In March of 1948, Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers came to Mobile, Alabama, on a whistle stop tour to play an unremarkable exhibition game that had remarkable consequences for the city, the black community, and for baseball itself.

Thrilled to see the man who broke major league baseball’s color barrier, Robinson’s brief appearance fueled a passion for the game among the city’s black population. One man, however, saw more than just excitement for a sport. Thirty-year-old Jesse Norwood saw a way to help the kids who would congregate beyond his stoop, lost and hopeless in the segregated South of the 1950s. Though having no baseball experience at any level, he realized he could take the model of the game and build it into a sense of dignity and pride.

Here’s to You, Jackie Robinson: the Legend of the Prichard Mohawks is the story of a man who transformed a gang of scrawny youngsters into both a team and a genuine force in the community. Norwood emerges as a figure worthy of legend, and his legacy can still be felt today.

With a novelist’s gift for storytelling, Formichella breathes life into a South long gone and creates a hero’s story, sometimes heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking, that begins in a sandlot and ends in the Baseball Hall of Fame.