Guide to Baseball Short Stories: A
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- Adler, Carl. "The Great American Pastime." Aethlon 21.2 (Spring 2004): 67-74. A baseball-absorbed dad "protects" his kid from a drifter.
- Afflerbach, Fred. "Bobo, Hank, and Me." Slow Trains 6.1 (Summer 2006). A ruined baseball card unknits a childhood friendship.
A touch melodramatic, but conveys the sinking feeling of lost childhood treasures and relationships quite well.
- Alexander, Holmes. "Five-Inning Wonder." Saturday Evening Post 219.8 (24 August 1946): 24-25, 54, 57. A pitcher returns from the war with an injured hand; his career is on the line--can he come through in the clutch?
- Alexander, Skye. "Life, Death, Love, and Baseball." In Undertow: Crime Stories by New England Writers (Level Best Books, 2003). Repr. Pachter. In the strike summer of 1981, a gardener starts an affair with a photographer client that she first meets at a Red Sox game.
Develops an intriguing, unsettling plot but then wraps up rather too quickly.
- Alexie, Sherman. "The Warriors." In One Stick Song (Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 2000): 42-54. Memories of a Spokane Indian basketball star who hates baseball.
The memories are of friendship, playground pecking orders, lust, and Strat-O-Matic. A prose piece that forms the center of a poetry collection.
- Algren, Nelson. "I Guess You Fellows Just Don't Want Me." The Last Carousel (1973). Repr. Bowering. An urban tall tale about a character named Ipso Facto, who, in one ballgame, almost steals a run by stealing the baseball.
- Anderson, Poul, and Gordon R. Dickson. "Joy in Mudville." Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1955. Repr. Terry Carr, ed. The Infinite Arena: Seven Science Fiction Stories About Sports. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1977. In the future, baseball is played on thousands of planets that try to emulate the culture of Earth.
This one would figure to have some satire of American imperialism buried somewhere in its dreadful prose and stick-figure characters, but maybe it doesn't . . .
- Anderton, Seven. "The Big Win." Ten Story Sports 6.3 (October 1952): 11-33. Reclusive owner plucks fan from cheap seats and names him manager of a hapless big-league club; club responds to manager's exhortations and goes on a tear.
Pleasant little story (despite lower-tier pulp conventions that allow mild profanity and the suggestion of premarital sex). The unseen owner turns out to be a little old lady delighted to make fan Joe Frost's dream come true and to justify his girlfriend Addie Miller's faith in him.
- Apple, Max. "Understanding Alvarado." American Review 22 (1975). In The Oranging of America and Other Stories (New York: Grossman, 1976), repr. New York: Penguin, 1981. 81-94. Whether Achilles "Archie" Alvarado, Cuban baseball hero and revolutionary, will return to the United States to collect his big-league pension comes down to a single at-bat taken by a retired American slugger against pitcher Fidel Castro.
Energetic, good-humored short story. For more fictional views of Castro on the mound, see Shepard, Wendel. 
