Dead Balls and Double Curves An Anthology of Early Baseball Fiction Edited and with an Introduction by Trey Strecker Foreword by Arnold Hano March 2004 paper, 0-8093-2562-4, $19.95 cloth, 0-8093-2561-6, $60.00 368 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 Baseball / Fiction    Writing Baseball Richard Peterson, series editor “So this is baseball, and it is fiction; tall tales are told, romance flourishes, heroism and extraordinary skill brighten the pages. . . . The anthology touches more than all the bases. It touches the heart.” —Arnold Hano, from the Foreword   Dead Balls and Double Curves: An Anthology of Early Baseball Fiction collects twenty-two classic stories from baseball’s youth, presented in chronological order to capture the development of this most American of sports. Many of these tales have never before been reprinted, adding historical value to the rich literary merits of this anthology.   Editor Trey Strecker’s collection begins with an informal village match in an excerpt from James Fenimore Cooper’s Home as Found (1838), published the year prior to Abner Doubleday’s alleged invention of the game outside Cooperstown, New York, and concludes with the arrival of the superstar slugger that signaled the end of the dead-ball era in Heywood Broun’s The Sun Field (1923). The sampling of fiction from the eighty-five-year interim loads the bases with the humor, realism, and athletic gallantry of the sport’s earliest years. Not all grandstanding and heroism, these stories also explore cultural and class conflicts, racial strife, town rivalries, labor disputes, gambling scandals, and the striking personalities that decorated a simple game’s evolution into a national pastime.   Dead Balls and Double Curves presents a lineup of first-division writers, including Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Christy Mathewson, Edna Ferber, and the game’s poet laureate, Ring Lardner, plus legendary characters such as Baseball Joe, South-Paw Skaggs, Tin Can Tommy, and the sole artiste of the mythic double curve, Frank Merriwell. Throughout the volume, each author’s abiding affection for the game and its characters shines through with diamond-like focus. An assistant professor at Ball State University, Trey Strecker teaches English and sports studies. He is the editor of The Collected Baseball Stories of Charles Van Loan, and his essays have appeared in Nine, Critique, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction.   The Lineup   “A Game of Ball,” from Home as Found by James Fenimore Cooper (1838) “The Base Ball Match,” from Changing Base by William Everett (1868) “Our Base Ball Club,” from Our Base Ball Club and How it Won the Championship by Noah Brooks (1884) “This Experiment Was Baseball,” from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (1889) “At the Polo Grounds,” from The Plated City by Bliss Perry (1895) “This Animal of a Buldy Jones” by Frank Norris (1897) “Seeking the Secret of the Double Shot,” from Frank Merriwell’s Double Shot by Burt L. Standish (1899) “The Alumni Game,” from Won in the Ninth by Christy Mathewson (1910) “The Bride and the Pennant,” from The Bride and the Pennant by Frank Chance (1910) “The Humming Bird” by Owen Johnson (1910) “Mathewson, Incog.” by Charles Van Loan (1911) “The Strange Case of South-Paw Skaggs,” by Arthur Chapman (1911) “Joe’s Run,” from Baseball Joe of the Silver Stars by Lester Chadwick (1912) “A Bush League Hero” by Edna Ferber (1912) “Fair-Weather Hits” by Louis Graves (1913) “The Diamond Jester” by Frank Evans (1914) “The Jinx,” from The Double Squeeze by Henry Beach Needham (1914) “Back to Baltimore” by Ring Lardner (1914) “The Redheaded Outfield” by Zane Grey (1915) “The Insignificant ‘Dub’” by Hugh S. Fullerton (1918) “Tin Can Tommy,” from Hearts and the Diamond by Gerald Beaumont (1921) “Mrs. Tiny Tyler,” from The Sun Field by Heywood Broun (1923)

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