My inspiration for this film was an old photograph of a youth baseball team that my father carefully saved for sixty years. The photo is of his team the day they won their division championship game in Fenway Park in 1937. My father is in the center of the picture. He is fourteen years old and he is holding a baseball in his left hand. He was the team’s only pitcher. I had seen the photo many times, but the day after he died while making a collage of photos to display at his memorial I saw the photo as if for the first time. I saw his young face, not as my father but as a boy with dreams and aspirations, a boy with his life ahead of him. Yet I knew what none of the boys in the photo knew then. In four years America would be attacked and these boys would enlist to fight in a war that would change their lives and alter their dreams. One thing that would not change for them was their love of baseball. I wondered why playing baseball had been so meaningful to them, and why one game was so important that the photo and story were shared with children and grandchildren. I wanted to make this documentary now to remember a generation that responded to the crisis of its time but also because we are currently living through another wave of immigration similar to that which brought my grandparents to America in the hopes of finding a new home. Their children found baseball. Baseball is a team sport but one where every player faces the pitcher alone. As in baseball how we handle ourselves as individuals as well as how we work together seem to me to be the essence of the American spirit.