With 2430 games played each regular season and up to 41 in the postseason, it is almost inevitable that baseball will throw up “stories that you couldn’t script” each year.\u00c2\u00a0This is part of the reason I fell in love with the sport, and\u00c2\u00a0also\u00c2\u00a0why\u00c2\u00a0I\u00c2\u00a0didn’t then immediately feel the need to seek out\u00c2\u00a0baseball-themed\u00c2\u00a0creative writing. It was not until relatively recently that I finally\u00c2\u00a0gave baseball fiction a go.<\/p>\n
Did I make a wise decision? Does a baseball-playing bear hit in the woods?
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(Bison Books, 2006) 292 pages.<\/strong><\/p>\n I don’t want to spoil the plot at all, but, now that you’ve seen the title,\u00c2\u00a0I think it is safe for me to describe this as a\u00c2\u00a0story featuring a famous Cuban political figure and at least one off-speed pitch.<\/p>\n Why Castro? Well, as Tim Wendel explains in a note before the opening pages of his novel, there’s little doubt that\u00c2\u00a0the\u00c2\u00a0revolutionary figure\u00c2\u00a0was a promising pitcher in his youth, and the flames of\u00c2\u00a0rumours that he\u00c2\u00a0was offered\u00c2\u00a0a\u00c2\u00a0contract\u00c2\u00a0to play baseball professionally in the United States have never been extinguished. What Wendel does is use the novel as a medium\u00c2\u00a0for speculation on just what Castro’s involvement with the game could have been\u00c2\u00a0on the island of\u00c2\u00a0Cuba.<\/p>\n To\u00c2\u00a0the average non-baseball-loving reader, and here\u00c2\u00a0I am just\u00c2\u00a0speculating of course, this\u00c2\u00a0book would probably be enjoyable, but\u00c2\u00a0far from\u00c2\u00a0mind-blowingly brilliant. However,\u00c2\u00a0as someone\u00c2\u00a0with an appreciation of how hard it is to describe events on a diamond (real or fictitious)\u00c2\u00a0when your channel is\u00c2\u00a0merely pen and paper (or black pixels and white pixels), I have great respect for Wendel’s work. Weaved into a story\u00c2\u00a0that contains\u00c2\u00a0the expected elements of love and\u00c2\u00a0political intrigue are good chunks of baseball action, all of\u00c2\u00a0them of the highest quality.<\/p>\n The book won’t make you an expert on political revolution and it’s not going to teach you how to throw a 12-6 breaking pitch, but if you are after something a little different this is well worth considering.<\/p>\n The publisher of Castro’s Curveball<\/em>, Bison Books,\u00c2\u00a0is an imprint of the University of Nebraska press and has a catalogue containing an impressive set of baseball-themed non-fiction, including Baseball’s Natural: The Story of Eddie Waitkus<\/a><\/em>, a book I intend to review at a later date.
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