As I watch the powers that be tinker with the sport I love so much over the past few years, this book is a resounding reminder that things evolve, but they also stay the same. In a world where sports is driven not by athletic ability, but by how many tickets it can sell and how many viewers it can entice, the story often isn’t the game itself but the drama surrounding it.

Frank Ryder is a pitching phenom. He throws the ball up to 110 miles-per-hour. Not only that, but he can disguise his pitches so well the hitters don’t know what’s coming. The Baltimore Orioles, who drafted Ryder out of college, are positioning themselves for a playoff run, thanks to the amazing rookie. However, the baseball powers-that-be aren’t too happy about Frank Ryder. They are afraid not just of him, but of others coming up from the minors like him. When hitters can’t hit a pitch, they feel the game will become boring and people will stop coming, knowing that when certain pitchers are on the mound that team is guaranteed to win. They begin to tinker with the idea of topping the speed a pitch can be thrown.

Ryder, meanwhile, is battling a ghost from his past. There’s danger in throwing that fast and that hard. It’s only happened once in major league baseball, but the potential is always there. Couple that with the unwritten rule that when a player on your team is deliberately thrown at, a pitcher must retaliate, Frank has to face a decision which could bring those ghosts to the forefront right at the time his team needs him the most after the All-Star Break.

The Fireballer is a great baseball book, but it’s also a good book about fallible humans who are brought together in a set of circumstances which end very badly. In our society, we’re always looking for someone to blame when something happens. We don’t accept that there are accidents that sometimes just happen in the normal chaos of our world. We are taught to keep things inside and not show weakness, and in our desire to just “get past” something we often shut out the discussion that is so badly needed to do just that.

The baseball side is wonderful. I agree with Mark Stevens’ perception of baseball and the tinkering that’s being done to a great game. Eventually, Frank Ryder asks the hard questions of those who want to ask a player to stop playing to the best of his ability for the sake of television revenue and ticket sales. What will happen to baseball in this timeline isn’t clear, and I found the ending less than satisfactory. I didn’t like the option Ryder took in the end, even though it seems like a Hollywood ending. 

The characters here are wonderful and complex. Frank is the deepest since he is at the center of the story, but everyone from the owners, managers, and players have the feel of real baseball. In Frank’s personal life, I found the idea that his girlfriend wouldn’t be there with him, yet demand his attention from 2,000 miles away a bit of a stretch. He needs her there mentally, that is obvious, but she stays on the sidelines for the most part. I think having her with him in Baltimore would have been better for the actual player, but for the story she is not. The confrontations he must have with his parents and brother, Josh (a minor-league catcher), about the ghosts in the past are very realistic. Everyone is at fault in some way in the big scope of things, but it is just a series of circumstances in which imperfect people make imperfect choices. The depth to all of them is quite nice.

For baseball fans, this is a great read. I don’t know if there’s enough in the rest of the story to keep non-fans interested, but there are also some lessons for the sports parents in here as well. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, although I wish the ending had been different.

… automatic runners are stationed at second base in extra-inning games (another abomination) in order to declare a winner more quickly and not face the prospect of fifteen-inning marathons …But the top priority should be to banish the designated hitter. It’s not going to happen, but one can dream.