Legions of baseball aficionados remember that Ray Liotta, who died in May, played Shoeless Joe Jackson in the heartwarming film Field of Dreams. That movie inevitably comes to mind when fans enjoy America’s national pastime, along with peanuts, fireworks, and seventh-inning stretches. But when they’re not visiting the clamorous ballpark, devotees can read books about bleacher bums and the boys of summer. Kirkus Indie recently reviewed three bracing baseball novels.
Steve Hermanos’ Going, Going, Gone! focuses on three San Francisco Giants teammates who travel back in time to 1906 and end up with the New York Giants. But this timeline features New Glory, a Cuban slave empire founded by Confederates who now want an atomic bomb. They propose a “Solar Series” between their league and the Giants. Our reviewer calls the work “a raucously entertaining, richly atmospheric SF sports fable.”
In The Baseball Widow by Suzanne Kamata, an American named Christine lives in Japan with her husband, Hideki Yamada, a high school baseball coach, and their two children, one of whom is disabled. The determined Hideki wants to see his team compete in the national championship, turning Christine into “a baseball widow.” The depiction “of Japanese baseball will be fun for those who are unfamiliar” with that world, our critic writes.
A former college baseball phenomenon gets hit by a car in Roland Colton’s Baseball Immortal. Then a disfigured John Doe wakes up in a hospital and claims to be the legendary player Ty Cobb, who died in 1961. Eventually, Cobb must deal with a radically different sport: “The game had changed from a contest of cunning….It was now ‘boom or bust’ as nearly every batter, it seemed, was swinging from their heels.” According to our reviewer, Colton delivers an “enjoyable yarn about Ty Cobb confronting modern-day baseball.”
Myra Forsberg is an Indie editor.
