Our Baseball Bookshelf

Baseball is back! And in honor of this week’s opening of the 2012 major league baseball season, we’re taking a look at Overlook’s baseball bookshelf.

Arguably one of the greatest books ever written about the sport is Robert Coover’s classic 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Reissued last year by Overlook, this timeless novel received a glowing tribute in The New York Times Book Review by Matt Weiland.

New in paperback this Spring is The Night Casey Was Born, a lively history of the most famous baseball poem of all time, Casey at the Bat. Author John Evangelist Walsh tells the story behind the poem and its young journalist author, as well as its inaugural performance in 1888 in New York's Wallack's Theater by DeWolf Hopper. The Night Casey was Born is a portrait of America in the earliest years of its love affair with baseball.

Billy Lombado’s The Man with Two Arms is a literary novel featuring a switch-pitcher who rises up through the ranks and baseball diamonds all over the country. It will thrill Chicago baseball fans, and appeal to all with a tender father-son story . Critic Alan Cheuse notes: “Undoubtedly modern America’s finest literary tribute to the baseball since Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural . . . Lombardo’s one of a kind novel about a one of a kind ball player becomes as engrossing as a perfect game going into the late innings. If you’re in the stands, you don’t want to look away from the field, let alone leave the stadium early. Those who love to read about this great pastime will have the same feeling when reading about Denny Grenville, on and off the field.”

And for the younger crowd, we recommend Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars by Walter Brooks, with illustrations by Kurt Wiese. The Freddy the Pig books, long considered classics of American children's literature are with each reissue by Overlook Press finding new readers. In this volume, Freddy organizes a Martian baseball team! Anyone who can imagine a baseball team consisting of Martians, an elephant, an ostrich, and Mr. Boorschmidt, with Freddy as coach, has a slight idea of what's in store.

Calling All Baseball Fans & Readers of THE MAN WITH TWO ARMS!

Have you ever had the feeling of disappointment when you finish a book and realize that you have absolutely no one with whom to discuss it? All you want to do is dissect and discuss the plot, characters, and ending--but to do so with any of your friends would spoil the book for them.

When you work in publishing, this happens more frequently than you might think--we read a lot of advance copies or manuscripts of books, and have to wait for the book to hit shelves (and then for your friends to get around to reading it!) we can sit down and properly analyze with others. We can imagine it happens to book reviewers--the first wave of readers of most books--as well.

And Spitball Magazine's Mark Schraf is having this problem with our wonderful baseball book The Man With Two Arms. The book came out in the spring, but as baseball season heats up, now is the perfect time to find yourself engrossed, as Mark was, in the funny and poignant novel about an ambidextrous pitcher. Read his full review here, and check out below for excerpts. If you're a baseball fan and haven't picked this book up yet, it makes a perfect read as teams claw their way into the playoffs come August and September. Enjoy!

Perhaps the greatest compliment a writer can be paid is to have his reader still thinking about his book months after the first reading. That is definitely the case with me and Billy Lombardo's novel, The Man With Two Arms, a sophisticated book with a deceptively simple title. In no other sport would true ambidexterity be so extraordinary (the only one I can think of that might come close is tennis, but the advantage isn’t nearly as pronounced), and it thus identifies Lombardo’s sparkling debut novel as unquestionably a baseball book. But it also establishes a primary theme as well: What is the true worth of athletic prowess, and just how unhealthy is hero worship for both the fan and the hero? After all, a ballplayer, no matter how great, is still just a man, isn’t he?

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Lombardo’s writing style isn’t as flashy as, say Brendan Boyd’s in Blue Ruin, but it doesn’t have to be. He captures the inner dialog of a father who wants desperately to give his only son the very best possible chance to succeed in the game he so passionately loves. The game descriptions and conversation are both spot on. Characterization is strong, with no cardboard characters to be found, save for Danny’s first professional manager in the minors. (Although, to be fair, a worn out baseball lifer would most likely be gruff and profane.) The author deftly allows Danny’s thoughts, speech, actions, and reactions to grow in sophistication throughout the 20 year span of the story, so that the character and his dilemma are fully realized.

