Baseball Fiction

Just one short season ago, major league center fielder John Roper had it all: the looks—and personal life—of a sports hero and the public’s adoration. But this hot property’s lucky streak has run out. After a World Series disaster, fans diss him, shock jocks mock him, and his dysfunctional family hassles him for money he really can’t spare. Now it’s up to him, and Hot Zone publicist Amy Stone, to get his life back on track.

Micki Jordan is a tomboy as much at home on the playing field as in a locker room full of naked guys. But the star publicist is looking to prove she’s also an irresistible woman in order to get a second shot at professional baseball player and major league playboy, Damian Fuller. Micki transforms herself into one hot number Damian can’t help but notice, and together they burn up the sheets and find themselves falling hard. That is until Damian’s past returns, threatening their future.

Griffin: All it takes is four days to change my carefully planned-out life. Four days to fall for Peyton Monroe. Four days to convince her to give me . . . us a chance. Before her, baseball was the center of my world. Being the best. Getting a full-ride scholarship. Getting drafted. Going pro. But from the moment my frisbee lands at her feet on the beach, I can't stop thinking about her. She's beautiful, funny, smart . . . and lives thirteen hours away. Long-distance love is a complication I should avoid, but staying away from Peyton is not an option.

Set in 1950 in the rural Midwest, and inspired by real events, this gripping novel explores what happens when an African American railroad repair crew is dropped into a tiny, tight-knit farm community. Will frictions build to an all-too familiar American tragedy, or can tensions be overcome in that uniquely American way, with balls and bats and a field of green? Seventeen-year-old Carlin Littman has big dreams, much bigger than will fit into sleepy Julian, Nebraska, population 172. She has set her sights on college, Chicago, and beyond.

What’s a 16-year-old boy to do when he learns that his stepmother and a local judge have murdered his father and now plan to kill him, too? Well, when it’s 1906, and you can play pretty good second base, you join a barn-storming baseball team making its way across Kansas. It also helps that the team is the Kansas City National Bloomer Girls. After all, who’d look for a runaway boy disguised as a girl on a women’s team that competes against town-ball teams of male players? Of course, it’ll take more than long hair, a Spalding glove, and a quick bat to stay alive.

When local baseball player Junior Jones receives death threats over the color of his skin, the team's wealthy owner hires Sam Rockwell to solve the case and stop a murder before it happens. Sam goes undercover as a minor league pitcher to strike out the culprit. Follow the clues along with Sam's curmudgeonly ghost of a father Frank Rockwell, and Sam's wife Amelia, who holds a secret that will forever change the lives of the entire Rockwell family. It's another laugh-filled, madcap mystery in the warm, witty 1950's Hollywood-style of author Jason Anspach.

They say that each of us becomes an entirely new person every seven years. But Rebecca Bradshaw doesn't feel any different when an old lover shows up severely injured at the hospital where she runs the physical-therapy department. Seven years ago, baseball player Jace Cooper left her without a second thought or the chance to share the life-changing secret she swore she'd keep from him forever. Now he was back, wanting both her help and a second chance.

You Know Me, Al is a classic of baseball, the game and the community. Jack Keefe, one of literature's great characters, is talented, brash, and conceited. Self-assured and imperceptive, impervious to both advice and sarcasm, Keefe rises to the heights, but his inability to learn makes for his undoing. Through a series of letters from this bush-league pitcher to his not-quite-anonymous friend Al, Lardner maintains a balance between the funny and the moving, the pathetic and the glorious.

It is 1947 when Joseph Burke, ex-Marine, ex-husband, ex-somebody–is hired as a bodyguard to protect Lauren Roach, 25 and spoiled rotten. The unlikely duo becomes entangled with Burke’s boyhood hero, color-barrier breaking baseball player Jackie Robinson, in a story that is both thrilling and engaging. It is in the historical character Jackie Robinson that Mr. Parker finds inspiration and Joseph Burke may find his redemption. This is a work of fiction about a real man. Most of what I’ve written I’ve made up. I have, however, attempted to render Jackie Robinson accurately. As he was, or as I imagined him to be, in 1947, when I was turning 15, and he was changing the world. The rest is altogether fiction. It may be more Burke’s story then Jackie’s story. But, without Jackie, Burke would have had no story. And neither would I. Robert B Parker.

