Book excerpt: Jalen DeLuca applies his baseball genius to his own playing in the follow-up to Tim Green and Derek Jeter’s New York Times bestselling novel Baseball Genius. Jalen DeLuca loves baseball. But he’s more than just a fan and a talented player; Jalen is a baseball genius. He can analyze and predict almost exactly what a pitcher is going to do with his next pitch. His unique ability helped him save the career of the Yankees’s star baseman, James “JY” Yager, by signaling the pitches from the stands. Now turning his focus to his own baseball career, Jalen has to put his genius into action in new and untested ways. But without the stats and information he has on the pro players, analyzing the pitchers seems impossible. And even if he knows what the pitch will be, actually hitting it takes more than intuition. As if the pressure of the team and drama with his friends weren’t enough, one major event changes everything—Jalen’s mom comes back into his life. Can Jalen work through it all to hit a grand slam and make his baseball dreams a reality?