Backstop: A Baseball Love Story In Nine Innings Now Available!

I’ve always loved the game of baseball. What’s not to love? A simple game─hit a round ball squarely with a round bat─with simple rules: reach base, move the runner along, and score more runs than your opponent.

My dad took me to my first ballgame, a Tigers/Angels night game at old Tiger Stadium, a game which the home team won. I was but seven years old. The Corktown district in Detroit, in the early 1960s, had not yet fully deteriorated, and the 1968 race riots were still a few years away. Al Kaline was my childhood idol, and I dreamed of playing major league baseball, of roaming the outfield the way Kaline did, of hitting for average, for power, and of winning a World Series.

Unfortunately, my parents had other ideas. I’m sure they meant well, to protect me from disappointment, by steering me toward a more attainable career. Pete Rose was still more than a decade away from signing a three million dollar deal with the Phillies.

I started writing my first novel, January’s Paradigm, when I was 35. A science fiction affair with an alternate reality theme written around a Chandleresque character who was a private detective circa 1945, two more novels would follow to complete a trilogy. The project took nearly 15 years to complete, during which I lost both my parents.

Funny, what losing one’s parents does: drive home the reality of one’s mortality. When my father passed away, I realized what I’d already known for quite some time─I was never going to play major league baseball.

After I finished the January books, I started looking for my next project. I was 51, in the first year of my sixth decade, and it seemed only natural that I write a novel with a baseball theme. In Backstop, I started with the boy I once was, with a dream of playing professional baseball. His parents, too, had other ideas. But where I succumbed, this lad ignores his parents’ wishes, to make his dream come true.

Sadly, Backstop’s father dies before Backstop is drafted by the Detroit Tigers. A major theme is Backstop’s drive to prove himself to his deceased father.

What’s a good story without romance? In his rookie season, Backstop learns that lovin’ can be readily found around the ballpark, but true love eludes him for a time─until a chance meeting with the owner of a small business in Chicago. What follows is a season-long courtship followed by an off-season marriage.

Twelve years elapse, and when the Tigers make the playoffs for the first time during Backstop’s tenure, he goes out to celebrate with teammates, and he falls prey to a younger woman.

Perhaps my most accessible novel to date, Backstop: A Baseball Love Story In Nine Innings is composed of multiple themes─the importance of dreams (and our drive to make them come true), of loss and love, and of redemption in the aftermath of infidelity.

Backstop is now available through Second Wind Publishing and in Kindle format from Amazon. A great winter read in anticipation of a new baseball season.