Hangman’s Game by Bill Syken Thomas Donne/Minotaur Books, $25.99, 320 pages, ISBN 978-1-250-06715-9 Kids everywhere dream of playing professional sports and being on a championship team. I remember for example—back in the late ‘50s when we were all playing Little League baseball in the upstate New York hamlet of Grahamsville—that we had regular, and dead serious, discussions about whether we’d rather play for the Yankees or the Brooklyn Dodgers.