Pinch Hitter: Baseball Fantasy Becomes Reality

Reviewed by Stuart Nachbar

Pinch Hitter

But David also has a secret that is a driver to the story. His older brother Danny was also a baseball protégé. Unlike David, Danny is an over-confident pitcher with quality stuff, good enough for a scholarship or a major league contract. However, Danny’s promise ends when he is hit above the eye by a line drive—off the bat of his younger brother. Immediately after that fatal incident, David ends his own baseball dreams, and years later, Danny disappears from his life, crippled by lingering pain and lost dreams. At the start of this story David has not seen his older brother for nine years.

Pinch Hitter is a moving story and I could see that Whitney spent a lot of time around a major league baseball team. The clubhouse and front office scenes are more detailed than I would expect to find from an author with no personal day-to-day connection to major league baseball, and Whitney also shows a strong knowledge of the situational game, where managers have to strategize again each other, using mind and matter to win. It’s no surprise that his main character is a pinch hitter, since that is a situational position in a game, as opposed to an everyday star. Reading Pinch Hitter, I was reminded of Rudy, the Notre Dame football movie, where a 26 year old college senior has overcome dyslexia to earn a degree and have a chance to play for a national championship team. Rudy is carried off the field at the end of his only game, just as David is heralded by his teammates at the end of this story.

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