The audiobook Baseball Humor: A Collection of Stories from Master Storytellers takes readers on a delightful journey through the eccentricities of baseball as told by some of the greatest sports fiction writers of all time. What inspired you to put this collection of stories together?

I’m a big fan of baseball and love baseball fiction. Several years ago, I worked as a voice actor on a radio drama based on You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner and I really liked his writing style. Then, a couple of years ago, I narrated a baseball biography about a Major Leaguer named Cy Williams who played from 1911 to 1930. The author included excerpts from newspaper and magazine articles, and I noticed the “flowery” writing compared to sports writing of today. At that time MLB was the dominant professional sport and the sports stories were a major source of entertainment. So, I read more Ring Lardner. He started as a sports writer but also wrote satire for magazines. And I discovered that many other writers, not just sports writers, wrote pieces about baseball. It dawned on me that the colorful characters and their banter would work well in audio format.

This is an amazing collection of Baseball stories that many readers may not have ever found on their own. How much research did you undertake for this book, and how much time did it take to put it all together?

The idea for the book was to find short stories that were both humorous and had dialogue that would be fun to bring to audio format. There first golden age of baseball started in the 1920s. I concentrated on that era. This project started out slowly. At first, I recorded stories in breaks in my audiobook narration schedule. It’s taken two years to complete but not full-time.

What was your favorite story in this collection and why?

I’ll say my favorite is “Alibi Ike” by Ring Lardner. It’s a satire about a talented ballplayer’s habit of making excuses about everything he does, whether good or bad, on or off the field. That earns him the nickname Alibi Ike from his teammates. He falls in love with the sister-in-law of the team’s manager. She mistakes his excuses for modesty and falls for him. She goes on a road trip with the team. He proposes and gives her an engagement ring but tries to keep it a secret from the team. In fact, one night he denies it. She finds out and walks out. He stops hitting, the team drops out of first place, and the irascible manager has to fix the mess. The story is almost entirely told through Lardner’s delightful dialogue.

What is the next book that you’re working on and when can your fans expect it out?

I’m working on a story about a courageous mayoral aide who is dealing with the squabbles in her city between a wealthy condo developer on beachfront property and the grumpy neighbors who oppose it. She leads a staff team on a retreat at a lake where they are instructed in sailing as a team-building exercise. While sailing she spots a man overboard and makes a rescue, and receives five million dollars. With that money, they come up with a solution to the property squabbles of which they had not previously thought. The timeline on it 6 months to complete but I’ll also be doing audiobook narration, which has deadlines that vary.

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Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2024/08/04/colorful-characters-and-their-banter/