Choosing Up Sides

Choosing Up Sides is a 1998 work of young adult fiction by John Ritter. Centered around baseball, it follows thirteen-year-old Luke Bledsoe, who grapples with his irrational father, a preacher. When the family moves to Ohio, Mr. Bledsoe forces Luke out of baseball, which is Luke’s favorite pastime. In response, Luke tries to play in secret while juggling the social implications of his disobedience with the many absurd rules and regulations imposed by his strict father. As he learns to distinguish the rational from the irrational, Luke slowly replaces traditional modes of thought with his own system of more progressive values. In this way, Choosing Up Sides follows a modified bildungsroman plot, in which the protagonist matures not by internalizing and accepting social norms, but by analyzing and selecting ones that represent moral goodness.

The novel begins in 1921. Luke has just moved with his family from the South to a town in Ohio. In his former town, social life was influenced by a strong, regressive religious ideology. Luke vividly remembers being taught that the left side of the human body falls within the devil’s domain and is inherently evil. Luke has lingering trauma stemming from this illogical norm; growing up as a left-handed kid, he was forced to use his nondominant hand. Whenever he erred, his father would punish him with verbal and physical abuse.

When the family moves to Ohio, Luke’s paranoid father is immediately on the lookout for signs of the devil. One day, Luke starts to play baseball. He soon learns that he has an incredible knack for the sport, especially as a pitcher. When his father finds out, he claims that baseball is “the devil’s playground.” Luke experiences cognitive dissonance between his knowledge that the sport is obviously innocuous and unrelated to the devil and his father’s dire claims and threats. Luke’s mother, meanwhile, does not stand up for him, deferring to the father’s traditional patriarchal authority. It is implied that Mr. Bledsoe also abuses his wife.



Meanwhile, Luke tries to learn about his new town and experience the joys of teenage life. He rides on a steamboat for the first time and marvels at the gargantuan feat of modern engineering. He also discovers new social and cultural norms. Compared to the South, Ohio’s more progressive environment isn’t squelched by irrational rules, and it’s generally more accepting of different life paths—with the exception of the period’s pervasive, debilitating racism. Luke also spends time with his Uncle Micah, who’s very different from Luke’s father and encourages Luke to defy his father’s rules. Micah relates his own childhood to Luke, showing his nephew how society was once even more regressive and providing important context for Mr. Bledsoe’s ignorance.

One day, on a fishing trip, Micah observes Luke struggling to use his right hand on the rod in order to respect his father. After Micah tells him it is perfectly OK to use his dominant hand, Luke comes to understand that much of his father’s ignorance is learned rather than willingly adopted.

During one of his tournament baseball games, Luke decides to use his left hand, thinking it will not cause any harm since his father is not present. After securing a win, he triumphantly returns home. When the next newspaper is released, it features a picture of Luke batting with his left hand. Mr. Bledsoe returns home and condemns his son for putting the family in pain. A church member approaches Mr. Bledsoe about the paper, but surprises the preacher by raving about his son’s performance rather than his use of the left hand. This embarrasses Mr. Bledsoe, but hardly provokes him to evaluate the norms that constitute his religious system.



The novel ends at the Bledsoe home in a scene that demonstrates Luke’s fundamental difference from his father. Mr. Bledsoe forces Luke to place his left hand on a table, then beats it with a belt buckle, disfiguring it, as Mrs. Bledsoe and her daughter scream. With his family reacting against him, Mr. Bledsoe leaves the house.

The ambiguous, ironic ending of Choosing Up Sides suggests that while Mr. Bledsoe may be weighed down by an ingrained ignorance, other members of the family have grown beyond his regressive views. Both sad and hopeful, Ritter’s novel portrays the rational mindset as something grounded in openness, community, and love, rather than in an individualistic interpretation of tradition.