Baseball's Best Short Stories

-- "This outstanding anthology is a testament to baseball's enduring drawing power as subject matter for some of our most renowned authors". -- Booklist

The first time available in paperback, this superb collection of short stories chronicles more than a century of America's love affair with baseball featuring writers from various eras. Many of the stories are about the game itself; others use baseball as a backdrop for writing about morality, greed, love, or other strong themes. All of them pay tribute to a game that has merged with our national identity.

In this collection of 27 baseball stories and one poem, good yarns slide between nostalgic reveries and thoughtful reflections on American culture. There's the extra-inning contest, the flame thrower versus the great slugger, the hot prospect who can't keep his mind on the game, the exhilarating win, the heartbreaking loss. Baseball, which we know so well from frolicking on the diamond as kids to carrying it in our hearts and minds as adults, belongs not to big business but to each of us. And as this wonderful anthology attests, it has inspired some winning fiction, from "My Roomy", written by Ring Lardner in 1914, to Damon Runyon's "Baseball Hattie", written in the baseball-mad fifties, to Garrison Keillor's 1988 story "Three New Twins Join Club In Spring". Batter up.