A Thing or Two About the Game

Brad is smart, idealistic, and unemployed, with a lifelong history of coming up short. When he stumbles into an arrangement to coach the Marlins, a softball team of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls, he sets out to accomplish something.

But accomplish what? Girls’ little league softball, he’s told, is not about winning. Brad would just as soon win, but just teaching, he quickly realizes, will be hard enough. So Brad sets out to teach. To coax, cajole, and bribe his girls to run the bases aggressively, throw to the cutoffs, cover bases.

The season progresses. Through ups and downs, through tears and small triumphs, the Marlins improve. Brad comes to understand and care about his players. But as the playoffs approach, Brad becomes increasingly aware . . . of rival coaches bending rules; of parents jockeying to advance their ambitions for their daughters; of convoluted off-field politics. Brad struggles to keep his focus on what matters. For it’s all so familiar. The twisted, conflicting agendas that have troubled his paths through life and career: Here they are, once again, penetrating even this small world of girls’ softball.

This story about softball is also a story about people searching for meaning; it’s about sorting through the tangles, and learning a thing or two about a game.