Pinch Hitting

“Pinch Hitting takes its place in the dugout alongside Bernard Malamud's The Natural as a timeless baseball fable, shot through with wonder.” –Daniel Paisner, author of Balloon Dog, A Single Happened Thing, and The Complete Game (with Ron Darling)

A crippled janitor becomes an unlikely minor league baseball hero, his never-miss swing honed by 30 years of practice in his backyard. When his deaf single mother died in a fire, he was ejected into a world he did not know, except as it was described in the thousands of books he read, and memorized, in his mother's huge home library. Taken in by firemen after the fire, he lands a janitorial job with the local double-A baseball team, where his baseball-hitting prowess is accidentally discovered by the grounds crew. He signs a minor league contract and begins to make minor league baseball history.

A brain tumor causes an emotionally damaged introvert to become an unwilling novelist, as he sleep-talks the words and his wife writes them down. The two of them soon realize the words are a story, about an unlikely baseball hero.

These intertwined tales begin a race against time: will the janitor make it to the big leagues before the reluctant writer dies from the tumor? A fictitious Roger Angell leads readers on a poignant journey through the vicissitudes of life and baseball, as Fate, Chance and Will battle it out in both worlds.

Morris Hoffman was a trial judge for 30 years, during which time he learned much about Fate, Chance and Will. He played lots of baseball when he was younger, all glove and no stick. He is a member of the MacArthur Foundation's Research Network on Law and Neuroscience, has written more than 30 law review articles on criminal law, the jury, and punishment, and co-authored more than a dozen science papers focusing on the neuroscience of punishment. He has also published several op-eds on legal topics in national newspapers, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He lives with his wife Kate in Denver. They have two grown sons and two still growing granddaughters. This is his debut novel.