Guide to Baseball Novels: O
- O'Connor, Philip F. Stealing Home. New York: Knopf, 1979. A fortyish man coaches a bad-news youth-league team to a championship while having an affair with a player's mother.
Realistic novel with flashes of keen observation but very little plot or character interest.
- Frank O'Rourke (1916-1989) has his own page in the Guide.
- Ogawa Yoko. The Housekeeper and the Professor. [Hakase no Aishita Sushiki, 2003.] Translated by Stephen Snyder. New York: Picador, 2009. A housekeeper and her young son bond over baseball stats and cards, insofar as they can, with a mathematics professor whose brain can form only the most ephemeral of new memories.
Reminiscent of several disparate texts, including the clinical tales of Oliver Sacks, stories of disabled mathematicians in fiction and real life like Proof and A Beautiful Mind, and Sherwoood Kiraly's Diminished Capacity, where neurologically-impaired people encounter baseball cards. But The Housekeeper and the Professor is a strongly original book, deftly told and full of the mysteries of mathematics. Naturally the characters are drawn to baseball, with its web of numbers. In fact, they all learn baseball far more from radio broadcasts and box scores than from real life – which doesn't prevent them from loving it in person. 
- Owen, Howard. The Rail. Sag Harbor, NY: Permanent Press, 2002. Retired baseball star hits bottom and makes his way back from a personal hell.
Sometimes catalogued as a baseball novel, but might be better placed as a kind of midlife-crisis family drama that happens to have a baseball player at its center; that athletic identity doesn't seem particularly crucial to protagonist Neil Beauchamp's story.
