Baseball's Best Short Stories is, quite simply, a hit machine, grinding out--one after the other, 28 selections in all--just what its title promises. Leading off with Ernest Thayer's classic poem, "Casey at the Bat," it segues directly into Frank Deford's rumination of what happened to Casey when the poetry stopped, then rounds up the usual subjects: Zane Grey's "The Rube's Waterloo," Ring Lardner's "Alibi Ike" and "My Roomy," James Thurber's "You Could Look It Up," P.G. Wodehouse's "The Pitcher and the Plutocrat," Damon Runyon's "Baseball Hattie," T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Hector Quesadilla Story," and, behind them, a bullpen of considerable depth and breadth. Staudohar steps up with a paragraph of context and biographical data for each piece, but his overall introduction is merely short and serviceable; real fans of baseball's ample literature will likely wish it went deeper in exploring the long and rich tradition that his collection engagingly sends to the plate. --Jeff Silverman
From Publishers Weekly
With the current malaise surrounding the sport, the time is ripe for this excellent collection chronicling more than a century of America's love affair with baseball. With an all-star cast of writers drawn from various eras and genres, Staudohar (Labor Relations in Professional Sports) demonstrates how thoroughly the game permeates American life?its psychology, sense of drama, mythology and moral code provide archetypes familiar even to those who have never set foot in a ballpark. The tales dramatize the conflicts between youth and experience, pride and humility, skill and luck, team loyalty and personal ambition. Master storytellers like Ring Lardner (author of three entries here), Zane Grey, Damon Runyon, P.G. Wodehouse, Robert Penn Warren, James Thurber, Garrison Keillor and T. Coraghessan Boyle celebrate the national pastime in 27 memorable tales and one poem, some poignant, some uproarious, each introduced by a brief editor's note. Baseball and literary fans may debate whether these are indeed the "best" baseball stories (where's George Plimpton's "The Curious Case of Sydd Finch"?). So many good writers have felt the need to write about baseball that compiling a good anthology of baseball fiction isn't the hardest of tasks. Still, even if this project is a bit of a hanging curveball, Staudohar has hit it out of the park.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
