Painting the Corners: Off-Center Baseball Fiction

Description

Bob Weintraub's marvelous collection of baseball stories goes directly to the core of what the game does for us when we watch it being played on the field, and shows how its heroes and villains can reach into our lives and remain a part of us for the rest of our days. The stories are told from various perspectives, including those of the player, manager, general manager, coach, scout, owner, writer, broadcaster, and fan. In "Knuckleball," a manager is beside himself when he can't let his star knuckleball pitcher start the seventh game of the World Series because the only catcher he's ever had in the big leagues suddenly goes down with an injury. The team from Alcatraz, in "The Way They Play Is Criminal," has a bag full of dirty tricks waiting to spring on its San Quentin rivals, and it uses them all. A father on a college tour with his daughter happens upon the very same autographed baseball he saw a friend catch in Fenway Park's bleachers thirty years earlier, and learns, in "The Autograph," how a twist of fate has brought the friend together with the player who hit it. In these and other stories, now in paperback, Weintraub infuses baseball with humanity, originality, humor, and compassion, and raises the game to a new level of understanding and love.

Bob Weintraub's stories have appeared in several publications including 96 Inc. and NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and Boston University School of Law and lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife, Sandra.

"Weintraub has executed a triple play: savvy baseball writing, unforgettable characters, and a home run ending for each tale." -W. P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe "Great storytelling for fans and nonfans alike. Bob Weintraub has big-league talent." -Dan Shaughnessy, author of The Curse of the Bambino and columnist for the Boston Globe "The prevailing trend seems to be to reduce baseball to numbers, to take out the adjectives and hyperbole, eliminating the descriptions of facial tics and personal travails and sunsets, to treat the game as some algebraic problem stretched across a blackboard in the basement of stats guru Bill James or some other math junkie. I myself prefer my baseball with the imagination left in, thank you very much. This collection of deft stories by Robert Weintraub takes us back to the bleachers and locker rooms, to the people who actually play and watch the game. Very nice. Very nice, indeed." -Leigh Montville, New York Times bestselling author of The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero "Imaginative baseball stories for long rain delays and hot stove league nights." -Darryl Brock, author of If I Never Get Back and Two in the Field "Unique and wonderfully twisted." -Ed Asner, actor "These stories are as faithful to the spirit of a ball game as a box score, yet with all the color of a yarn told in a clubhouse during a rain delay." -Michael Coffey, author of 27 Men Out: Baseball's Perfect Games "Weintraub has executed a triple play: savvy baseball writing, unforgettable characters, and a home run ending for each tale." -W. P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe "Great storytelling for fans and nonfans alike. Bob Weintraub has big-league talent." -Dan Shaughnessy, author of The Curse of the Bambino and columnist for the Boston Globe "The prevailing trend seems to be to reduce baseball to numbers, to take out the adjectives and hyperbole, eliminating the descriptions of facial tics and personal travails and sunsets, to treat the game as some algebraic problem stretched across a blackboard in the basement of stats guru Bill James or some other math junkie. I myself prefer my baseball with the imagination left in, thank you very much. This collection of deft stories by Robert Weintraub takes us back to the bleachers and locker rooms, to the people who actually play and watch the game. Very nice. Very nice, indeed." -Leigh Montville, New York Times bestselling author of The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero "Imaginative baseball stories for long rain delays and hot stove league nights." -Darryl Brock, author of If I Never Get Back and Two in the Field "Unique and wonderfully twisted." -Ed Asner, actor "These stories are as faithful to the spirit of a ball game as a box score, yet with all the color of a yarn told in a clubhouse during a rain delay." -Michael Coffey, author of 27 Men Out: Baseball's Perfect Games