A Big Hit A New Collection Of Essays About Baseball Connects For A Griffey-Sized Home Run

So numerous are the books about baseball that they literally bow bookshelves from the sheer weight.

Classics like “The Boys of Summer” to tomes decrying the ruin of the national game like “Coming Apart of the Seams” all crowd the shelves. Players born when Jimmy Carter was president write their autobiographies as though 20 years is a life long enough that it’s worth reading about. Roger Kahn writes about writing about baseball.

And every year, more join the lineup like poseurs pretending that basketball has not supplanted baseball as our national game.

John D. Marshall, book critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has tossed readers a changeup: an eclectic collection of essays by Northwest (and former Northwest) writers either about baseball in this corner of the country or about baseball as a metaphor for life.

Among literary circles, some of the essayists - Sherman Alexie, Timothy Egan, Lynda Barry, Bryan Di Salvatore - are as familiar as Seattle Mariners outfielder Ken Griffey Jr. That Marshall gathered this team of writers for his baseball book is laudable. After all, it’s clear some of the writers don’t know a slider from a curve and at least one doesn’t even like baseball.

But sometimes an eclectic bunch of players guided by a coach more interested in having fun than in winning the championship does come up with a big win. That’s the case with “Home Field.”

Some of the nine writers hit homers with their essays - among them, Spokane native Egan, now a Seattle-based writer for the New York Times.

In his irreverent, clear style of writing, Egan tells of one summer season coaching his 8-year-old daughter’s softball team in Seattle. Listen to his prose:

” ‘There’s no crying in baseball!’ I said to a 10-year-old named Felicity… . Felicity was not crying from emotional anguish or injury. She just flat-out did not want to be on the field, holding a stiff, unfolding leather glove for no discernible reason. She wanted to be home playing with her twin hamsters, David and Seth. Besides, both of her hands had gone numb, and she was starting to lose some of the feeling in her toes. ‘I don’t like baseball,’ she told me. ‘And, I don’t like you.’

“Aggressive, assertive, to the point - I was impressed with Felicity. If I could get her into an anger-management focus on the softball, I’d have a slugger with an attitude.”

Larry Colton hits the grand slam of “Home Field,” though, with “Can’t Miss Prospects.” It’s a touching, accessible story of the brief time Colton flirted with professional baseball. He parallels his story with that of Steve Matcuk, a 1996 prospect who spent last summer with the Class A Portland Rockies.

Colton writes of his final meeting with Matcuk at the young player’s apartment in Portland, Ore., last June:

“… as I bid him good-bye and good luck, I felt a fatherly instinct, a need to say something astute, something that could make the difference between his being a winner in The Show or just another guy who once pitched opening day in the Northwest League.

“As he started down Burnside, I called after him, motioning him back toward me. ‘I do have one bit of advice,’ I said.

” ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

” ‘No matter what else you do,’ I replied, ‘pitch ‘em low and away.’ “

A baseball cliche, but nonetheless, when used by such an accomplished writer as Colton, we readers can forgive him the writerly gaffe. Ditto for Marshall for tossing yet another baseball book onto an already crowded field.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: BOOK REVIEW “Home Field: Nine Writers at Bat” edited by John Douglas Marshall (Sasquatch Books, $21.95, 213 pages)