Maggie Fortini doesn't play baseball but is a dyed-in-the-wool fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jim Maine is a Giants fan whom who teaches Maggie the fine art of scoring a baseball game. Jim is drafted into the army and sent to Korea, and although Maggie writes to him often, his silence is just one of a string of disappointments - being a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in the early 1950s meant season after season of near misses and dashed hopes.

Twelve-year-old House Jackson, star pitcher and team captain of the Aurora County All-Stars, has been sidelined for a whole sorry year with a broken elbow. He's finally ready to play, but wouldn't you know that the team's only game of the year has been scheduled for the exact same time as the town's 200th-anniversary pageant. Now House must face the pageant's director, full-of-herself Frances Shotz (his nemesis and perpetrator of the elbow break), and get his team out of this mess.

Conor Nash has lived his life with a single purpose - to pitch in the major leagues. He’s been released from professional baseball contracts 10 times over a 16-year career, but he’s overcome every obstacle to finally reach "The Show" when he’s a decade too old. As he faces the specter of injury-forced retirement, he becomes a man neither he nor his wife recognizes. During his career, Conor avoided the trap of alcohol and drugs because his drug was baseball.

This entertaining history blends anecdote, incident, and analysis as it chronicles the story of our national pastime. Alexander covers the advent of the first professional baseball leagues, the game’s surge in the early 20th century, the Golden 20s and the Gray 30s, the breaking of the color line in the late 40s, and the game’s expansion to its current status as a premier team sport. He describes changing playing styles and outstanding teams and personalities, but also demonstrates the many connections to society.

When a beautiful brunette driver meets Nashville Slammers catcher, Sawyer McBain, at the airport, he figures it's his lucky day. Sure, he's usually pretty guarded around people, especially after his ex, but he can enjoy the car ride. Until she passes his apartment...and keeps driving. Slammers executive Addison Carlisle needs one little favor. Sure, she may have kinda maybe kidnapped one of her professional baseball players, but it's for a really good cause. She desperately needs someone high-profile to auction off that night for the multiple sclerosis society she's chairing.

When the kitchen ceiling caved in and the contents of his mother’s attic splayed across the floor, Ron, better known as “Punky”, knew he had to help clean up. With the assistance of his son and nephew, he would try to preserve as many of the dirty, mold-covered memories as he could, including a mysterious old metal box, possibly belonging to his Grandpa Hash. What’s inside it takes him back 32 years earlier, as he recalls the magical weekend in 1984 spent with his grandfather attending two baseball games.

I’m the crazy fun one. Pedal to the floor, balls to the wall, party all weekend guy. The guy everybody calls for laughs and a good time. And I always deliver. So, when Ainsley Winslow and I made a pact for a summer fling, I was all in. What hot-blooded college male doesn’t jump at the chance for a no-strings-attached relationship? Not this one. Then summer drew to a close, and I found myself wanting time to move slower. Ainsley Winslow is a girl of her word. When fall inevitably came, she vanished.

This is a novel about a single-A baseball team in California, called The Dog Sox. It is owned by a woman who received it as a birthday gift from her boyfriend. The team has a phenomenal pitcher, with a very strange delivery, and a drunken and abusive father. This is a love story about the sport of baseball, a story which is replayed every summer, in every state. The characters come alive in this lively and often humorous novel.

Matt Granite and his San Francisco Gladiators find themselves in a flat-footed tie with their arch rivals, the Los Angeles Tangelos. Johnny Morinda, the hard-nosed manager of the Tangelos, will do anything to pull out a win against the young star catcher and the Gladiators.

Fans are cheering Troy Soos for his absorbing mysteries packed with old-time baseball lore. In The Cincinnati Red Stalkings, he whisks you back to the summer of 1921 when life was simpler and the world was a safer place - or was it?

I was issued an ultimatum between the two loves of my life: her or the game. No matter what I choose, I have to give up something I love. Spring training is my first chance to show the world that Cooper Noah is back after the elbow injury that took me out of the game. It's the stage I stand on to prove I'm the starter the Vegas Heat is paying big bucks for. But my heart isn't in any of it. My heart can't be in it when it's broken. There's no way I can have both, but I've made my choice. It's time to play hardball.