Frank Deford's Fellow Traveler

Like eating Cracker Jack on a Sunday afternoon, Frank Deford's The Entitled is rife with cliché. And that's just how it should be, as modern baseball is a great big paean to nostalgia, replete with mock-classic stadiums, uniforms that haven't changed since the 1920s, and countless other anachronistic quirks. Still, writing sports fiction is one thing; writing baseball fiction is another game altogether. Not only are Bernard Malamud's The Natural and Don DeLillo's Underworld lauded as some of the greatest sports epics of all time, they're firmly embedded in the American literary canon. Six-time Sportswriter of the Year and a longtime Sports Illustrated writer he may be, but when Deford set about to craft his own take on America's pastime, it was no minor-league affair.