Bunts: Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose, and Other Reflections on Baseball

In Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, a political columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner set out, in his words, to produce an anti-romantic book about a subject that has been romanticized to a fare-thee-well.In “Bunts”: The Complete Baseball Essays of a Natural-Born Right Fielder, he returns to that audience, with finely-honed pieces about the sometimes recondite, sometimes frustrating, always passionately felt subject: baseball. Here are Will’s stump speech (Baseball: Who Needs it?), essays from Dan Okrent’s Ultimate Baseball Book and Ken Burns’ Baseball (“I played Little League in Champaign, Illinois, where I was a model of mediocrity under pressure. My team was the Mittendorf Funeral Home Panthers. We wore black”.).

Published in time for Father’s Day 1998, “Bunts” is certain to generate the sort of review attention that had the Wall Street Journal saying of Men at Work, “inquisitive and extraordinarily nimble-minded…this season’s baseball book of choice”.