BASEBALL IMMORTAL

In this novel, a baseball legend finds himself in the present day.

In the opening scene of Colton’s series opener, a tense baseball game is in progress. It won’t take readers long to figure out the game actually happened a century ago. And sure enough, Ty Cobb, the star of the Detroit Tigers, soon makes an appearance. After the game, the story’s action shifts to the present, with a man named Chase Ripley staggering drunk out onto the sidewalk at a bar’s closing time. The former college baseball prodigy is reeling from the death of his imperious father (“The only time his father ever gave him praise was when he had a perfect day at the plate”). Chase doesn’t see the car bearing down on him until it’s too late. When the tale resumes, a badly disfigured John Doe awakens in a hospital—and claims to be Ty Cobb, somehow alive again as a young man many decades after the baseball luminary’s death in 1961. As this restored Cobb recovers, he’s forced to deal with a very altered state of the world—and baseball. Colton eases his readers into this amusing premise with a good deal of narrative skill and patience. This leads to many dramatic payoffs, not the least of which is the opportunity it gives both the author and Cobb to comment on current-day baseball. At one point, Cobb muses: “It was clear that the game had changed from a contest of cunning and deception…to waiting for the circuit clout. It was now ‘boom or bust’ as nearly every batter, it seemed, was swinging from their heels, producing a proliferation of strikeouts and homeruns.” Baseball fans will likely love this kind of stuff (although some of them may disagree with the warm, appealing version of the famously unlikable Cobb presented here). And readers who aren’t aficionados of America’s national pastime will still appreciate the well-done time-travel mystery that unfolds throughout the book.

An intriguing, enjoyable yarn about Ty Cobb confronting modern-day baseball.