America, The Talk, and Dr. Phil. Radio and podcast audiences know her as Adam Carolla’s co-host. Her first memoir, Exploiting My Baby: Because It’s Exploiting Me was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and optioned by ABC.
About the Book
Title: “MAKING IT HOME: Life Lessons from a Season of Little League” Author: Teresa Strasser
Release Date: June 6, 2023
Details: Trade Paperback Original / ???? pages / $18.00
ISBN-13: 9780593546086
— Joe Boesch