I'm in Australia, never watched baseball, consider it un-Australian when I see baseball being played on the local cricket ground etc — really no baseball fan. (

I'm in Australia, never watched baseball, consider it un-Australian when I see baseball being played on the local cricket ground etc — really no baseball fan. (Although I did play softball briefly as a kid.) Even so, a couple of years ago I looked at Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al (1916), and couldn't put it down until I'd finished. Extremely engaging writing, very highly recommended. "The book consists of stories that were written as letters from a professional baseball player, Jack Keefe, to his friend Al Blanchard in their hometown of Bedford, Indiana. ...Jack Keefe is a headstrong, gullible, cheap, naive, self-centred, egotistical and uneducated rube—but he has a strong pitching arm. ...In his barely literate letters home to his friend Al, he details his first experiences in the big leagues, which ends in disaster as he pitches poorly and gets sent back down to the minors again. Later, he is accepted again by the majors where he gains some success as a pitcher, but is taken advantage of by nearly everyone he meets. ...Much of the humour of the book is from Jack's boastful, oblivious nature, and his utter inability to recognize when he is being manipulated or cheated. ...Lardner was a sportswriter who relocated to Chicago in 1907, where he covered the Cubs and White Sox baseball teams for several city newspapers, most notably the Chicago Tribune." "His contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all professed strong admiration for his writing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Know_Me_Al https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Know_Me_Al https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_Lardner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_Lardner Read it online: https://archive.org/details/youknowmealbushe00larduoft/page/n9/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/youknowmealbushe00larduoft/page/...