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Much of this novel’s thematic richness can’t be discussed in a book review, simply because this would give all the special secrets away that are so rewarding to discover and contemplate as you turn the last pages. So I have a plan: Read The Man with Two Arms, and let me know what you think. I’m dying to talk to somebody about this book!

More Praise for Billy Lombardo's THE MAN WITH TWO ARMS

Jeremy Wilson of the literary journal Triquarterly reviews The Man with Two Arms: "In Billy Lombardo’s new novel, The Man with Two Arms, Henry Granville, a science teacher and baseball nut, looks at the birth of his child as an opportunity for an experiment. Would it be possible to groom a perfectly symmetrical human through a strict campaign that insisted the child perform all his motor functions with both hands? Additionally, Henry wonders what intellectual benefits his self-described “symmetry campaign” might have. Could his child end up perfectly balanced between left-brain and right-brain skills? So, from an early age, Henry’s son Danny must obsessively alternate using his right hand and his left while throwing and hitting a baseball, brushing his teeth, writing and drawing, and everything else you can imagine. The symmetry campaign works—almost too well—as Danny not only becomes the greatest baseball player the world has ever seen, but also gets burdened with a mild case of clairvoyance. But with baseball superstardom comes the inevitable gaze of the public eye, and the constant attention and expectations threaten to destroy Danny, his family, and the game that he loves.

To say that The Man with Two Arms is just another sports book would be like saying Danny Granville is just another baseball player. As Henry tells Danny late in the novel, “You’re about something much bigger than baseball,” so is Lombardo’s novel. The title alone speaks to freakishness, a sideshow act that charges admission, and by doing so inherently asks several intriguing questions. How does the world define and react to unique talent? Are these talents gifts or burdens? What responsibility do people with these “freakish” talents have to the public? Danny echoes other talented superstars who often just want to be left alone to do what they do best. But when you are that good at baseball, or at anything, you become something more than an individual with individual wants and desires.

Playing for the Chicago Cubs, Danny evolves into a type of messiah, the chosen one who could redeem a franchise for a century of suffering. “It seemed as though the world had been made for [Danny]—that when God, or whomever, had first come upon the excellent idea of a world, he had done so with the image of Danny Granville in his head. [ . . . ] It was possible, even, that God had waited this long billions of years in anticipation for that to happen.” But can anyone, even the greatest baseball player ever, be expected to hold up under such an enormous burden of responsibility? Or perhaps a better question might be, does he even have a responsibility?

Questions of science and art, family and responsibility, fate and chance, the individual and society, permeate the depths of what is on the surface a simple story rendered in a youthful and fable-like style. Lombardo cut his teeth onstage at Chicago’s Uptown Poetry Slam, and, in addition to two other collections of short stories, has recently published a collection of poems, Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns. His background as a poet shows in his musical descriptions of simple movements. “Henry poured Killian’s Red into his pint glass from the still parade of knobbed options on tap, filled it to the lip of the mug and walked as though the floor were a tightrope beneath him.” Lombardo paints the pouring of a beer as a triumphant act in a circus performance.

Similar delight comes in searching for all the symmetries Lombardo has deposited throughout the book: the Granvilles live equidistant between Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park; the basement of their house is devoted to science and baseball, while the top floor is devoted to love and art. But part of me wishes there were more balance in the narrative design, something in the way the book was structured that also spoke to questions of balance and symmetry. The novel is broken into three nine-chapter sections, like three baseball games. But why not two, a perfect doubleheader? Book One chronicles Danny’s younger years, Book Two his teenage years, and Book Three his professional days with the Chicago Cubs. Yet the book’s most interesting and important conflicts don’t emerge until Book Three, with the onset of adulthood and all of its requisite dramas. For me, that’s way too late in the game.

After the media scrutiny becomes too much, and Henry gets painted as a modern Victor Frankenstein, Danny asks, “Why can’t I just play baseball?” The book itself—like Danny, his parents, and his girlfriend—seems to want to keep Danny forever young, an innocent boy playing a boy’s game for its sheer enjoyment. Lombardo recognizes this as an impossibility, but can’t help himself from wishing it could be true."

