Baseball Fiction

The proposal was simple: Score a home run and take my virginity. Except my proposal went to the wrong brother. It was supposed to go to my best friend, but as fate would have it, it fell into the hands of his infuriatingly hot, irritatingly charming older brother. Lane Collins is Orleans University's All-Star baseball captain. Cocky pitcher. Player on and off the field. The life of every party. And the same guy I've crushed on in secret since we were kids.

The first ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California, in the 1970s.

Dean Evers, an elderly widower, sits in front of the television with nothing better to do than waste his leftover evenings watching baseball. It’s Rays/Mariners, and David Price is breezing through the line-up. Suddenly, in a seat a few rows up beyond the batter, Evers sees the face of someone from decades past, someone who shouldn’t be at the ballgame, shouldn’t be on the planet. And so begins a parade of people from Evers’s past, all of them occupying that seat behind home plate. Until one day Dean Evers sees someone even eerier….

My name is Lux Weston, and I’m a matter of national security... apparently. All I did was meet a beautiful girl in a bookstore and then rescue her. Once… twice… and maybe a third time—from a creeper. The problem? The creeper turned out to be Secret Service, and the girl… well, she’s Radley Andrews—the President’s only daughter. It has disaster written all over it. I should stay away. She’s a student, I’m a Major League Baseball player. She’s trying to hide from the spotlight, I’m standing underneath it. Not to mention I’ve never had a relationship, and Radley has her own demons to battle.

He's sexy and irresistible. I've done my best to ignore the magnetism that flows between us. I don't need complications in my life. I can't get wrapped up in his world, the last thing I need is to get attached to a professional athlete. I don’t have time for heartbreak.

Resisting the shortstop has never been my strong suit. I failed at it during my first spring training. It sure as hell looks like I'm about to fail at it again. The sport I love playing with my very soul hangs in the balance. But everything my heart craves lies with the guy I've got to resist. A guy who's asking me to make the toughest choice ever.

The company I worked for had been bought by who I later found out was my best friend's ex. That was one crazy story. He ended up being a retired Pittsburgh Pirate. I was just as shocked when I found out. He'd gotten three of his ball playing friends to agree to do some promotion for the company for practically nothing. I was going to be the one to get them everything they needed while they were there. Out of the three of them, I was sure there would be at least one sexy man that would have the need to release some stress, and I was all for helping him. You see, I didn't do love or ...

On Salmon Beach, magic happens: Mermaids speak in dreams and lives are transformed. Maddy believes she's lost her past. On Salmon Beach she rediscovers her desires. Nick has buried his feelings, and everything he cares about, deep within himself. On Salmon Beach he unearths his heart. Maddy Phillips, alone for the first time, comes to the hidden community of Salmon Beach - only accessible by sea, or 200 steps down a sheer cliff - to seek refuge from a broken relationship. What she won’t acknowledge is the loss of something - and someone - much more significant. Nick McKay moves to Salmon ...

Ryan Bingham's job as a Career Transition Counselor - he fires people - has kept him airborne for years. Although he has come to despise his line of work, he has come to love the culture of what he calls "Airworld" - finding contentment within pressurized cabins, anonymous hotel rooms, and a wardrobe of wrinkle-free slacks.

On the 50th anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the World", Don DeLillo reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life characters who on October 3, 1951, witnessed Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning.

My senior year definitely had some ups and downs. I'd gone to my prom, but it hadn't worked out exactly like I thought it would. It was even better. My dream had come true. I'd finally gotten that second kiss from my best friend, after he'd saved me from my creepy date of course. That kiss led to the most amazing night of my life. Everything was perfect. At least I thought it was. Then I woke up the following morning and everything changed. It was all a mistake. He'd never know just how much those few words changed my life. I was going off to college, and I was looking forward to every ...

Sutter Mason is sick and tired of ballplayers. And as far as she's concerned, the broken promise the last ace left her with was her final strike. The problem? Her dad is the coach of the hometown minor league team. And the hot new lefty who just joined the squad? He's her brother's new roommate. This time around, instead of falling for the player, she's going to use him to get what she wants—the perfect case study for her psychology thesis.

In these 11 stories, Gary Soto scores again. With a sensitivity and humor born from his own experiences while growing up in California's Central Valley, the author brings to the surface issues such as success and failure, honesty and deceit, love and friendship.

Brayden: I'm the man with it all. The pinstriped jersey covering my back garners easy cash, flashy cars and fast women. My gilded name drapes over the city in neon. I have everything. Everything, except the thing I crave most. Ashley Foster. They say you can never go home again. I'm out to prove them wrong. But what if returning requires facing all the things you destroyed? To what lengths would you go to earn forgiveness? Would you beg? Would you borrow? Would you steal?

When a cosmic anomaly disrupts the championship baseball game between Earth and Mars, reclusive trillionair Xan Ruiz-Harlow takes the bold step of shifting the contest into an artificial "Infinite Plane" existing outside of normal space-time. Now the elite players of the Earth Raptors and Mars Thunderbolts must adapt to playing in a dimension where the laws of physics are constantly warped in bizarre ways - balls defying gravity, trajectories altering inexplicably, and the very fabric of reality threatening to unravel with each pitch. As the greatest stars from both worlds employ innovative...

Lachlan Downy was a lover, not a fighter. Okay, he wouldn't lie, he was a fighter, too. But nobody had to know that. Especially not Memphis Tennessee Conner and her stuffy attitude when it came to cops and "men like him". Memphis knew cops. Her daddy was a cop. He was also the president of a motorcycle club. Needless to say, he's about as alpha as they come, and she's tired of overbearing men who think they know how to run her life better than she does.

Ten-year-old Katy Gordon loves baseball, and she's good at it, too. She tries out for the 1958 Little League season in the disguise of a boy, and she gets in easily. But when the coach finds out she's a girl, he forbids her from playing. "Since the beginning of baseball as an organized sport, it has always been the sole province of male athletes, and will remain so", says the Little League director. It's not fair, and Katy, who's also learning about the Civil Rights Movement in school, recognizes this as another societal injustice.

From his first day at boarding school, Toyo Shimada sees how upperclassmen make a sport out of terrorizing the first-years. Still, he's taken aback when the seniors keep him from trying out for the baseball team, especially after he sees their current shortstop. Toyo isn't afraid to prove himself; He's more troubled by his uncle's recent suicide. Although Uncle Koji's defiant death was supposedly heroic, it has made Toyo question many things about his family's samurai background.

Though Mary Yoder longs to marry someday, she finds caring for her community's injured and sick is much easier than courting. But when Englischer Clay Markham crashes his car nearby, Mary's nursing shows her his hidden wounds are more painful than his injuries. Though she's irresistibly drawn to his kind nature, can she risk letting him into her heart? On the run from his troubled past, ex-pro baseball player Clay can't believe the quiet sanctuary he's found under Mary's care. Her gentle faith and knowledge are somehow giving him hope he can change his life.

"I don't want to play anymore." Those six words coming out of James' mouth stopped the world around us. They were the most powerful words I'd heard since "It was all a mistake." He was really beginning to have a knack with changing lives one sentence at a time. Both of our dads began asking questions. Then they started telling him how wrong he was. They knew exactly what he needed, time. The more they told him, the more irritated I got. While I thought James was crazy, I totally understood where he was coming from and what he was about to go through. My dad was much worse than his. He was ...