Waiting for Teddy Williams

It's been several years since I read a book by Mr. Mosher, and I welcomed a return to Kingdom Common. These books don't have heroes or villains, just ordinary people living relatively ordinary lives, even if some of them are a bit eccentric. Talking to a statue near a town ball field might qualify as eccentric, but the statue, believe it or not, is essential to the plot, and seems perfectly plausible as part of it. This book is a homage to an almost extinct form of sport, the town ball teams that regularly played other local teams in their area. These were not pros, you understand, but local working men who just played for the love of the game. As a young boy, I remember going to watch my dad play softball for one of the local garment facory teams, and even then found it unusual that he played center field without using a glove! Intertwined into this local scene is the rabid Red Sox rooters of new England, fiercely determined to see their beloved Sox win their first World Series since 1918 (of course, now that they've won two since then, some of the urgency has appeared to be diminished, but not the enthusiasm). Read the book for the glimpse of small town life it gives you, the way ordinary people go about making their way in the world, and enjoy reading about the mythical World Series between the Sox and the Mets, while the Sox are managed by "the Legendary Spence"! It's enjoyable from beginning to end.

This is one of those stories that will stick with you and keep you smiling days after you have finished it. It is almost magical, in the vein of The Natural and other great story-telling. I really loved this little fable and the way it is told. What a joy!

Fabulous, absolutely fabulous. And that, as the adage goes, is not only baseball, that is also great fiction, whether you care for baseball, don't care for baseball, or have the misfortune of being a Yankees fan.

"Waiting for Teddy Williams" follows the story of Ethan "E.A." Allen who grows up in Kingdom Common, Vermont, the unofficial capitol of the Red Sox Nation, a town with a baseball bat factory, a town where every radio is tuned to every Sox game. E.A. is homeschooled by his single mother, stripper, hooker, escort, wannabe country singer Gypsy Lee Allen, who teaches him much more than the average boy would learn in school. Her lessons also include batting practice. E.A. has two dreams, one to be a Red Sox hero and two, he wants to find his father, who his mother refers to as Mr. Gone and Long Forgotten. Then one day during the summer when he is eight years old, a drifter named Teddy Williams shows up on his family's property and E.A., young man of the house, goes out to shoo the fellow off. But before the drifter leaves, he teaches E.A. a few things about baseball and about life. The drifter will return throughout this humorous story full of quirky characters, always teaching E.A. and yes, the drifter is his dad. And yes, E.A. finally makes it to the majors, playing for the Sox. And yes this is a story about much more than just baseball, but if you are a reader who loves the game, then you're guaranteed to love this book. But you don't have to be a card-carrying baseball fanatic to be captured and captivated by this story. I know, because Mr. Mosher drew me right in and I've never played the game.

A long, long time ago - when we still argued whether Babe Ruth or Roger Maris held the single-season home-run record - a little book circulated like a whisper among true fans of baseball and its prose. By 1982, Roger Angell, Paul Gallico and Tom Boswell had already been dangled like stars in the twilight heavens of baseball literature, but this new little novel told us some-thing about baseball they hadn't. It slid head-first into the incalculable depth of memory and dreams about a sport defined too often by esoteric calculations. In short, "Shoeless Joe" by W.P. Kinsella captured the pure, lump-in-the-throat intimacy of fathers playing catch with sons. In a very short time, it came pouring out, all the poetry, metaphor and sensuality of base-ball. It was like a literary tarp being dragged across the field of American letters by pa-tient, undaunted groundskeepers whose only job was to keep baseball fiction forever green and unmuddied. The life-imitates-baseball genre provided reading material for little-boy right-fielders who'd grown into love-handled ESPN addicts, as well as the scripts for several Kevin Costner movies. But nobody captured Kinsella's original and literally fantastic brand of magical realism, where the ghosts of legendary players could play in an Iowa cornfield, or a 2,000-inning Cubs game of mythic proportions could go unrecorded by history. Until now. Howard Frank Mosher, one of the most versatile and funny American storytellers since Mark Twain, grew up playing Little League and town ball. On summer nights when the Red Sox played the Yankees, his father and uncle would drive him to a nearby mountaintop, where the play-by-play radio signal was clearer. So it's probably as natural as outfield grass at Fenway Park that Mosher has written his ninth book about baseball. But as Mosher himself admits, "Waiting for Teddy Williams" is about baseball in the way that "A River Runs Through It" is about fly-fishing. "Waiting" is more clear-eyed than Kinsella's gauzy and poetic "Shoeless Joe," but equally poignant. Both pluck the chords that resonate with lovers of old-time baseball, who see larger-than-life ballplayers like Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams through the fun-house mirror of memory. That is, larger than larger-than-life. But for all its echoes of Kinsella, Mosher's blend of quirky characters, contemporary mythology, and mischievous prose is utterly original and entertaining. One needn't be a die-hard baseball fan to enjoy this story, but if you know the difference between a "knuckler" and a "slider" - and the smell of new-mown outfield grass or the taste of sandlot dust - you'll probably read this book then tuck it safely on a shelf beside baseball classics such as "The Boys of Summer" and "The Pride of the Yankees." It's that good. In "Waiting for Teddy Williams," Mosher has stolen home as a consummate humorist - proving his uproariously funny 2003 Lewis-and-Clark satire, "The True Account," wasn't just a c