Billy Lombardo's THE MAN WITH TWO ARMS on NPR's All Things Considered

Alan Cheuse reviews The Man with Two Arms by Billy Lombardo, a novel about a baseball pitcher who can throw both right- and left-handed on All Things Considered from NPR News.

"The 2010 baseball season has begun and our book reviewer, Alan Cheuse, has found what he considers the first fine baseball novel of the season. It's called The Man With Two Arms, and it's written by Chicago writer and teacher Billy Lombardo.

ALAN CHEUSE: The man of the title is Danny Granville. He comes from Chicagoland and he has two golden arms. His baseball-crazed father, Henry, raises him from infancy to play ball, and specifically to pitch both left-handed and right-handed. With coaches' thoughts in his head and Astroturf in his basement, father Henry cultivates a champion, a switch-pitcher who grows up to be a beautifully trained athlete with a great talent for baseball.

Through high school and college we watch Danny grow, and when he hits the majors playing for the Cubs, his first season looks as though it's going to be a triumph. Danny is something like a natural and his game-obsessed father does everything he can to enhance his son's natural abilities.

From the boy's first year on, the father directs him steadily and scientifically toward balance. As Danny's art student girlfriend Brigit discovers when she gets him to undress in preparation for posing for her that early propensity for balance has produced in the ballplayer an anatomical symmetry close to perfection.

It seems perfectly appropriate that Danny begins his major league career by pitching several games as close to perfect as it gets when the pitcher bows out in a late inning.

Lombardo's one-of-a-kind novel about a one-of-a-kind ballplayer is just as engrossing as a perfect game going into the late innings. If you're in the stands, you don't want to look away from the field, let alone leave the stadium early. Those who love to read about this great pastime will have this same feeling when reading about Danny Granville, on and off the field."

More Praise for Billy Lombardo's THE MAN WITH TWO ARMS

Journalist, sportswriter, and biographer Allen Barra offers some glowing praise for Billy Lombardo's new baseball novel The Man With Two Arms: "Most great baseball fiction—books such as Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and Kevin Baker’s Sometimes You See It Coming come quickly to mind—are heavy on the realism but with a touch of the weird. Billy Lombardo’s fits neatly on a shelf with those classics. Lombardo, author of such fine collections of short stories as Logic of A Rose and Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns, is a Chicago-based writer and editor who is both a master of fiction and a consummate observer of the game, which is what makes his strange premise so oddly believable: Henry Granville, a baseball fanatic, trains his son Danny to pitch with both hands, much in the way Mickey Mantle’s father trained him as a switch hitter. Lombardo is as deft at handling the comic and tragic aspects of his story as his creation, Danny, is at whizzing them in from both sides of the plate. Let’s subtitle The Man with Two Arms “The Unnatural” and call it the best baseball-themed fiction so far this decade.

Billy Lombardo's New Novel THE MAN WITH TWO ARMS Reviewed in Chicago Tribune

Book critic and author Alan Cheuse takes a look at The Man With Two Arms in the Chicago Tribune: "The man of the title, really a young man from Chicagoland, has two golden arms. His name is Danny Granville and his baseball-crazed father Henry raises him from infancy to play ball—and specifically to pitch both left-handed and right-handed. With “coach’s thoughts” in his head and Astroturf in his basement, Henry cultivates a champion, a “switch-pitcher” who grows up to become a beautifully trained athlete with a great talent for baseball. Through high school and college we watch Denny grow, and when he hits the majors—playing for the Cubs—his first season looks as though it’s going to be a triumph.

Lombardo sets his sights on writing a lovely homage to the game, and to what is undoubtedly modern America’s finest literary tribute to the baseball since Bernard Malamud’s novel "The Natural." Danny himself is something like a natural himself, with his game-obsessed father doing everything he can to enhance his son’s natural abilities. From the boy’s first year on the father directs him “steadily and scientifically toward balance…” As Danny’s art student girl-friend Bridget discovers when she gets him to undress in preparation for posing for her that early propensity for balance has produced in the ball-player an anatomical symmetry close to perfection.

