Overview
Eliot Asinof’s newest baseball hero left tiny Gandee, Missouri, as John Clyde Cagle Jr., a hard-throwing lefthander who had pitched a perfect game in high school. Now he returns in triumph as the legendary “Black Jack,” superstar of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a stoic, menacing mound demon with a Fu Manchu moustache and a 106-mile-per-hour fastball.
In a nationally televised event that, like everything else in his life, is precisely orchestrated by agent and money manager Gordon Stanley, Jack’s return is to dedicate Black Jack Field, the two-million-dollar ballpark he has donated to his hometown. He arrives in a white stretch limo, glamorous girlfriend at his side and the world at his feet, but he is stung by a spate of bad memories of his boyhood, most pungent of which is that of Cyrus Coles, his fat black battery mate who had quietly taught Jack the disciplined pitching that had made him great. Typically now, when Jack throws out the ceremonial first pitch to his father, Vietnam war hero, spit-and-polish sheriff of Gandee, everyone believes the father to be the reason for the son’s success.
Then Jack confronts Cyrus’s murdered body, blown away by a shotgun blast. He has to face the fury of Cyrus’s widow, Ruby, and, most provocative of all, an outspoken woman named Foxx, who makes him aware that he’s been living a lie.
Jack flees this unsettling scene with his girlfriend for the pleasures of New York City—until he learns that, back in Gandee, his father has arrested Ruby for the murder of her husband. To everyone’s astonishment, Jack returns to Gandee to help her. With Foxx now an ally, he sees his hometown for its corrupt racist traditions, bringing on a new understanding of himself that leads him to risk everything to probe an intolerable truth.
Synopsis
Eliot Asinof’s newest baseball hero left tiny Gandee, Missouri, as John Clyde Cagle Jr., a hard-throwing lefthander who had pitched a perfect game in high school. Now he returns in triumph as the legendary “Black Jack,” superstar of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a stoic, menacing mound demon with a Fu Manchu moustache and a 106-mile-per-hour fastball.
In a nationally televised event that, like everything else in his life, is precisely orchestrated by agent and money manager Gordon Stanley, Jack’s return is to dedicate Black Jack Field, the two-million-dollar ballpark he has donated to his hometown. He arrives in a white stretch limo, glamorous girlfriend at his side and the world at his feet, but he is stung by a spate of bad memories of his boyhood, most pungent of which is that of Cyrus Coles, his fat black battery mate who had quietly taught Jack the disciplined pitching that had made him great. Typically now, when Jack throws out the ceremonial first pitch to his father, Vietnam war hero, spit-and-polish sheriff of Gandee, everyone believes the father to be the reason for the son’s success.
Then Jack confronts Cyrus’s murdered body, blown away by a shotgun blast. He has to face the fury of Cyrus’s widow, Ruby, and, most provocative of all, an outspoken woman named Foxx, who makes him aware that he’s been living a lie.
Jack flees this unsettling scene with his girlfriend for the pleasures of New York City—until he learns that, back in Gandee, his father has arrested Ruby for the murder of her husband. To everyone’s astonishment, Jack returns to Gandee to help her. With Foxx now an ally, he sees his hometown for its corrupt racist traditions, bringing on a new understanding of himself that leads him to risk everything to probe an intolerable truth.
Publishers Weekly
Eight Men Out, Asinof's acclaimed nonfiction account of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, is his primary claim to fame; his first foray into fiction, Man on Spikes, was not as successful, commercially or critically. Asinof's new novel, about a baseball superstar's reckoning with his past, falls in between. It's admirably ambitious, but it shies away from the kind of kinetic sports descriptions Asinof is known for. John Clyde Cagle Jr., aka "Black Jack," is one of baseball's most successful pitchers. He has a $100-million Dodgers contract, and with a beautiful girlfriend who happens to be the Dodger owner's daughter, product endorsements, tours and publicity, he is poised to earn further millions. He donates $2 million to build a baseball field in his dumpy, backwater home town of Gandee, Mo., then returns there for the first time since high school to celebrate the opening of Black Jack Field. But the returning hero has a secret he'd just as soon forget: as a teen he was just an average pitcher, and it was only through the brilliant coaching of his high school batting mate, Cyrus Coles, that he became the star he is. Cyrus, a black auto mechanic who never had a chance of turning pro, is murdered on the way to the ceremony, and Cyrus's upright, truthful wife, Ruby, is charged with the murder. Jack is sure that Ruby is innocent, so he leaves his plush, glamorous environment to take time to exonerate her. A mouthy female reporter for the local newspaper, who Jack disastrously dated in high school, gets irritatingly involved with Jack's life. Readers will intuit the mystery's solution, especially given the heavy foreshadowing weighing down the relationship between Jack and his overbearing father, who's the sheriff of Gandee, above suspicion although virulently racist. The novel comes to a tidy conclusion, but its sparkling, suspenseful passages about baseball are overwhelmed by Asinsof's more sentimental themes. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Editorials
From the Publisher
“A shocking murder involving the wife of a big leaguer’s old high school teammate plunges the major league superstar into a viper’s nest of small-town secrets, racism and lies.”—USA Today Baseball Weekly
“Here is the book’s great originality: it lets readers see how despite financial and cosmetic changes, baseball still retains its uncommon pertinence to the deepest truths about American life.”—Jerry Klinkowitz, author of Owning a Piece of the Minors
“[A] successful mixture of hard-boiled mystery, coming-of-age story, and baseball yarn.”—Booklist