Short Season and Other Stories (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Softcover

Klinkowitz, Professor Jerry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801863651 ISBN 13: 9780801863653

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Each night, from April through August, up to a quarter of a million people in small towns and cities across America watch minor league baseball, experiencing the ups and downs of their local team -- every move, every player, every inning. Welcome to the world of Short Season. Meet the Mason City Royals. Live with the team for five months, across eight mid-western towns, with "no more than two days off from April through August and a night-long bus ride every three to six days." Join in the triumphs and misadventures of its collection of hopefuls and has-beens as they get to know each other in English and Spanish, admire baseball groupies, crisscross backroads propelled by a beery-eyed driver in a rattletrap bus, play cards, steal cars, get sent up and down, and somehow through it all play good enough ball to become the Class A champions.

About this title

About the Author:

Jerry Klinkowitz is executive director of the Waterloo Indians, a farm team of the Cleveland Indians. In the off-season, he teaches at the University of Northern Iowa and has published twenty books of literary and cultural criticism.

From Publishers Weekly:

This impressive collection of 28 interrelated stories follows the fortunes of a fictitious A-level minor-league baseball team, the Mason City Royals, through a season. Each short narrative focuses on a particular person or eventfrom the bus driver who doesn't feel comfortable unless the bus is going at least 80 m.p.h. to Boom-Box Night, when fans bring radios to the park and change the volume and channel on cue. The tone of the tales ranges widely. There is the slapstick "Ball Two," in which a player from Panama and a teammate from the Dominican Republic come to blows after the Panamanian calls the Dominican a word that has friendly connotations in the one country but is disparaging in the other. "Baseball Bingo" is a clever account of how a shy P.A. announcer uses the bingo calls to broadcast a dinner invitation to a pretty fan he's watched for many games. Klinkowitz's style pleasantly parallels the rhythms of the sport he obviously loves. Most of the time his stories proceed at a leisurely pace; then in brief, quick moments he captures indelibly the atmosphere of minor-league baseball, where fans are perhaps more raucous than in the majors and where players struggle to realize their dreams.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0801863651
• ISBN 13: 9780801863653
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200