Because of this, it seems perfectly appropriate that Danny begins his major league career by pitching several games as close to perfect as it gets when the pitcher bows out in a late inning. Denny sets an eighty pitch limit for each of his performances, whether right-handed or left. If he has any flaw it isn’t as a player, but as the care-taker of a great talent who eventually wants to try and experiment with his gift.

Baseball is a difficult game to predict. Novels are easier to figure, because the enjoyment at the higher levels comes from being confronted by questions about why things happen in life rather than just the suspense of waiting for them to happen. You won’t want to second-guess the author of this delightful new work of fiction. Lombardo’s one of a kind novel about a one of a kind ball player becomes as engrossing as a perfect game going into the late innings. If you’re in the stands, you don’t want to look away from the field, let alone leave the stadium early. Those who love to read about this great pastime will have the same feeling when reading about Danny Granville, on and off the field."

Billy Lombardo, author of THE MAN WITH TWO ARMS, Profiled in New City

Billy Lombardo, author of The Man With Two Arms, is profiled by Tom Lynch in Chicago's New City weekly newspaper: "Billy Lombardo strolls into The Breakfast Club on Hubbard Street fifteen minutes late, having missed his stop as he took the train into the city from his home in Forest Park. He was writing, he says, finally making progress on something new, and he wasn’t paying attention. The author, though in his forties, exudes a childlike whimsy when he laughs at his mistake—he’s apologetic, but he wears an excited, goofball sort of grin that’s apology enough. He has a lot to smile about.

Lombardo’s first novel, The Man With Two Arms, was just released by Overlook Press, a baseball book about a father who teaches his son to throw with both his left and right arms; the son becomes Major League Baseball’s first superstar ambidextrous pitcher.

Danny Granville spent almost every waking hour of his Chicago childhood learning to throw a baseball with either arm, under the strict tutelage of his father, Henry. He becomes a sort of pitching machine—a superman freak who’s capable of throwing the ball perfectly with either arm, a tremendous and unheard of asset in baseball. He works his way through the Cubs organization and quickly finds himself in the majors. Danny’s described as having the right arm of Seaver and the left arm of Koufax. Pressures follow—the spotlight, the fans, the media. While Lombardo gives Danny much more than just baseball—he loves to paint as well—he seems to throw at him much more than anyone could handle. The Man With Two Arms isn’t simply a baseball book; it’s about family, about the unique, incomparable relationship between a father and son, about survival and competition itself.

The idea started to take shape in 2003, after Lombardo was on vacation with his family in Florida, and his son, 10 at the time, started throwing a baseball around lefty with some surprising success.

But my first question to him was an obvious one, at least to me. A Bridgeport kid from a blue-collar family—how the hell did he decide his hero in his novel should be with the Cubs? Isn’t that some sort of sacrilege? Lombardo laughs. “My affiliation is with the Sox, for sure,” he says. “My son, who is more of a baseball guy, he’s nuts about the Sox, so I had some explaining to do when I decided to go with the Cubs. It was gonna be Sox, in the book, originally. But I’m dealing with a tool box that’s not quite packed yet. I don’t have the greatest tools in that yet. When I started writing the book all I had was a fucking mallet and a jeweler’s screwdriver, that’s about it.”

Then it comes out. “I didn’t know how to deal with the Sox winning the World Series. Before 2005, I was thinking Sox all the way [for the book], but then they won the Series, and I was like, I just couldn’t brush over the fact that they had won the Series. I didn’t know how to do that. But it doesn’t hurt that there are more Cubs fans in the world, too.”

After I admit I’m a Cubs fan, with only a modest amount of shame, Lombardo offers: “I also knew the Cubs weren’t going to ruin it by winning the World Series.”

The Man With Two Arms necessarily includes some intricate baseball passages, descriptions of on-the-field face-offs between pitcher and batter, the strains of the minors, training regimens. You wouldn’t know it from the book, but when he started writing, Lombardo didn’t know baseball all that well. “My understanding of baseball was really limited,” he says. “I only knew what my son knew about baseball. My son’s introduced me to it.”

He didn’t even play as a kid. “I played softball. So with this book, it wasn’t me dipping into my own life as much as I did with my other books. I didn’t go to many Sox games. My dad wasn’t a baseball fan. My friends—we played softball. I didn’t even know kids who played baseball.”

