Inspiration for book about baseball still eludes Grisham

You could call John Grisham a frustrated writer.

True, he has enjoyed phenomenal success with a golden shelf of best-selling legal thrillers, including “The Firm,” “The Pelican Brief,” “The Rainmaker,” “The Runaway Jury” and “The Last Juror.”

What frustrates him is that he hasn’t been able to figure out how to write a novel about his lifelong passion for the great American pastime.

“I would love to write a really great baseball novel, something like ‘The Natural,’ ” says Grisham, referring to the Bernard Malamud classic. “I’m still waiting on the inspiration.”

Until it strikes, there is “Mickey,” Grisham’s baseball movie. Unlike the many film adaptations of Grisham’s novels, “Mickey” is not based on one of his books. It did, however, begin as a literary project.

” ‘Mickey’ started off as a book,” said Grisham, speaking from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “It didn’t last for two or three pages because I just found it impossible to capture in prose the action on a baseball field. It’s so visual.”

So “Mickey” became a screenplay, then a movie. Unable to find a distributor, Grisham and director Hugh Wilson have been self-distributing the film themselves in a limited number of markets across the country.

Despite the title, the film is not about Mickey Mantle. It’s about a lawyer (Harry Connick Jr.) who gets into financial trouble and takes off with his young son, whose name he changes to Mickey.

A talented ballplayer, the boy (Shawn Salinas) continues his Little League career in hiding. But, notes Grisham, although Mickey is “successful at playing a lot more baseball,” he and his dad “pay a price for it.”

Like many ardent baseball fans, the 49-year-old writer began his love affair with the game in childhood. Growing up in Arkansas and Mississippi, he played Little League ball and worshiped the Cardinals.

“For me, personally, baseball is a sport that you hand down from generation to generation,” Grisham says. “My father was a huge Cardinals fan,” he says, and “his father was a great fan,” too.

“Baseball is very romantic to me because the history of our country mirrors the history of baseball,” Grisham muses. “There are records of Civil War soldiers playing baseball. And if you take the history of the game — through the Industrial Revolution, the wave of immigrants, the civil-rights era — it’s just a wonderful reflection of our country.”

At one time, Grisham hoped to be part of baseball history himself. Until he was nearly 20, in fact, he nursed the dream of playing pro ball. But he got only as far as junior college.

“I had a uniform: That was about the extent of my talent,” he recalls. “I saw a curveball one day from a junior-college pitcher, and I never wanted to see another one. Time to go on and do something else.”

As the world knows, that “something else” was the law and then writing. But baseball fever remained in his blood, and he passed it down to the next generation.

When his son Ty, who turned 21 on May 12, was a kid, he joined Little League. Grisham, who was just becoming successful from his writing, had the luxury of time to coach the boy’s team. Eventually, Grisham became a Little League commissioner (a title he still holds) and built a baseball complex in Charlottesville, which includes seven fields that are used by 500 children each year.

“After my son’s last Little League baseball game — he was 12 years old and I’d coached him for a number of years — I remember being very sad and wishing that I could have just one more year of Little League baseball. And that’s the premise of the (movie’s) whole story.”

Although Grisham has yet to write that “great baseball novel,” he did write lovingly about the game in “A Painted House.” In that nostalgic 2001 novel, said Time’s Jess Cagle, “his compassion for his characters is infectious, and the book is finally rewarding.”

Grisham’s most recent legal thriller, “The Last Juror,” also garnered its share of good notices. Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised the book for its “crispness, streamlined energy and self-deprecating charm.”

The prolific Grisham is in the early stages of his next novel, which he’ll start writing in earnest next month. He won’t say anything about it except that it’s another legal thriller.

Meanwhile, his 2001 book, “Skipping Christmas,” is being turned into a movie called “Christmas with the Kranks,” starring Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis and Dan Aykroyd. It’s due out for Thanksgiving.

“The (Chris Columbus) script is wonderful,” says Grisham. “It’s funnier than the book.”

With all this to keep him busy, you’d think Grisham would be more than satisfied. But that unwritten baseball book continues to haunt him.

“I keep waiting for the story to hit,” he says, a wistful note in his voice. “One of these days.”