The Black Bat

Finalist for the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of 2025They say baseball players are a superstitious bunch, with charms, and rituals, and things that cannot be said in the dugout. Just as there are no atheists in fox holes, they play a game of such extreme highs and lows, that the touch of the next world is always at hand. And like Achilles and the Greeks on the shores of Troy, the gods-the baseball gods-are waiting there to drive mad whom they would destroy...Two teams, the county cup, an ignoble blackguard, a mysterious stranger from lands of foreign baseball: the field is set for the eternal drama of human life to play out between the lines of fair and foul. Mankind’s tools, the extensions of himself, the hand-turned kit of bat and ball, are not immune to the creeping taint of evil. The wages of sin are death, and so will he reap who raises the haft of what has been devoted to destruction: The Black Bat...Yet, in the ballplayer’s struggle there is hope. As a team strains together to win, to overcome what is stacked against them, one man, at its centre, with bat or ball, can redeem all he holds dear. This is victory. And in a country ball diamond, with boys drawn from cornfields and fishing boats, and fans of all types cheering, one such man, on the pitching mound, will throw against what seeks to drag him down. The stakes are nothing less than the soul of the woman he loves.BioHis mind corrupted by childhood exposure to horror movie matinees, but equally enthralled by the atmosphere of old churches, Simon Pole writes cosmic poetry from the location of Kingsville, Ontario. A graduate of Harvard University, Simon has continued his studies of what is hidden in the dark. Writing is also in his blood, being the great-great-grandson of early Canadian poet Susie Drury.