Twilight of the Long-ball Gods: Dispatches From the Disappearing Heart of Baseball by John Schulian

“For baseball fans, John Schulian’s Twilight of the Long-Ball Gods is the perfect antidote to winter. Schulian does something remarkable in this book: He brings to life an all-but-lost world of semipro teams and American Legion ball, of old Negro leagues and the Class D minors. . . . Schulian can flat-out write. Boxing and baseball have, by far, produced our best sports prose, and Schulian crafts sentences with the best of American journalists. Quotidian struggles here become the stuff of literature because American mythology, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed more than a century and a half ago, places the quest for individual success at the center of our national epic.”—Elliott J. Gorn, The Chicago Tribune

“For those who love baseball but sometimes wonder why, amidst the barrage of headlines about steroid use, grand jury investigations, and lavish excesses, John Schulian’s Twilight of the Long-ball Gods will, lyrically and poetically, reaffirm your affection for America’s greatest game. This sparkling anthology of columns . . . solidifies Schulian’s place among the elite of contemporary baseball writers. In fact, I prefer Schulian to, for example, Roger Angell and Tom Boswell . . . because the subjects Schulian chooses to write about are more intriguing. . . . Hopefully, there will be more gifted writers like John Schulian to capture stories that are filled with the same insight and eloquence found in Twilight of the Long-ball Gods.”—C. Paul Rogers III, Elysian Fields Quarterly