In this semi-monthly forum, we will review, report and/or analyze books about baseball. Since I’m hosting the site, temporarily, I’ll be focusing on baseball fiction–only because I find so-called “reality” boring. But if you want to discuss nonfiction books about baseball, just send them to me and I will post them. (I will notify the Commissioner when the rightful author deserves CP credit, rather than the book page host.)

To launch our virtual book shelf, I’d like to tell you about Del Leonard Jones’ 2020 novel, At the Bat: the Strikeout that Shamed America.

Jones’ historical novel is set in 1888, the year Ernst Thayers’ infamous poem, “Casey at the Bat,” was published. Jones’ narrates events before and after the baseball game in which Casey struck out, providing both a rich context for the poem itself as well as an opportunity to follow the principal characters AFTER that notorious whiff and discover how Casey’s strikeout changed their lives. Jones does all that with style and humor. The novel is a riotous tour of minor league baseball in California, an outrageous exposé of American racism and classism, and a nostalgic nod to a time when small towns identified themselves through their baseball teams.

The principal characters are Mighty Casey himself, of course, the umpire who called the first two suspicious strikes, the Negro catcher Fleetwood Walker (pretending to be Mexican in order to play in the all-white California League), and the renowned investigative journalist Nellie Bly, already a celebrity because of her revelatory articles about the treatment of women in mental institutions. What a cast!

Thayers’ oft-recited poem is to baseball what the Iliad is to Greek culture, a seminal text brimming with clues about how and why baseball became the national game, and why we PEBAcites are so addicted to it. I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s a fun read.