Strike Zone

Front Cover
Viking, 1994 - Fiction - 253 pages
It's 1993. The Chicago Cubs win ten straight to tie the Phillies on the last day of the season. With an exhausted pitching staff, the Cubs call on thirty-two-year-old rookie and clubhouse oddball Sam Ward to pitch the big game. For Ward, a career minor leaguer up for his sixth "cup of coffee", it's his first start in the big leagues. His chance to prove that he's not a "baseball bum", that maybe his wife shouldn't have left him, that he's not crazy. But something is wrong. Sam Ward is not getting the calls from umpire Ernie Kolacka. And he doesn't know why. Was it that wisecrack he made a few years ago at the sports dinner, the gay rights petition, the clubhouse incident with President Nixon? Sam only knows that he has to win. What he doesn't know is that the game is fixed. Sixty-year-old Ernie Kolacka, forced into retirement, is umpiring the last game of a distinguished career - a consolation prize in an otherwise disappointing life. His own promising future as a ballplayer shot down in Korea, unhappy in marriage, ignored by his kids, Kolacka hangs on to certain principles that he lives by - integrity, hard work, loyalty to friends. But when his principles collide, Kolacka is suddenly faced with an unbearable moral dilemma. Writing his first novel, Jim Bouton, author of the classic Ball Four, shows an original comic touch with the creation of Sam Ward. Eliot Asinof, veteran novelist and author of the acclaimed Eight Men Out, is the gruff and crusty voice of Ernie Kolacka. In alternating chapters, Ward and Kolacka face off in a duel of competing characters whose lives are on the line - one ball game seen from two utterly different points of view. A double-blind study of balls andstrikes, right and wrong, life and death. As Sam watches the breaks fall against him, he struggles for a way to triumph. As Ernie feels his career, his integrity, slipping away, he balances on the edge between honor and death.

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Contents

Section 1
10
Section 2
30
Section 3
41
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

James Alan Bouton was born in Newark on March 8, 1939. He started out playing American Legion ball, trying to perfect his knuckleball pitch. He graduated from Bloom High School in Chicago Heights, Ill. He spent a year at Western Michigan University before he was signed by the Yankees in December 1958. He made it to the big leagues in 1962. He was a pitcher of modest achievement who wrote the baseball tell all book - Ball Four in 1970. It told of selfishness, dopiness, childishness and meanspiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy¿s game very well, and many readers saw it, approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the baseball clubhouse. The book was his account of the 1969 baseball season, seven years after his big-league debut with the Yankees. It was also his attempt at age 30 to salvage a once-promising career by developing the game¿s most peculiar and least predictable pitch: the knuckleball. He later wrote his follow -up book I¿m Glad You Didn¿t Take It Personally. James Alan Bouton passed away on July 10, 2019 at the age of 80 after a long struggle with vascular dementia. Writer Eliot Asinof was born in Manhattan on July 13, 1919. After graduating from Swarthmore but before joining the Army during World War II, he played minor league baseball for the Philadelphia Phillies' organization. His best-known work was Eight Men Out, which is about the 1919 Black Sox scandal and became a movie in 1988. He wrote over a dozen books during his lifetime including Man on Spikes, Seven Days to Sunday, and Final Judgment. He also wrote for television and the movies, but his published credits were limited, most likely because he was blacklisted in the 1950's. He died due to complications of pneumonia on June 10, 2008.

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