Dear Subscriber,
All right. I confess. I’m a baseball fanatic. I was the Sports Editor for my Huntington Beach High School student newspaper, The Oiler (which name still makes me want to puke). Our mascot was a walking oil derrick. I was also a stringer for the Orange County Register. I enjoyed the sports beat, but I preferred writing about baseball and basketball and other lower echelon sports. Not so much football.
This fanatical attention led to me creating a few baseball stories, of course, over the years. You can read some in my fiction collection called The Mayan Magician. The title story is about a young Mayan maid in Mexico who makes a deal with her higher power to be able to throw a very magical knuckleball, and she makes it to the majors pitching for my San Diego Padres. My son, Ari, did the cover (I paid him), and he now teaches high school Physics with a side of art and comics. The closest my fictional story came to real life was a Japanese woman knuckleball artist, Eri Yoshida (hey, that’s close to “Ari”), who today pitches in the independent minors. Trust me. Some day a woman will be pitching in the majors, probably with some special pitch also, like a “flamingo slurve” (I made that up).
Another novelette I created was about a Jewish pitcher who pitches into problems when baseball becomes very high tech. in the future. Smart Arm becomes an international thriller that you may enjoy.
If you like my stories, then you can subscribe to my “story per month” and/or “serial per month (10 episodes)” Auschwitz Dancer.
My current San Diego Padres aren’t (yet) living up to their big payroll, and they must play my #1 son Chris’s Yankees this weekend, so good luck with or without Manny Machado.
Take care of yourselves and keep fighting the good fight and read to preserve our freedom of inquiry.
James Musgrave
