Baseball's best short stories

This anthology brings together twenty-eight exceptional short stories about the great game of baseball. Written over several decades by some of America's favorite writers, including Zane Grey, James Thurber, Robert Penn Warren, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Chet Williamson, many of the stories are about the game itself; other use baseball as a backdrop for timeless themes, such as morality, greed, and love. All of them pay tribute to a game that has emerged with our national identity. The stories on these pages conjure that mixed aroma of dirt and peanuts and seem to produce that promising sound of a bat making contract with a ball. They renew faith that even with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, a come-from-behind victory is still possible, and they show us baseball at its most entertaining, 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." Good yarns slide in between nostalgic reveries on the lore of the game and thoughtful reactions on American culture.