Man on Spikes (Writing Baseball)

One of baseball writing's best utility men, Asinof is justly famed for Eight Men Out, his masterful exploration of the tragic events that led to the surreal stain of the 1919 Black Sox scandal; it is a deservedly enduring work of baseball nonfiction. Asinof's first literary at-bat, though, was in the fictional league. Man on Spikes--long out of print until that egregious error was rectified with the debut of Southern Illinois University Press's Writing Baseball series--is about as unromantically clear-eyed a look at baseball as exists in the genre. Its hero is a journeyman ballplayer named Mike Kutner, based, intriguingly, on a real journeyman ballplayer named Mickey Rutner, who Asinof played minor league ball with, and who, in one of the game's cosmic jokes, winds up on the same page as Babe Ruth in the alphabetical listings of The Baseball Encyclopedia.

Kutner, like Rutner, is never quite good enough to stick in the Majors, but his dream of making it allows ownership to abuse and exploit his talent for the 16 seasons after he signs his first contract. Dreams die hard, and sports dreams die particularly hard; Asinof works this theme beautifully, until, in the end, Kutner can finally hang up his spikes and hold onto something more tangible than reverie: sustaining love. This is a novel bursting with passion, understanding, and the insight of someone who's played the game and can translate its feelings without filtering them through rose-colored flip-ups. --Jeff Silverman