The Grand Slam Book of Canadian Baseball Writing

Hugh Oliver is editor-in-chief at the OISE Press.

This is an eclectic compendium of some two dozen short stories,
fictional extracts, and poems by many well-known Canadian writers,
several of them former players in local Canadian leagues and all of them
seeming baseball enthusiasts. Contributors include Mordecai Richler (his
widely anthologized “Playing Ball on Hampstead Heath”); Morley
Callaghan (“A Cap for Steve”); George Bowering (“Baseball, a poem
in the magic number 9”); Alison Gordon (an extract from her novel The
Dead Pull Hitter); and W.P. Kinsella (“The Baseball Spur”). Many of
the stories draw on the comedy and drama inherent in local baseball
competition, with strongly portrayed and often eccentric characters
caught up in the tension of the play. Collectively the stories might add
up to a grand slam; the poems hardly warrant, in either sense, a homer.