An excerpt from the book's introduction

My father was a Major Leaguer. He spent eight good years playing for the Cardinals, Red Sox and Phillies. After his playing days, he turned to coaching and scouting, becoming the sort of man who finds new talent and then hones and nurtures it. It occurs to me that my own career in teaching and writing is a reflection of that part of his life.

Our family was immersed in baseball. For me and my brothers and sisters, sitting in major and minor-league dugouts, traveling to Florida each February for spring training, having Stan Musial or Joe Garagiola or Marty Marion in attendance at family gatherings was all part of the normal routine.

It was only natural, then, that both of my brothers played baseball professionally, the older one making it to Double A, the younger one stuck in A ball with the same inability to hit a good curve that afflicted me.

Both of my sisters, I should add, were and are talented players. They don't throw like girls, metaphorically or literally. In fact, you might want to check out my sister Cindy's very fine baseball book, FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME (William Morrow).

But that immersion in the game had a downside, at least for me. I played well enough in high school and college, but the game's very familiarity led me to treat it with contempt, and by the time I'd reached thirty I'd given up on baseball entirely, no longer even watching it on television or reading about in the newspapers. And in the same way, in those years I lost touch with my father, the old major-leaguer.

My father was something of a mystery to me. I didn't know him as well as I might have, or should have. I admired him, certainly. I can recall marveling at his play on the diamond, the grace with which he moved, the ease of his athletic skill.

But he was, in many ways, a distant figure, especially as I grew into my teen years and then went off to college. And so, over time, I seemed to leave him behind the way I'd left the game.

I was busy, in those years, building a career as a writer and teacher. Then, over the years, the stories I sold to various magazines and newspapers began coming closer and closer to home for me. I began to write about what I truly know best. I began to write about baseball.

It was my children who brought me to this new appreciation for the game and a desire to write about it. My son is a Down Syndrome young man who prospers within his limits, holding down a good job at a local McDonald's and sharing his life's successes with me, from winning trophies at the Special Olympics to being named employee of the month at his restaurant.

And my delightful daughter is an eight-year-old filled with her mother's intelligence and a full load of energy and promise. She's a natural hitter and I won't be surprised when she becomes the first woman in the big leagues.

Watching her grow and watching my son become more independent than I ever thought he could be led me, in this writer's life, to think about parents and their children, to think about my father, to think about The Game.

And so I re-discovered baseball, and in so doing found the shared language I need to communicate with my father when we talk about how the Cardinals are doing. We marvel over the phone about Mark McGwire's exploits, and what we're really doing is taking part in a most welcome sort of verbal dance that expresses a boy's love for his father and the father's love in return.

So I owe baseball a lot. As the essays tell you, I play again now, just for the love of it in an over-40 league where I live. I still can't hit a curve, but I'm a decent first baseman and an adequate pitcher and I revel in the joyous sensation of fielding a groundball or connecting on a single up the middle.

What you find in this collection, then, is the result of that debt I owe the game. The short stories appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies and used bits and pieces of my long history with the game. Most of what you'll find in the short stories isn't true, of course, at least not in the way it's used in the story. But fiction writers write about what they know and lie to fill in the rest.

Essayists, on the other hand, tell the truth as they know it, and the essays here are as close as I can get to telling the truth about myself, my family, and The Game.

Writing is a lonely business in most cases, but when I write about baseball I get e-mail, letters, phone calls. People care, and remember, when they read about baseball.

This tells me that I've found some truth in here somewhere, something worth saying. I hope you agree. Feel free to e-mail me with your thoughts on the book.