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Some sort of crisis in his life has caused him to, apparently, forget how to play, so a female sportswriter delves into his past, seeking the trauma that has motivated him and now threatens to destroy him. As we find out more about him, this impossibly perfect player takes on depth and reality.Michael Bishop. Brittle Innings. During World War II, a minor league team has an unusually large, unusually decayed looking player. There's a reason for that - the player is Frankenstein's monster, re-emerged after hundreds of years of wandering, a reviled outcast. Interesting.

Jim Bouton and Eliot Asinof. Strike Zone. Sam Ward, oldest rookie in baseball, is going to pitch the Cubs' last season game, which will determine whether they will go to the playoffs. The oldest rookie pitcher is matched by the oldest rookie umpire, Ernie Kolacka, a man of enormous personal integrity, whose best friend is begging him to throw the game, because otherwise the gamblers he's in hock to will kill him. The novel is an inning by inning account of this last game; we take turns inside the heads of Ernie and Sam as they make their critical decisions.

At the most basic level, there is a perceived separation between sport and literature. We're surprised at the idea that the same person would have a season ticket and a library ticket. When a British literacy campaign recently asked Premier League footballers to choose their favourite book, the result was an idiot's syllabus of children's primers or ghosted memoirs of recent stars - although, shamingly, continental and American players consistently chose volumes from the grown-up or even college shelves.Yet while such evidence nourishes the idea of a separation between scholars and jocks, literacy and sporting interest do, of course, frequently coexist. For many years, Britain's leading dramatists literally made up a cricketing XI, with the possibility of opposition batsmen being "caught Stoppard bowled Pinter" or "run out (Ayckbourn)". John Motson's meticulous dossiers for Arsenal home games will note the presence of Nick Hornby and Melvyn Bragg. And, on a personal note, my own deadline for finishing this piece was earlier than that specified because of a pressing engagement at a Queen's Park Rangers v Northampton Town pre-season friendly.

Following the Greene / Mauriac distinction, the majority of fiction in this genre is made up of novels or plays that happen to have some sport in them. Even the MCC, for example, would struggle to classify The Pickwick Papers (1836) as a cricketing novel, but Dickens, the great reporter, confidently caught it as part of the English scene: "'Play!' suddenly cried the bowler. The ball flew from his hand straight and swift towards the centre stump of the wicket. The wary Dumkins was on the alert; it fell upon the tip of the bat, and bounded far away over the heads of the scouts, who had just stooped low enough to let it fly over them. "

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