Four Home-Run Books for Baseball Season

Baseball fans surely know the legendary Blue Jays play-by-play radio broadcaster Jerry Howarth who covered historic baseball moments like the back-to-back World Series Championships in 1992 and 1993 and brought on-the-ball descriptions into living rooms. In his newly published memoir Hello, Friends! Jerry recounts stories about players like Roberto Alomar and Joe Carter to Josh Donaldson and the late Roy Halladay, and shares his views on life and family with the same insights and humour baseball aficionados will remember.

Part memoir, part philosophical reflection, Fail Better is a love letter to baseball where sport and literature collide. Loaded with concepts like “time out of time” and theoretically infinite game-space, Fail Better argues the idea that “there is no better tutor of human failure’s enduring significance than this strange, crooked game of base, where geometry becomes poetry,” considering baseball historically, ethically, politically, nostalgically, and linguistically.

Far from boring, Andrew Forbes’s The Utility of Boredom is a collection of essays that will hit home runs with inside baseball types and casual fans alike. This is a book of baseball as sanctuary that will regale and remind of readers of days in the sun cheering on their favourite team, while it talks about the slow-glory of baseball, and the heartbreak of fandom. 

George Bowering’s The Diamond Alphabet is a double-passion project: marrying his fondness of baseball with his love of language, Bowering gives readers a baseball book made up of 130 between-innings takes, five for each letter, that hits home the intersection between baseball and literature.