Hits and Misses in Baseball Mysteries

“Murderers’ Row” is just the thing for late summer and early fall, the time of year in America when baseball nostalgia ripens sweetly. The book takes its name from the 1927 Yankees’ lineup of power hitters, but the title is not metaphoric. It is factually descriptive.

Otto Penzler, the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York, has gathered 14 baseball mysteries by contemporary writers of mystery and suspense, and the result is satisfying, mostly.

Among the best are Brendan DuBois’ “A Family Game,” which deftly weaves together the placid and intensely familial sport of youth baseball and the tensions within the father of the family, a former mobster under witness protection in a small rural town. He can’t even order a pepperoni pizza for fear of betraying his origins.

Laura Lippman, who accurately writes that the best Cuban restaurant in Baltimore is in Greektown, nicely describes in the story “Ropa Vieja” the chilling cynicism with which a reputedly respectable, and certainly rich, eye doctor goes to criminal lengths to promote his success in rotisserie baseball.

And other stories in this collection touch on the ideals and corruptions of the game.

There’s Elmore Leonard who, in “Chickasaw Charlie Hoke,” makes vividly painful the little lies of an aging former ballplayer who exaggerates his pitiful former career into something much bigger than it ever was.

Henry Slesar’s “Killing Teddy Ballgame” is a tale of a player assigned to keep Ted Williams safe after the Boston Red Sox keep getting death threats about him. The story is amusing until it takes a horrifying turn.

Troy Soos’ “Pick-Off Play” brings to life the dust, sweat and corruption of minor league ball in Texas before World War I--before, that is, the White Sox scandal of 1919 made the majors clean up their act, and all of baseball became respectable.

Why do we love baseball so much? One reason is that it’s a subject easily given to the tall tales that Americans, from Mark Twain and Bret Harte onward, have loved to tell.

Max Allan Collins mixes fact and fiction with a preposterous and amusing yarn in “Pinch-Hitter” about how the preposterous and amusing--and bold--Bill Veeck brought the first midget into baseball as a pinch-hitter. The poor guy drove pitchers crazy because his strike zone was so small, and he was beginning to believe he was more than a joke, when the baseball commissioner banned midgets. The narrative of “Pinch-Hitter” takes place much later. It is about, as they say, the “untimely demise” of the midget.

But not all the stories in this collection work. Lawrence Block’s “Keller’s Designated Hitter” is tightly plotted but the motivation of the killer in the story seems off the mark.

John Lescroat’s “Sacrifice Hit” is all-too-obviously contrived. The story is about the terrible passions that Little League championships arouse in parental breasts, but the author belabors his subject. He even stoops so low as to write that “The field was a slice of Norman Rockwell Americana...” as if that had never been said before.

In “The Power” Michael Malone writes in tough-guy prose a lot about men, women and Plato, and a little about baseball, but the taste of this stew is a bit off.

Thankfully, these weak selections are balanced by such picks as “Harlem Nocturne” by Robert B. Parker, which is a hokey but satisfying story about how Jackie Robinson and pals stood up to the mob. Thomas Perry’s “The Closer” is a clever, funny story about a guy who parlayed a natural gift for flimflam into the successful ownership of a major league club. A pitcher’s inability to escape the crushing burden of a terrible pitch he made in a crucial game nine years earlier is the theme of “The Shot” by Mike Lupica. “Two-Bagger” by Michael Connelly may be the best of the lot. It’s a taut and affecting story about a guy who gets out of a five-year hitch in California’s Corcoran State Prison, the two cops who meet him and fathers’ love of little sons who love baseball.

“Murderers’ Row” largely fulfills its promise to bring out some engaging baseball yarns to go with the end of summer. Some of its stories make it clear why we love baseball so much too.