The History of Baseball

A Short Story

By: Christie Hodgen

Narrated by: Courtney Patterson

Length: 1 hr and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

Has anyone ever told you that baseball is more than a game, that it's really a metaphor for life? Have you ever wondered what they meant? This story imagines the answer.

A single mother moves to Kansas City with her young daughter and notices that everyone she meets - her new colleagues, neighbors, even the mailman - can't stop talking about baseball. "It's more than just a game," they tell the mother. "It's so much more. What you need is to come to a game and experience it." Again and again the mother makes her excuses - she is busy with work, and parenting, and fending off her ex, who keeps drunk texting, threatening to sue for custody - and just doesn't have time to get out to the stadium.

But baseball, it seems, won't take no for an answer. One day a Kansas City Royals outfielder moves into the neighborhood. And things only get stranger from there.... Soon enough the mother begins to realize that her participation in America's favorite pastime might not be optional - it might be compulsory, a mandatory part of American life. In fact, whether she keeps her daughter and her job might depend on her learning to play the game. She stalls as long as she can, until one day an unexpected confrontation with three of baseball's official representatives - a sort of existential World Series - determines her fate.

Christie Hodgen is the author of three highly acclaimed books of fiction, most recently Elegies for the Brokenhearted, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "the literary equivalent of a hand grenade". Her awards include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Kansas City.

©2015 Christie Hodgen (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

This is NOT a history of baseball

This is yet another whiny self centered screed about an over privlidges recently divorced woman who works at a university and how ,.. oh i dont really care, she has some sort of first world problems, and considers herself interesting and fasciating and put upon simply becase she sucks air. I was looking for a book about, oh you know, a History Of Baseball!!! This is not it

The narrator is delightful and dose such a great job that I almost cared, but even her fantastic work can not overcome the incredibly self involved text.

Change the title!

I was entertained enough, but based on the title it was not at all what I expected the book to be.
Make sure you read the description to understand what this book is.

Pointless

Kind of no reason to listen to this. Especially For fans who love to hear history and about the game