A report from the true heart of baseball, this anthology leaves behind the bad boys and big names of the major leagues to take readers to the places where the spirit of America’s game resides. These are a veteran sportswriter’s dispatches from the bush leagues and the sandlot, his tributes to the Negro leaguers, mining-town dreamers, and certifiable eccentrics who give baseball its heart and soul, laughter and tears.   John Schulian, a long-time Sports Illustrated contributor and former Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist, puts together a portrait of a disappearing America—a place inhabited by star-crossed Negro Leagues slugger Josh Gibson; by a vagabond player still toiling for the Durham Bulls at thirty-six; by the coach who created the Eskimo Pie League for kids in a Utah copper-mining town. When he does venture into the big leagues, Schulian gives us the underdogs and the human touches, from Bill Veeck peg-legging toward retirement as the game’s last maverick team owner, to musings on Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe at Christmas, to Studs Terkel’s reflections on baseball. In the end, though, this collection belongs to the kid at a tryout camp, the washed-out semipro following the game on his car radio, the players who were the toasts of outposts from Roswell to Wisconsin Rapids—and to the readers who keep the spirit of the game alive. *Starred Review* In this sparkling collection of essays, Schulian, a contributor to Sports Illustrated and formerly a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times , offers a reminder that baseball hasn't always been about endorsements, million-dollar deals, and agents. The game once had a heart and still does if we look hard enough. Over the last 25 years or so, Schulian has been attracted to baseball's eccentrics and dreamers, and here he brings together his accounts of some of them. His profile of the late Max Patkin, long known as the Clown Prince of Baseball, recalls how Patkin's comic antics helped sell minor-league baseball when it was struggling to attract fans. Similarly, his account of Rocky Bridges, journeyman player and successful minor-league manager whose rough edges kept him from a chance to manage in the bigs, reveals the kind of grassroots character who once gave baseball its personality. There are also poignant glimpses of Josh Gibson, the Babe Ruth of the Negro Leagues, whose talent couldn't bypass the racism of his times, and of a California League team comprising ex-major leaguers and former phenoms who refuse to give up the dream. Schulian is one of the very best sportswriters of the latter part of the twentieth century. His work resonates with time and place, compassion, and humanity. This is a wonderful collection that deserves a huge audience. Wes Lukowsky Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “For baseball fans, John Schulian’s Twilight of the Long-Ball Gods is the perfect antidote to winter. Schulian does something remarkable in this book: He brings to life an all-but-lost world of semipro teams and American Legion ball, of old Negro leagues and the Class D minors. . . . Schulian can flat-out write. Boxing and baseball have, by far, produced our best sports prose, and Schulian crafts sentences with the best of American journalists. Quotidian struggles here become the stuff of literature because American mythology, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed more than a century and a half ago, places the quest for individual success at the center of our national epic.”—Elliott J. Gorn, Chicago Tribune "Schulian puts it all together in prose as sparkling as the view of the sun twinkling off the boats in the harbor from the upper deck in Wrigley Field."—Ron Rapoport, Chicago Sun-Times “[The stories] focus on the lesser-known corners of the game, such as semipro ball, sandlot leagues and the old Negro Leagues, and they are all gems.”—Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times "In this sparkling collection of essays, Schulian . . . offers a reminder that baseball hasn't always been about endorsements, million-dollar deals, and agents. . . . Schulian is one of the very best sportswriters of the latter part of the twentieth century. His work resonates with time and place, compassion, and humanity. This is a wonderful collection that deserves a huge audience."— Booklist "'Long-ball' a hit even for non-fan. . . . Chapter after chapter of enticing sketches, stories spun of people’s dreams, of their hopes, their failures, their ordinariness, their endurance, achievements."—Geeta Sharma-Jensen, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Some of the best baseball writing you will ever read.”—Doug Moe, Madison.com and Capital Times "One key piece in this volume examines the life and legacy of Negro League great Josh Gibson, weaving together interviews with Josh's son and former teammates. Schulian's work has been widely anthologized, and aficionados of good baseball writing will appreciate this tome."— Library Journal "Baseball has belonged to poets a