Guide to Baseball Short Stories: G

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Gager, Timothy. "Six Facts about Influencing Baseball in Heaven." In Final Fenway Fiction. Long-departed Harry Agganis intercedes for the Sox.

Gallico, Paul. "Saint Bambino." Repr. Lewis. A grandfather tries to make a "man" out of his grandson, and gets some help from the sainted George Herman Ruth.

Unashamed hokum.

Gallico, Paul. "The Umpire's Revolt." Repr. Holtzman. An Irish girl from Canarsie persuades her beau, a big-league umpire, to wear an outlandish suit of clothes, touching off a sartorial revolution among umpires everywhere.

Sub-Runyon New York baseball yarn; pretty leaden.

Gardner, Nancy. "Count to Ten." In Final Fenway Fiction. Quick-thinking woman foils crime at Fenway Park.

Deliberately old-fashioned yarn, with tough dialogue, though the setting is Boston of the 2000s.

Garfield, Hank Williams. "The Heroes Challenge the Gods to a Ballgame." 108 1.2 (Winter 2007): 34-40. The heroes and gods of Greek mythology, that is, with Tiresias managing the big game against Hera, wife of the Gods' starting pitcher.

Garfield, Henry. "Beanball." In Final Fenway Fiction. Far-future Martian re-enactment of the miracle of 2004.

Geary, Tracy Miller. "October 2004." In Further Fenway Fiction. Female fan falls in love with a much younger man during the Red Sox' drive to the 2004 World Championship.

Geary, Tracy Miller. "Opening Day." In Pachter. Female Red Sox fan good-humoredly dates a male Yankee fan until the guy shows his true colors.

The bare plot would lead you to expect a light-hearted or wry story, but it's trenchantly serious.

Geary, Tracy Miller. "Victory." In Final Fenway Fiction. Brother succumbs to cancer just short of the '04 Series.

German, Norman. "The Havana Home Run." Elysian Fields Quarterly 21.3 (Summer 2004): 51-64. Key West in 1952: veteran scout watches a makeshift game that features the fastest pitcher of all time against batter Ernest Hemingway.

Gies, Joseph. "The Old Cardinal Spirit." This Week Magazine, 1957. Repr. Cummings. Father and son move to new community, where the son plays ball and hopes that his alcoholic ex-major-leaguer father will stay on the wagon.

Dissolves near the end into standard temperance-story formulas, but early scenes of the son trying to cover for his father (an apartment-building superintendent) are nicely drawn.

Gilb, Dagoberto. "Uncle Rock." New Yorker, 2010. Repr. Moreira. Boy tells of a ballgame he attended in the company of his mother, a magnet for men.

Tightly-written sketch of family dynamics. The setting, incidentally, must be 1983, the only year that Joe Morgan played for the Phillies.

Goldberg-Strassler, Jesse. "Javier Madera Closes the Door." Aethlon 32.2 (Spring/Summer 2015): 1-13. Minor-league reliever overcomes an overdose of trite clubhouse rhetoric to notch a save, in this detail-packed story.

González, Juan Antonio. "Ritualidades." And translation (as "Rituals") by David Bowles. In Moreira. Memories of a classic 1981 ballgame featuring Fernando Valenzuela and Nolan Ryan: but even more important, of the moment when the narrator realized how obnoxious tobacco smoke can be.

Gonzalez, Ray. "Baseball." Circling the Tortilla Dragon, Creative Arts Book Company, 2002. Repr. McNally, Wilber. In the World Series, a high fly ball goes up – but does it ever come down?

Atmospheric short-short story.

Gopnik, Adam. "The Rookie." The New Yorker (4 October 1999). 59-67. An expatriate in Paris tells his son a fantastic story of a toddler pitching for the 1908 Giants.

Metafiction, really: Gopnik's piece is an essay that circles around the central fiction, which he examines as fiction, as nostalgia for America. Very well-done.

Gorman, Peter D. "Pastime." Aethlon 22.2 (Spring 2005): 43-54. Matter-of-fact rendering of an imaginary minor league.

Graham, Paul. "The Brief But Glorious History of the Sub Zero Baseball League." 108 1.3 (Summer 2007): 36-40. Rabid baseball players in the coldest corner of upstate New York establish a mid-winter league.

Granados, Christine. "Good Father." In Moreira. Oblique rendering of a tense ballgame conversation.

Grant, Jesse, ed. Fast Balls. New York: Alyson, 2007. Nineteen erotic stories.

All in the hard-core gay-erotica genre.

Graves, Louis. "Ach Du Lieber Baseball!" Repr. Lewis. A butcher wishes that he could bat 1.000, and ends up playing right field for John McGraw's Giants.

Early-20th-century magical realism, anticipating Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.

Graves, Louis. "Fair-Weather Hits." (1913) Repr. Strecker. Sequel to "Ach Du Lieber Baseball!": the butcher returns to the Giants, but only when the sun is shining.

Darker tone in this one, with an ending that anticipates Alan Sillitoe's Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, almost.

Greenberg, Alvin. "Game Time." In Delta q (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1983): 23-37. The Dutchmen, a wandering ballclub, play intrasquad games to no crowds on deserted fields across the USA until, during a particularly interminable contest, time literally stands still.

One of the better evocations of the lack of a clock in baseball. Told from the perspective of an unusually well-realized (non-stereotypic) Latin ballplayer.

Greenberg, Alvin. "The Real Meaning of the Faust Legend." In The Discovery of America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980): 87-99. Ballplayer sells his soul to bat .368 – but can only hit that well at AA Muncie.

Blends realistic psychology with myth.

Grey, Zane. The Red-Headed Outfield and Other Baseball Stories. Title story repr. Strecker.

Criticism: Solomon