Great article on summer reading tips from the Washington Post, including a nice mention of the Ballpark Mysteries. One librarian got her son hooked on the Ballpark Mysteries books, and he used them as a jumping off point to explore the wider world around him. From the article:
Knowing her son is obsessed with baseball, Icaza helped him discover the Ballpark Mystery Series. “It clicked for him and he read the whole series,” she says. In fact, one summer, they went on vacation and he got a minor league baseball directory at a ballpark. He read about each team in the country. “It sounds very boring, but for him, he was learning about the mascots, and I liked it because he was learning about what cities were in different states.”