The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told is a mixed collection of fiction, nonfiction, and in-between pieces inspired by America’s game. The subtitle, “Tales from the Diamond”, makes it sound as though these are stories about amazing plays, games, etc, which is not quite  the case. Instead, we get a truly eclectic array of pieces: Doris Kearns’ Goodwins’ musings about growing up a fan of baseball, bonding over her father over radio scores;   an excerpt from a novel in which a Senators fan sells his soul to the devil so Washington can beat the Yankees in the pennant race;  one author’s attempt to interview a veteran of the Old Days as they watch a Yale-St.John’s match together; Al Schmuck’s libelous if entertaining stories about Ty Cobb, etc, which are printed without mentioning that Schmuck has acquired such a reputation as a sleaze journalist  that some newspapers wouldn’t even print him. (However, that particular piece did mention the ‘Cobb cocktail’, which is Southern Comfort mixed with honey and hot water. Perhaps on opening day I shall toast the Peach in his own style!)    I began by listening to the Audible version, which had its limits; I like the narrator well enough, but because of the constant variety of material and the not-always-obvious  demarcations between chapters,  the delivery could become confusing at times, so I ended up switching to actually reading it, which was a vastly more enjoyable experience despite the fact that for me there is an explicit connection between baseball and listening, hence the even divide in my Audible library between “John Scalzi titles” and “baseball books”. There are also some stories where the audio approach is terrible at delivering the content, like the “Who’s on First” Sketch – the energy and hilarity of that sketch is ruined when someone is announcing “ABBOT:” and “COSTELLO” every two seconds.  There were a lot of surprises in this volume: I’d never heard of Jackie Mitchell, for instance, a teenage girl who struck both the Babe and Lou Gehrig out in succession, and I had no idea the western writer Zane Grey wrote baseball stories. Turns out he wasn’t just a one-trick pony.  Also, Russians? They play baseball. There’s a team in Moscow known as the Green Sox! What’s next, Russians with mothers and apple pie? The sheer variety of pieces in this book commends it as a read, because not only do we get this odd blend of fiction and nonfiction, but it also doesn’t fixate on the major leagues: sure, there’s a great piece on Ted Williams’ last at-bat, but there are also the stories that demonstrate how captivating baseball was even at the local level, where Mississippi towns play ball against one another and dream of going to the big city of…..Jackson. Several of the pieces delve into what baseball did for its fans beyond the visceral enjoyment of the game, like one reporter’s wrestling with himself over Jackie Robinson forcing him to think about his own prejudices, or “A Scotchman, a Phantom, and a Shiny Blue Jacket” showing us how baseball reportage not only allowed a young writer to develop his writing skills as a boy, but his obsessive knowledge of the game and its trivia was his ticket into respectability among the grown-up men. Definitely recommended for a basefall fan, so long as you know going in that’s not just “The Greatest Plays in Baseball” or somesuch. Its title is an oversell, sure, but it’s fun nontheless.

“What did you hit last year?” Carey ast him.
“I had malaria most o’ the season,” says Ike. “I wound up with .356.”
“Where would I have to go to get malaria?” says Carey, but Ike didn’t wise up.

“Alibi Ike”, as reprinted in The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told

[The Soviets] were still in the early stages of their evolution, and had only just reached the point where they were starting to invent some baseball slang. They called the diamond, in Russian, “the square.” A pop fly was a “candle.” If a player made a sharp, precise throw, someone might say, “Sergei, that was a real bayonet!”The area where the infield dirt gives way to the crescent-shaped outfield grass was known as “the moon,” and this allowed the Red Devils to indulge a lyrical impulse by saying, when Tzelikovsky trotted to his position, “Andrei has gone to the moon.”

“Going to the Moon”, as reprinted, etc

The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

“Hub Kid Fans Bid Adieu”, as reprinted, etc