Book Review: The Wide Turn Toward Home

In "How to Write a True Baseball Story," Richard Peterson employs the ghost of Ring Lardner to dish out advice to a would-be practitioner of the genre. Lardner advises the rookie writer to avoid tall tales of his ball playing youth, games of catch with his dead father, and all the other oh-so-familiar formulas in favor of seeking the simple-and often unpleasant-truth about baseball. Following Peterson's rubric, the introspective protagonists of Winkler's collection would bat somewhere near a cool .500, which is an impressive debut. But truth is not everything in the game of baseball (Just ask A-Rod) and the other stories in Winkler's collection go far to show his knowledge of baseball fiction and the game's history.