By now, Lombardo’s a baseball nut, and he has a legitimate concern that the book will alienate some readers who don’t share his passion for the sport. “It’s still a concern. It looks like a baseball book,” he says. “With How to Hold a Woman, I was just as fearful that that would appear to be a woman’s book, as I’m afraid this would appear to be a man’s book, you know? That’s why there’s so much more in there. I originally thought it was going to be a baseball novel, but I don’t think it’s a baseball novel anymore.”

Baseball, more than other sports, has this inherent ability to create sweeping sentimental narratives. This may be helped by Hollywood—think “Field of Dreams” or “The Natural”—but that’s not the sport’s fault. There’s a history, it’s a sport that’s taken personally; fathers play catch with their sons, sons learn from their fathers. America is offended—outraged!—when players take performance-enhancing drugs, yet shrug when athletes in other sports indulge as well. Baseball lends itself to melodrama.

“What’s really interesting,” Lombardo says, “is that I didn’t have that with my dad at all. He wasn’t a sports guy. He certainly participated in our lives in other ways, but our childhoods were less chaperoned than my own children’s. The first game I went to with my stepson, Carlton Fisk hit a fly ball into the stands. I had sandals on—it’s ridiculous to go to a baseball game with sandals on, I didn’t even know how to go to baseball games—and the ball ended up under my foot. I just remember him looking at that ball the whole game, and that was my first experience with father-son baseball, that was part of the joy of that thing.”

The Man With Two Arms and How to Hold a Woman have more in common than one would think—they’re both about families, about relationships between parents and children, between married couples, and how families struggle to overcome crisis."

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Billy Lombardo's THE MAN WITH TWO ARMS in Chicago Magazine

Billy Lombardo's The Man with Two Arms is reviewed by Steven Yaccino in Chicago Magazine: "In 2005, Billy Lombardo published his first book of short stories, fictionalized versions of his Bridgeport childhood, called Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories. He hit a prolific stride last year with two more collections (How to Hold a Woman and Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns), all the while finishing an MFA at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, teaching English at the Latin School of Chicago in Lincoln Park, running the national student literary magazine Polyphony H.S., and writing his first novel, The Man with Two Arms.

The novel, which comes out in February (Overlook Press; $24.95), tells the story of Danny Granville, whose obsessive father molds him into an all-star ambidextrous pitcher for the Chicago Cubs—with a mystical curve ball thrown into an otherwise Roy Hobbs-like narrative. Ten agents rejected the book before an editor at Overlook found Logic of a Rose at Strand Bookstore in Manhattan and, after reading it in one night, e-mailed Lombardo. He sent The Man with Two Arms, and Overlook made an offer the next day.

“It feels like it’s pouring,” Lombardo says of his success, though he’s skeptical about keeping up his current pace. “These books are the product of the last five to seven years. There’s always a little bit of fear, like, Am I going to have the time again?”

Billy Lombardo's THE MAN WITH TWO ARMS Reviewed in Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly offers a review of Chicago writer Billy Lombardo's new novel, The Man With Two Arms, coming in February: "This debut novel from Lombardo follows ably in the cleat-prints of W.P. Kinsella and Bernard Malamud, chronicling the life of a talented Chicago pitcher. In their middle-class Chicago suburb of the mid-1980s, baseball nut Henry Granville and his wife, Lori, face marital discord regarding Henry’s immediate, insistent campaign to commit their baby son Danny to a life in baseball. When Henry discovers his son’s natural ambidexterity, visions of raising a superstar “switch pitcher” (an almost unheard-of athletic skill) kick his obsession into overdrive. One rocky boyhood later, Danny signs with the Cubs and finds instant fame (“Danny can throw like Tom Seaver with one arm and Sandy Koufax with the other”) as well as a bit of infamy; he’s a “freak” in the eyes of opponents. Meanwhile, Danny falls in love with an art instructor and nurtures another rare talent: clairvoyance. Fans of sports fiction should find this an enjoyable trip to the mound, with just enough old-fashioned Americana magic to keep them guessing."