Fidrych's love of game, life bursts through in The Bird

I was only seven years old when Mark Fidrych broke into the major leagues, setting baseball on its collective ear with his zany antics and darting fastball. I hadn't yet been caught up by the baseball bug, and even living in western Michigan, I wasn't in the loop on the Bird. In fact, I have a distinct memory of talking baseball cards with a couple of kids on the school bus in second or third grade. One of them asked if I had the Bird. I thought he meant Doug Bird. He thought I was an idiot.

By the time I fell absolutely head over heels for the game, Fidrych was on his way out, victim of what years later proved to be a torn rotator cuff though at the time was chalked up to shoulder tendinitis. He battled for several more seasons, spending the last three years of his career pitching in Triple-A before finally hanging it up in 1983. Even in the minors he drew crowds, though it was nothing like the packed houses he played as a rookie, when he won 19 games for a bad Tigers squad and led the American League in ERA.

Butterfly Winter flutters off course

As anyone who has been following this site the past couple of months knows, I have been counting down to the release of W.P. Kinsella's Butterfly Winter, his first novel in 15 years. I primed myself by reading Shoeless Joe and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, both excellent novels that rank among the greats of the genre, particularly Shoeless Joe. They set the bar awfully high for Butterfly Winter, and to me it didn't come anywhere close to clearing it.

While magic plays a prominent role in both Joe and Confederacy, Kinsella kicks the hoodoo up a notch in Butterfly Winter, handing the job of primary storyteller over to a baseball-evangelist-turned-wizard from the enchanted Caribbean nation of Courteguay, a fictional country wedged between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Kinsella employs a gringo journalist to draw from the wizard both the story of Courteguay and that of the Pimental brothers. Julio and Esteban, fraternal twins who look nothing like each other, play for 20 years in the U.S. major leagues, beginning when they are just 10, thanks to doctored paperwork that added six years to their age. Julio, who began pitching to Esteban when the two were still in their mother's womb, is nearly unhittable, provided he is pitching to his brother, a woeful hitter who would never make a roster if not for the fact that the two come as a package deal.

Chip on Piazza's shoulder hasn't been knocked off yet

I generally shy away from memoirs and "tell-all" books about current and recent players. They seem often to be either formulaic or biased or both. There are, of course, exceptions. Last year's Jim Abbott bio, Imperfect, was a nice, honest portrayal of a guy I came to admire the more I read. But I won't typically go anywhere near the salacious titles that seem to roll off the presses right around the time pitchers and catchers report.

So why did I pick up Long Shot, the new Mike Piazza memoir? It showed up in the mail just as I finished another book, I respect co-author Lonnie Wheeler's work as a biographer and storyteller, and my editor at Baseball America asked me to. (My official, more formal, review will appear on BaseballAmerica.com as well as in our Books issue this spring.)

The dust jacket, in typical fashion, promises thrills and spills: "With resolute honesty Piazza addresses the issues that swirled about him during his career: the rumor that he was gay, the infamous bat-throwing incident with Roger Clemens during the 2000 World Series, and the accusations of steroid use that plagued nearly every power hitter of his era."

Kinsella set the bar high with Shoeless Joe

With W.P. Kinsella's new baseball novel, Butterfly Winter, due out in the U.S. next month (it was released on a small scale in Canada in 2011), I'm taking a look back at a couple of his older ones, which are both considered classic works of baseball fiction. Last week I wrote about The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. This time it's Shoeless Joe, which as most readers know was the basis for the 1989 movie Field of Dreams.

I found Shoeless Joe more accessible on first read. Perhaps seeing the movie a number of times primed me, but I think the magic in this one keeps the reader, and the characters, on the same plane, whereas The Iowa Baseball Confederacy has us bouncing all over time, mixing in mythology, fantasy, and tortured love into an epic battle with biblical overtones.

Knowing what happens, at least on a general level, before you read a book takes a little of the fun out of it, of course. It's hard to get as wrapped up in the tension of certain scenes when snippets from the film start running in the back of your mind and eliminate any element of surprise. I found myself following Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan through the narrative, though James Earl Jones, at least was easy to eliminate.

Kinsella's Iowa Baseball Confederacy a rich tale of fantasy, obsession

Baseball lends itself to obsession. From young boys spending every dime of their allowance money on trading cards to grown men spending every spare moment crunching numbers in a pursuit of the perfect metric, the game's hold runs deep.

Gideon Clarke's fixation is more specific than most. Convinced that the Chicago Cubs visited his hometown in 1908 for an epic exhibition game against a collection of all-stars from a competent but relatively obscure circuit known as the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, he devotes his life to unearthing the evidence to prove the game took place. No hint of the contest can be found in any old newspaper. His communications with the survivors of the players involved prove fruitless. Even the Cubs' own files, which Clarke accesses by pulling off an elaborate ruse, contain nothing.

No setback, however, can shake his determination or dampen his near-religious fervor. At one point the protagonist of W.P. Kinsella's The Iowa Baseball Confederacy claims to feel like a prophet. Puppet, however, might be the more accurate descriptor.

Abbott memoir stands apart from its peers

Jim Abbott’s wish throughout his career, dating as far back as Little League, was to be treated like anyone else. He never wanted to settle for “pretty good, considering.” But despite everything he accomplished on a mound, the stories about his hand—or rather lack thereof—never stopped.

The stands filled with well-wishers from the time he made the varsity squad as a sophomore in high school. They wanted to cheer the heroic effort of the boy who had to slide his glove from the nub of his right wrist onto his left hand after each pitch. He just wanted to win.

And win he did. In his sophomore year he led the University of Michigan to the Big Ten title and was honored with the Golden Spikes Award. A year later he was selected by the California Angels in the first round of baseball’s draft. Before embarking on his pro career he traveled to South Korea with Team USA and earned a gold medal by beating Japan in the final game. He jumped straight to the big leagues the following spring without ever playing in the minors.

And the hand was still the headline. The press had the audacity to ask if the Angels added him to the roster as a publicity stunt. After losing his big league debut 7-0 to the Mariners in front of a crowd of 47,000, Abbott had to endure a post-game press conference where he and his human-interest angle were the story and not the game itself. Little had changed from the time he was a kid in elementary school, where every year the other kids would need to get a good look at the one-handed kid until the novelty wore off.

Harrisburg's City Island is one historic patch of grass

Any number of minor league cities can trace their baseball roots back into the 19th century. What makes Harrisburg, Pa., unique is that you don't need to hopscotch all over town to track the game's progression. No old ball grounds were demolished to make way for a parking lot or a Walmart. When Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper took the field as Senators, they worked the same real estate as Hall of Famers Frank Grant and Hughie Jennings, who starred for the Harrisburg Ponies in 1890.

City Island, on the Susquehanna River, has always been the capital city's home for professional baseball. Teams and leagues have come and gone over the years. Grandstands have burned down, flooded and abandoned. But baseball has always returned to the same place, most recently in 1987 when the Double-A Senators filled a void created when the area's Class B squad dropped out of the Interstate League after the 1952 season.

Andrew Linker, who covered the Senators for 20 years for the Harrisburg Patriot-News and was a longtime correspondent for Baseball America, chronicles the island's rich history in One Patch of Grass: How the Babe, Spottswood, Oscar, Eleanor, Vlad and Milton helped Harrisburg make magic on an island in the backwaters of baseball.