Mini-Review: The Might Have Been

Recently finished reading my second baseball novel (!) in the last month; The Greatest Show on Dirt by James Bailey was the first. I’ll be doing reviews of both of them in the near future as my 501 schedule permits.

I wanted to contact Joseph Schuster but could find no info either on Facebook nor his website. Joe, if you;re out there, drop me a line.

In the meantime, I came across this mini-review from the NY Times of April 20, reprinted here for your convenience:

THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN
By Joseph M. Schuster.
Ballantine, $25.

The effort to sustain the tradition of the great American baseball novel receives an honorable boost with this meticulously peopled tale of opportunities lost. Like Chad Harbach’s “Art of Fielding,” Schuster’s first novel pivots on a midgame accident: a rude encounter with a chain-link fence that jettisons the prospects of a St. Louis Cardinals outfielder named Edward Everett Yates. Ditching a fiancée and the secure ennui of his uncle’s flour business, Yates takes another shot at a baseball career, only to find himself, decades later, pushing 60 with a scattershot résumé as a minor-league manager and serial mismanager of personal relationships. Yates dodges an array of traps laid out within a nonlinear time frame that heightens the poignancy of his life choices. The occasional lazy descriptive sentence or foray into hotel-bedroom farce is recompensed by Schuster’s vigorous supporting roster of problem-child players, skinflint team owners and M.B.A.-flaunting executives. Best, perhaps, is the book’s small bounty of frisky, take-charge older women, a rarity in a genre conventionally strewed with the put-upon young widows of summer.

I daresay that Mr. Schuster never received the pre-publishing publicity that Mr. Harbach did, although I find The Might Have Been much more satisfying than TAOF. Just sayin’.