Baseball Humor

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.

Before he was “Babe” or “The Sultan of Swat” or “The Great Bambino”, George Herman Ruth was just another teenage misfit at St. Mary’s School for Boys. But Ruth has something the other boys don’t, and when Baltimore Orioles manager Jack Dunn watches him throw a baseball over a building, Ruth gets the chance to punch his ticket out of the orphanage. All he has to do now is make the team.

Popular novelist Dan Jenkins is well known in the golf world for his column in Golf Digest. A modern classic among 20th-century sports novels, Dead Solid Perfect is Jenkins' hilarious send-up of professional golfers and the often ludicrous reality of life on the tour.

The road to Major League Baseball goes through the minor leagues. Every year there are over 5,500 players trying to work their way to the top of the tiered minor league system. Very few people know what life is really like for these aspiring players - until now. This collection of stories from actual minor league players is a hilarious, heartbreaking, and honest account of the struggle to make it to the big leagues.

Last Days of Summer is the story of Joey Margolis, neighborhood punching bag, growing up goofy and mostly fatherless in Brooklyn in the early 1940s. A boy looking for a hero, Joey decides to latch on to Charlie Banks, the all-star third basemen for the New York Giants. But Joey's chosen champion doesn't exactly welcome the extreme attention of a persistent young fan with an overactive imagination. Then again, this strange, needy kid might be exactly what Banks needs.

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.

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.

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....

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."

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.

Time: August, 1950. Place: A suburb north of Fenway Park. Young Billy Flynn is determined to find truth and direction, in spite of a family that opposes him at every turn and a neighborhood populated by a host of zany, insensitive, un-politically correct characters, who aspire to little and value even less. It is light. It is heavy. It is American. It is Irish/American. It is sad. It is funny. And if it weren't for the irrepressible spirit and persistence of its hero, Billy Flynn, it could have been tragic.

Johnny Morinda, the bombastic manager of the Los Angeles Tangelos, finds himself with an open spot for the All-Star Game, which is being played in New York. Much to the surprise of the baseball world and the other All-Star players, Johnny adds the hot-hitting Matt Granite to the squad. New York will never be the same as Matt's friends Sean and Jack romp through the Big Apple.

Matt Granite plays baseball for his High School team and voted as Most Valuable Player. When they win the sectional High School championship, Matt and his friends are taken to watch the San Francisco Gladiators as a reward. Matt has been passed by every major league baseball team, in the amateur draft. Big league clubs avoid high school catchers like the plague...they never work out. Little does Matt know, but his world is about to change forever.

Join Matt Granite, the San Francisco Gladiators star high school catcher as he goes on the road to face Johnny Morinda and the Los Angeles Tangelos. This time it will be Matt and his friends Sean and Jack matching wits against the Tangelos and their pea green uniforms on their arch rival’s home turf. It’s all in for the trio as the baseball world still hasn’t recovered from their debut in Row 25 Seat 12.

This book contains everything you need to know to be a man. Everything. It will prepare you for every situation you can imagine, from the office to the bedroom. It will improve your life no matter what you're doing...whether you're in a bar, in a fight, in a wedding, in an argument, at a game, at work, or in a stranger's bed. It's time to be a man. Listen to this book.

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.

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 goes to Philadelphia to play the Flintlocks. The City of Brotherly Love is anything but as they try every trick in the book to get under the young catcher's skin. Not to worry, Sean and Jack are there to make things right. Johnny Morinda, the manager of the Tangelos, joins the gang. There will be nostalgia...there will be a stripper pole in the Flintlocks owner's suite.