ESPN Quick Pitches: A Star-Studded Lineup of Original Sports Fiction

Get your red-hot sports fiction right here! ESPN QUICK PITCHES fires ten great pieces of short fiction right at the intelligent sports fan’s strike zone. Featuring authors as diverse as bestselling writer Dave Eggers and major league pitcher Miguel Batista, these stories demonstrate that sports in the post-ESPN world is no mere metaphor for life, but increasingly life itself. These tales—selected by the editors of ESPN The Magazine and McSweeney’s, and originally published in the inaugural Fiction Issue of ESPN The Magazine—range from whimsical to serious, from based-on-fact to surreal, but each one shares with the best sports literature a deep love for that place where games, memory and imagination intersect. ESPN QUICK PITCHES includes: Bleacher Couch Man by JESS WALTER Perfectly capturing the teasing, banged-up banter of a group of weekend warriors, Bleacher Couch Man chronicles the belated transformation of an unemployed 42-year-old divorcee. My Life in Baseball by DAVE EGGERS The autobiography of a surprisingly articulate beard, whose latest gig is working the face of a San Francisco relief pitcher. Angel Wings by SUSAN STRAIGHT A bold piece of experimental fiction, chronicling a mother’s heartbreaking lament for her hoops-star son, senselessly shot dead at a fast-food drive-thru, then mercilessly mocked by online trolls. Moto by WELLS TOWER An 11-year-old boy is pressed by fate into a doomed competition with a fearless but troubled neighbor. The Favorite by JOHN BRANDON A financial wunderkind fallen on hard times returns to his boyhood home and concocts a small-time scheme to rebuild his bank account by framing a local football star. What if… by JEFF PINKNER Five counterfactual premises demonstrate that the sports history we take for granted could just as easily have been a dream. The Kudzu League by CHRIS BACHELDER An elegy for an obscure baseball league with finances so shaky that even a boy’s circus catch of a foul ball affects the bottom line. The Bow-Tie Miracle by MICHAEL BIBLE With his girlfriend in tow, a high school junior under the influence breaks into the restricted areas of Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium during a Carolina Panther game. John Brisker’s Greatest Game by GARE JOYCE A journalist obsessed with ABA bad-ass and black separatist John Brisker—presumed dead years before at the hands of Idi Amin—tracks him down in Monrovia, Liberia. Or does he? The Family Business by MIGUEL BATISTA Sixty years after her father died in an airplane crash that killed his entire baseball team, a 73-year-old grandmother in the Dominican Republic decides to introduce her grandson to the family’s brilliant, tragic past.