Guide to Baseball Short Stories: M

McAfee, Daniel. "Batting 1.000." Spitball. Repr. Shannon. A veteran pitcher tells how he saved a World Series by striking out an unstoppable space-alien batsman.

McGill, William. "Holding On, Letting Go." Elysian Fields Quarterly 21.3 (Summer 2004): 76-80. Grizzled catcher departs game in peace after one last collision at the plate.

McIlrath, J. Harley. "Rain." Aethlon 18.2 (Spring 2001): 93-94. A father and son tend to farm chores and watch rain develop as they wait for a ball game to come on the radio.

McIlroy, Kimball. "Joe, the Great McWhiff." Esquire (1946). Repr. Staudohar. A couple of smart alecks get the idea of making a gorilla into a major-league pitcher, but the Yankees find ways of beating the gorilla, anyway.

A throwaway farce that knows its own limits, and funny enough. I wonder, though, if there are possible unsettling racial undertones of the story, coming as it does in the year that Jackie Robinson joined organized baseball. It seems to deflect anxieties over integration into the perceived harmlessness of animal fable. See also a contemporary story by Schramm, and Smith's Rhubarb.

McKenna, Edward L. "Fielder's Choice." Esquire (1946). Repr. Staudohar. An aging ballplayer turns hero when stands collapse during a game; crushed in the disaster is an old acquaintance of the hero, a careful bank clerk.

Weak baseball details and portentous language make for a pulpy sort of baseball yarn.

Maddox, Marjorie. "For Real." Aethlon 24.2 (Spring/Summer 2007): 73-78. Mother watches anxiously as her daughter plays ball energetically despite a heart condition.

Mahon, Robert Lee. "Fathers Playing Wiffle Ball with Sons – And Stepsons." Aethlon 19.1 (Fall 2001): 101-107. The meditation of one of those fathers as he watches a front-driveway match played by the boys.

Malone, Michael. "The Power." (2001). In Penzler. An agent tells the story of how a pitcher and catcher formed part of a love triangle resolved only by some quick thinking on the part of a cerebral barfly.

Maroney, Walter. "Curt Schilling and The Lord of Hosts." Slow Trains 4.3 (Winter 2004-05). Comic conversation between the Red Sox' right-hander and his Creator.

Maroney, Walter L. "God and Baseball on the Roofs of Brooklyn." Slow Trains 3.1 (Summer 2003). A confused young man finds guidance in a conversation with an older man who's playing catch with a boy.

Martin, Jay. Baseball Magic. Clifton, VA: Pocol Press, 2008. Eleven short stories about baseball.

These cluster around magical and metafictional themes (baseball turns out to be the key to "Why Jane Austen Never Married," for instance).

Martinez, Victor. "The Baseball Glove." In Gary Soto, ed., Pieces of the Heart. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993. 152-162. The narrator persuades his brother to pick chiles with him, in hopes of saving enough of their pay to buy a baseball glove; whne immigration authorities descend on the field, the brothers are driven away.

A socio-economic allegory of Mexican workers in the US fits nicely over a realistic situation; as so often, baseball is a route to becoming "American."

Martone, Michael. "The Death of Derek Jeter." Esquire 146.5 (November 2006). Yankee shortstop muses to himself in a series of self-consciously literary and metaliterary vignettes.

Inspiration for a legendary pastiche thread on Baseball Think Factory.

Matyshak, Stan. "How You Play the Game," Aethlon 13.2 (Spring 1996): 125-134. A teacher must serve as umpire for a game between his school and their rivals.

Themes of fair play and steadfastness in sport, conveyed in an unsentimental and unhokey way.

Mazza, Cris. "Caught." Aethon 14.1 (Fall 1996): 153-161. [Sport Literature Anthology Issue] Repr. McNally. A self-loathing man recalls the ruins of his baseball career.

Meissner, Bill. Hitting Into the Wind. New York: Random House, 1994. Reprinted Dallas: SMU Press, 1997. Thirty short stories and short sketches about baseball.

Meissner's pieces are dead plain ordinary. They're about things like fathers and sons playing catch, youth league nostalgia, washed-up ballplayers. Once in a while one of the pieces will offer an interesting angle, like two on the equipment of the game, "The Man Who Rescued Baseballs" and "The Glove Lacers."

Mele, Andrew Paul. "A Boy of Summer." Aethlon 23.2 (Spring 2006): 91-100. Lad's-eye view of the 1955 World Series.

Meyer, Bruce. Goodbye Mr. Spalding. Windsor, Ontario: Black Moss Press, 1995. Eight short stories, a prose poem, and a verse poem, all about baseball.

A mixture of the magical and the mundane, deliberately overwritten in different directions, showing a range of themes related to the game. This collection is at its best when it takes a very far-fetched idea and runs with it, as in the title story. "Goodbye Mr. Spalding" features Albert Spalding's 1888 world baseball tour running into trouble in Samoa, where the American stars encounter a home-grown ball club coached by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Meyerson, Henry. "A Dodger in the Bronx." Aethlon 13.1 (Fall 1995): 71-78. Various desultory memories of neighborhood stickball and neighborhood fan loyalties in New York of the 1950s.

Miller, Dinah. "My Father's Son." Aethlon 16.1 (Fall 1998): 117-124. A Red Sox fan with the misfortune to live in New York muses about baseball, family, and Catholicism.

Monroe, Glen. "The Bonus Bust." Ten Story Sports 6.3 (October 1952): 114-119, 121, 123-24, 126, 128. Bidding war gives bonus baby a swelled head; ultimately he retreats to the minors to get his game back together.

The eternal theme of a rookie with a lot to learn, here making sense in the context of 1950s bonus rules that forced big-bonus prospects to stay on major-league rosters.

Morelli. C.G.. In the Pen: A Baseball Collection. New York: iUniverse, 2007. Eight short stories and about baseball.

The title piece is a wry little sketch about the lives of doomed men pent in a tiny cell – until the phone rings ...

Morrison, Raymond. "Stealing Home." Aethlon 24.1 (Fall/Winter 2006-07): 59-62. Father, slipping into Alzheimer's, sits in the stands in Atlanta and supposes that he is at the Yankee Stadium of a previous generation.

Murakami Haruki. "All God's Children Can Dance." In Jay Rubin, translator, After the Quake [2000] New York: Vintage, 2002. 47-68. Exasperated man with an evangelical but oddly sensual mother tracks his long-lost father to an abandoned baseball diamond.

Profoundly odd story that is enmeshed in this stellar collection of six short stories, all linked by the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

Myka, Lenore. "Inheritance." In Further Fenway Fiction. College fundraiser enjoys the last few days of the life of an intensely devoted Red Sox fan.