Baseball Humour

Humor is the best part of baseball. To survive a long season, the everyday schedule, and the failure that is inherent in the game people have always needed a good laugh about a ballgame from time to time. The stories in Baseball Humor: A Collection of Stories by Master Storytellers poke good fun at the struggles, ambition, greed, romance, envy, wisdom, and quirks of the players, managers, wives, and fans. Included are “The Pitcher and the Plutocrat” by P G Wodehouse, “Horseshoes” and “Alibi Ike” by Ring Lardner, “The Red-Headed Outfield” and “The Rube” by Zane Gray, and many others.

A succinct history of baseball, newly revised and updated. In this third edition of his lively history of America's game, widely recognized as the best of its kind, Benjamin G. Rader expands his scope, covering record crowds and record income, construction of new ballparks, a change in the strike zone, a surge in recruiting Japanese players, and an emerging cadre of explosive long-ball hitters. The book is published by The University of Illinois Press.

Considered one of the best baseball novels of all time, this black comedy about a discontented businessman's obsession with a fantasy baseball league of his own creation is "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" meets William Gaddis meets John Updike's Rabbit, Run. Somewhere in a "major-league" American city, there lives a man named J. Henry Waugh—no-account accountant, barfly, and country music fan.

Baseball has always been a symbol as much as a sport. With a blend of individual confrontation and team play, a luxurious pace, and an immaculate urban parkland setting, it offers a sunny rendering of the American Dream, both the hard work that underpins it and the rewards it promises. Film, America's other national pastime, which magnifies and mythologizes all it touches, has long been the ideal medium to canonize this aspirational idea.

Marilyn Monroe died just after midnight on August 5, 1962; former Little League champion Kimitake "Clyde" Koba was born on the same day, at the same time. As Clyde struggles to escape the ghost of his brother and his alcoholic father and stumbles through his first love, he finds strength in the belief that he is the reincarnation of Monroe. Meanwhile....

From the beloved creator of the wildly popular Sam O’Nella Academy YouTube channel, an irreverent and timely science fiction collection that offers a wry look at the not-so-distant future Sam A. Miller, the creator behind Sam O'Nella Academy, has spent ten years teaching his 4.8 million...

Dwayne Devero is just like you and me, except he simply doesn’t give a sh*t anymore. He’s had enough. He’s done with people living life wrong. You’ll do it right, or he’ll bury you under the bases at the ballpark where he coaches. It’s just that simple. Tired of poor decisions being made all around him, from the politics of player positions on his son’s little league baseball team to the philandering of his wife in his own bedroom, Dwayne decides that breaking is better than bending.

In this briskly paced novella involving far more than America’s pastime, an older man befriends an angry young boy following one of his disastrous practices. The boy is clearly the worst player on his team, yet he is desperate to improve. So the man sets out to give him some pointers about the game and possibly about life, amid initial reservations from the boy’s mother, and violent opposition from his vulgar and abusive stepfather.

It seems that the FDR writer is back wanting more Fe-As-Ko stories from cowpoke Royal Leckner. This time it's 1897, Royal and E.M. have been married about four years. And so have Leviticus and Lou(ella) Perrault, owners of the Four Arrows ranch. Royal is still foreman of the ranch and caretaker of its owner. As he reminds us, Leviticus and Lou(ella) Perrault are "short a hat size," but "nice and honest, which is better than smart and fox-like any day." It's time to take the cattle to Portland for the annual sale, and Royal is bringing Leviticus along to teach him how "to sign on the dotted line."