Kirjahaku

It's only a game, Bill Littlefield's National Public Radio program tells us, trying to keep sports in perspective. And for all the deadly serious perspectives of sports commentators and fans, Littlefield's is perhaps the most realistic. It is certainly the most entertaining. Sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, Littlefield's take on the games people play is as refreshing as it is enlightening. From baseball Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett's untimely death, to pickup soccer games among misfit high-schoolers, to the most obscure nicknames and unusual mascots in college sports, the book collects memorable commentaries from Littlefield's popular NPR sports show as well as never-before-published essays. No matter the topic, Littlefield illuminates the dark corners and unlikely angles of sports with wry good humor and a lightly worn expertise that lets nothing pass.

Baseball and Philosophy brings together two high-powered pastimes: the sport of baseball and the academic discipline of philosophy. Eric Bronson asked eighteen young professors to provide their profound analysis of some aspect of baseball. The result offers surprisingly deep insights into this most American of games.The contributors include many of the leading voices in the burgeoning new field of philosophy of sport, plus a few other talented philosophers with a personal interest in baseball. A few of the contributors are also drawn from academic areas outside philosophy: statistics, law, and history.This volume gives the thoughtful baseball fan substancial material to think more deeply about. What moral issues are raised by the Intentional Walk? Do teams sometimes benefit from the self-interested behavior of their individual members? How can Zen be applied to hitting? Is it ethical to employ deception in sports? Can a game be defined by its written rules or are there also other constraints? What can the U.S. Supreme Court learn from umpiring? Why should baseball be the only industry exempt from antitrust laws? What part does luck play in any game of skill?

In a neighborhood nondescript except for how often small houses are being torn down to make way for big houses, a beautiful woman too young to be widowed waits for her husband to come home from prison. Arthur Baladino is getting out courtesy of a compassionate leave program, the theory being that he's too feeble to shoot anybody else.Next door to the Baladino home, a little boy in a baseball uniform asks his father, "What happens when you die?" It's a question the father will soon confront in a terrible and surprising way. Just down the street, a young woman is trying to figure out how to re-start her life after her husband has lost his money, hers, and their home by day-trading in their basement. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, several women and a couple of men-two of them accomplished arsonists who've sometimes been employed by Arthur Baladino-dream of what might have been if they'd been wiser, more patient, or luckier in a past long dead everywhere but in their imaginations.On a landscape more often than not indifferent, these people seek mercy, if not in love, than in the sometimes rickety, temporary alternative connections they can find with their fellow seekers.