Off-Season (Writing Baseball) by Eliot Asinof

By Eliot Asinof

Eliot Asinof’s latest baseball hero left tiny Gandee, Missouri, as John Clyde Cagle Jr., a hard-throwing lefthander who had pitched an ideal online game in highschool. Now he returns in triumph because the mythical “Black Jack,” megastar of the la Dodgers, a stoic, menacing mound demon with a Fu Manchu moustache and a 106-mile-per-hour fastball. In a nationally televised occasion that, like every thing else in his existence, is strictly orchestrated by way of agent and funds supervisor Gordon Stanley, Jack’s go back is to commit Black Jack box, the two-million-dollar ballpark he has donated to his place of origin. He arrives in a white stretch limo, glamorous female friend at his aspect and the area at his ft, yet he's stung via a spate of undesirable thoughts of his boyhood, such a lot stinky of that's that of Cyrus Coles, his fats black battery mate who had quietly taught Jack the disciplined pitching that had made him nice. generally now, while Jack throws out the ceremonial first pitch to his father, Vietnam conflict hero, spit-and-polish sheriff of Gandee, every body believes the daddy to be the cause of the son’s success. Then Jack confronts Cyrus’s murdered physique, blown away via a shotgun blast. He has to stand the fury of Cyrus’s widow, Ruby, and, such a lot provocative of all, an outspoken lady named Foxx, who makes him conscious that he’s been residing a lie. Jack flees this unsettling scene along with his female friend for the pleasures of recent York City—until he learns that, again in Gandee, his father has arrested Ruby for the homicide of her husband. To everyone’s astonishment, Jack returns to Gandee to aid her. With Foxx now an best friend, he sees his place of origin for its corrupt racist traditions, bringing on a brand new figuring out of himself that leads him to probability every thing to probe an insupportable fact.