Guide to Baseball Short Stories: G
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- Gallico, Paul. "Saint Bambino." Repr. Lewis. A grandfather tries to make a "man" out of his grandson, and gets some help from the sainted George Herman Ruth.
Unashamed hokum.
- Gallico, Paul. "The Umpire's Revolt." Repr. Holtzman. An Irish girl from Canarsie persuades her beau, a big-league umpire, to wear an outlandish suit of clothes, touching off a sartorial revolution among umpires everywhere.
Sub-Runyon New York baseball yarn; pretty leaden.
- Garfield, Hank Williams. "The Heroes Challenge the Gods to a Ballgame." 108 1.2 (Winter 2007): 34-40. The heroes and gods of Greek mythology, that is, with Tiresias managing the big game against Hera, wife of the Gods' starting pitcher.
- Geary, Tracy Miller. "October 2004." In Further Fenway Fiction. Female fan falls in love with a much younger man during the Red Sox' drive to the 2004 World Championship.
- Geary, Tracy Miller. "Opening Day." In Pachter. Female Red Sox fan good-humoredly dates a male Yankee fan until the guy shows his true colors.
The bare plot would lead you to expect a light-hearted or wry story, but it's trenchantly serious.
- German, Norman. "The Havana Home Run." Elysian Fields Quarterly 21.3 (Summer 2004): 51-64. Key West in 1952: veteran scout watches a makeshift game that features the fastest pitcher of all time against batter Ernest Hemingway.
- Gies, Joseph. "The Old Cardinal Spirit." This Week Magazine, 1957. Repr. Cummings. Father and son move to new community, where the son plays ball and hopes that his alcoholic ex-major-leaguer father will stay on the wagon.
Dissolves near the end into standard temperance-story formulas, but early scenes of the son trying to cover for his father (an apartment-building superintendent) are nicely drawn.
- Gonzalez, Ray. "Baseball." Circling the Tortilla Dragon, Creative Arts Book Company, 2002. Repr. McNally. In the World Series, a high fly ball goes up -- but does it ever come down?
Atmospheric short-short story.
- Gopnik, Adam. "The Rookie." The New Yorker (4 October 1999). 59-67. An expatriate in Paris tells his son a fantastic story of a toddler pitching for the 1908 Giants.
Metafiction, really: Gopnik's piece is an essay that circles around the central fiction, which he examines as fiction, as nostalgia for America. Very well-done. ![]()
- Gorman, Peter D. "Pastime." Aethlon 22.2 (Spring 2005): 43-54. Matter-of-fact rendering of an imaginary minor league.
- Graham, Paul. "The Brief But Glorious History of the Sub Zero Baseball League." 108 1.3 (Summer 2007): 36-40. Rabid baseball players in the coldest corner of upstate New York establish a mid-winter league.
- Graves, Louis. "Ach Du Lieber Baseball!" Repr. Lewis. A butcher wishes that he could bat 1.000, and ends up playing right field for John McGraw's Giants.
Early-20th-century magical realism, anticipating Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.
- Graves, Louis. "Fair-Weather Hits." (1913) Repr. Strecker. Sequel to "Ach Du Lieber Baseball!": the butcher returns to the Giants, but only when the sun is shining.
Darker tone in this one, with an ending that anticipates Alan Sillitoe's Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, almost.
- Greenberg, Alvin. "Game Time." In Delta q (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1983): 23-37. The Dutchmen, a wandering ballclub, play intrasquad games to no crowds on deserted fields across the USA until, during a particularly interminable contest, time literally stands still.
One of the better evocations of the lack of a clock in baseball. Told from the perspective of an unusually well-realized (non-stereotypic) Latin ballplayer. ![]()
- Greenberg, Alvin. "The Real Meaning of the Faust Legend." In The Discovery of America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980): 87-99. Ballplayer sells his soul to bat .368 -- but can only hit that well at AA Muncie.
Blends realistic psychology with myth.
- Grey, Zane. The Red-Headed Outfield and Other Baseball Stories. Title story repr. Strecker.
Criticism: Solomon
