HOBART | Best-selling author Gary Moore has an unqualified love for the hero of his latest book.

The character is a sympathetic everyman, a teenage baseball prodigy whose promising career is detoured by World War II. The character is like family in very real ways.

"He's my father," Moore said as he signed copies of the book "Playing with the Enemy" on Saturday at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on U.S. 30 in Hobart.

Joining Moore were authors such as John Etter, who was promoting his book "The Indiana Legion," the story of the Civil War Indiana militia that helped protect the state from Southern sympathizers plotting to hand Indiana to the Confederacy. Debbie Ludwig also was on hand to promote her murder mystery "Innocent of Tribulation."

"Playing with the Enemy" chronicles the adventures of Gene Moore, a small town, teenage baseball player.

"Sesser (Ill.) had never had a hero, and Gene Moore was the closest they had ever come to putting one of their own on a pedestal," a line from the book reads.

At 15, Gene Moore was so good he was drafted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, Gary Moore said.

When the war began, Gene Moore joined the Navy to serve his country and was assigned to a touring Navy baseball team. Toward the end of the war, the Navy captured the German submarine U-505 and needed men to guard the prisoners.

With Navy and Marine personnel taxed to the limit in combat, Moore and his baseball team were tapped to guard the prisoners.

The team taught the Germans to play baseball, and in the process Moore shattered his ankle, effectively ending his career.

Gary Moore remembers, when he was 12, looking through a drawer and discovering an old yellow envelope with a letter dated after the war. The letter asked his father to report for tryouts with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

"I still limp, my ankle hurts every day, and I don't want to go through that again. My time has come and gone," Gene Moore told his hometown friends, according to the book.

Gary Moore said his father put the envelope in his pocket and never mentioned it again.

Gene Moore never encouraged his son to play baseball. The game had broken his heart, and he didn't want the same thing to happen to his son, Gary Moore said.

Highland's Ryan Serna, a Little League baseball player with Major League aspirations of his own, said the baseball, bat and glove on the book's cover immediately caught his eye. Ryan Serna said he has to read books about baseball, and his mother, Gina Serna, agreed.

"If he doesn't read it, I will," Gina Serna said.

The book is scheduled to be made into a movie and now is on sale in local bookstores.