Where is the truth about baseball to be found? In nostalgic stories of the timeless bond woven between fathers and sons on the ball field. Or in stinging expos about manipulative owners, abusive coaches, and greedy players. Beginning with a mostly truthful essay about an exhausted university department chair who believes a visit to Cooperstown can save his soul and ending with the story of a delusional university professor who loses his mind because he takes baseball-and baseball writing-too seriously, Extra Innings tackles the question of how writing about baseball has shaped our...

Selected as one of baseball literature's Golden Dozen by Roger Kahn, Man on Spikes is an uncompromisingly realistic novel about a baseball player who struggles through sixteen years of personal crises and professional ordeals before finally appearing in a major league game. In a preface to this new edition, Eliot Asinof reveals the longsuffering ballplayer and friend upon which the novel is based.

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Eliot Asinof s newest baseball hero left tiny Gandee, Missouri, as John Clyde Cagle Jr., a hard-throwing lefthander who had pitched a perfect game in high school. Now he returns in triumph as the legendary Black Jack, superstar of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a stoic, menacing mound demon with a Fu Manchu moustache and a 106-mile-per-hour fastball.In a nationally televised event that, like everything else in his life, is precisely orchestrated by agent and money manager Gordon Stanley, Jack s return is to dedicate Black Jack Field, the two-million-dollar ballpark he has donated to his hometown....