Calico Joe
by John Grisham, 2012

In a departure from judicial dramas, John Grisham wrote a book about the personal effects of a beanball. Maria and I listened to this, on CD, last weekend, just in time for Spring Training. The story weaves a pair of fictional baseball players (one hero and one villain) into the real world of 1970’s baseball. The villain, motivated by a number of personal shortcomings and perceived slights, throws a beanball at the hero. The hero is hit in the face, and his promising but short career is ended. The story catches up with the characters 30 years after the incident to see if closure can be obtained.

While I appreciate baseball books and most of John Grisham’s stuff, this isn’t his best work by a long shot. A lot of the backstory on the narrator (the villain’s son) just makes you want to cringe, while the closure at the end seems like an odd combination of predictable and unrealistic.