Birthday greetings

Birthday greetings go out to Jerry Klinkowitz, today. Klinkowitz is the author of Short Season and Other Stories (Johns Hopkins: 1988) and Basepaths (Johns Hopkins: 1995). The former is a collection of stories about a fictional minor league team in Iowa. These stories were novelized in Basebpaths.

Klinkowitz was a member of the ownership group of the now-defunct Waterloo Diamonds (Midwest League) from 1978 to 1994. He wrote of his experiences in Writing Baseball (Illinois: 1991)*. His fictional works drew from his time with the Diamonds.

Currently a professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, Klinkowitz is also a noted authority on the works of Kurt Vonnegut.


* reprinted in 1999 by Southern Illinois as Owning a Piece of the Minors.

Leading Off: Opening Lines, Part 3

"It's when you're good that they throw at your head."

"In the summer of my thirty-seventh year, when the air began leaking so conspicuously from my life that remaining oblivious to it soon required my full attention, my father fell into a pig-rendering fire and, of his unspeakable injuries, perished."

"From the dugout where Grouchy sat, the whole field spread itself out before him, the diamond not a diamond at all but what it really was, a square with players at every corner."

"This was supposed to be a book about losers."

"It was bad enough going 0-for-5 and committing a dumb-ass error that led to two unearned runs in the bottom of the ninth that beat you."

"My name is Gideon Clark and, like my father before me, I have on more than one occasion been physically ejected from the corporate offices of the Chicago Cubs Baseball Club, which are located at Wrigley Field 1060 West Addison, in Chicago."

"They were the laughing boys of the American League."



(Strike Three You're Dead, Rosen; Blue Ruin, Boyd; Keystone Kids, Tunis; All G.O.D.S. Children, Craig; The Dreyfuss Affair, Lefcourt; The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Kinsella; The Seventh Babe, Charyn.)