BASEBALL'S BEST SHORT STORIES

Baseball's Best Short Stories is, quite simply, a hit machine, grinding out--one after the other, 28 selections in all--just what its title promises. Leading off with Ernest Thayer's classic poem, "Casey at the Bat," it segues directly into Frank Deford's rumination of what happened to Casey when the poetry stopped, then rounds up the usual subjects: Zane Grey's "The Rube's Waterloo," Ring Lardner's "Alibi Ike" and "My Roomy," James Thurber's "You Could Look It Up," P.G. Wodehouse's "The Pitcher and the Plutocrat," Damon Runyon's "Baseball Hattie," T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Hector Quesadilla Story," and, behind them, a bullpen of considerable depth and breadth. Staudohar steps up with a paragraph of context and biographical data for each piece, but his overall introduction is merely short and serviceable; real fans of baseball's ample literature will likely wish it went deeper in exploring the long and rich tradition that his collection engagingly sends to the plate. --Jeff Silverman