A Month of Game Days

stories by

Scott D. Peterson

218 pages, $18.95 (+ shipping)
ISBN: 978-1-964277-33-2

Projected Release Date: May, 2025

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SYNOPSIS

What if a father of three sons managed to live a 24/7 baseball existence as a coach and a player? What if his wife became as obsessed with running to fill her husband’s long absences and avoid dealing with their estranged son living nearby? Would this family life be sustainable even in a small New England town?

Through a series of short stories that shine various lights on the Mallett family and a novella that follows them during one baseball-filled day, A Month of Game Days is concerned with much more than sports as it shares the journeys of characters who are flawed, occasionally humorous, and sometimes travel into dark places while they engage in pastimes they love.

Scott D. Peterson writes fiction, researches baseball literature, and has taught classes in composition, creative writing, American literature, and sports media at the University of Maine, Wright State University, and currently at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His publications focus on baseball fiction and scholarly articles tracing the ways journalists and journalists turned short story writers wrote baseball into American culture. His book, Reporting Baseball’s Sensational Season of 1890, examines the Sporting Life journalism covering the Brotherhood labor war of that year. He lives in St. Louis with his wife and enjoys travel, reading, and pickle ball.

With a cast of characters that would make W. P. Kinsella envious, Scott D. Peterson’s novel-in-stories takes a reader to the baseball fields in small-town Maine, where there is no shortage of black flies and philosophy. At the heart of A Month of Game Days is the Mallett family. Lou, the patriarch, is losing on the diamond and with his family; especially with his eldest son and his running-crazed wife. This novel is pure fun. ~Robert Wallace

Scott D. Peterson’s A Month of Game Days is a stunning and creative novel-in-stories grounded in one family’s complicated relationship with baseball. Wonderfully unpredictable the book is richly populated with compelling, often flawed, but ever human characters. Funny, heart-breaking, at times erotic, this is literary sports fiction at its best that conjures both Kinsella and James Joyce—a remarkable achievement that will stay with you long after you turn the last page. ~Bruce Pratt

Scott D. Peterson’s collection, A Month of Game Days, delivers what I love best in sports stories. Here, baseball games, rituals, and rules provide the structure for exploring the fictional Mallett Family’s emotions. Though playing or umping or watching baseball is mostly what they do with their bodies, deconstructing their relationships to each other and to their community is what they do with their minds. This is a very human collection wrapped up in some really good baseball. ~Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Welcome to the Bughouse

Finch Mallett

So, I’m sitting there, wanting to run as the fog breathes in and out of the trees pressing in on all sides. I’m jonesing bad. I try to tell myself it’s just the black flies. It feels more like the middle of March. I alternate between sweating and shivering inside my hoodie and windbreaker. The assistant coach for New Canaan comes up and wants to know if I’ll work the plate. In a previous lifetime, I used to get stoned with this guy before our high school games. I tell him I just want to watch my little brother pitch. He says my brother ain’t gonna pitch without an umpire. I tell my former buddy I didn’t bring my gear. He calls my bluff, offers to let me use his. I finally say yes, the words sounding tinny in my ears, like someone else said them. At least he didn’t offer to hook me up with some pills. I glance at the woods surrounding the ballpark once more and shiver as the fog snakes out of the trees.

Ten minutes later, I’ve just about got my gear on and my feet under the idea of working the game when my father pulls up in his Chevy Blazer. J.J., my little brother, sneaks a look at me when he gets out, but he doesn’t smile or say anything. It takes my father a few more minutes to recognize I’m going to be behind the plate. The look on his face gives me no clue to what he thinks of this situation. According to my mother’s unwritten rules, neither of them can speak to me unless I indicate that I am ready to apologize to the family for my actions. It has been almost a full year since I’ve spoken to Bette. In that time, Lou has done his best to schedule me for games he isn’t coaching or ones my younger brothers aren’t playing. I imagine it’s like one of those logic puzzles on standardized tests. During the few moments of any given day when I’m not feeling nauseated and shaky, the whole drama feels absurd and embarrassing.

When my father comes out for the pregame meeting at home plate, he is all Lou Mallett, Little League Manager. There is no hint of his part-time day job as a rehab counselor at the Deadwater Hospital in Bangor. Whoever heard of a part-time social worker? Even though he’s all baseball on the field, I still need to be careful around him because he is in close contact with my caseworker. I’m clean, but one bad report could get me in trouble with the law again. I know I’m already down a strike as soon as Lou recognizes New Canaan’s assistant coach and starts making assumptions that I’m here because we’re up to our old habits again. I speak deliberately as I go over the ground rules. My stomach’s churning and my ears are ringing. I take deep breaths and focus on the fog that’s now retreating as I go over what to do if a ball goes under the temporary plastic fence or if the coaches want to call time. The ballfield is the only place I never felt like an imposter—and I had to go and ruin that.

Lou hangs back and says, “Speaking as a manager to the umpire, I trust you will call them as you see them.”

Fighting down knee-jerk anger, I try to take his assumptions at face value. The back and forth inside my thoughts just spawns more nausea and head-spinning. I want to tell Lou to drop the crap and speak to me directly because Bette isn’t here to enforce her stupid rules. Instead, I calm myself by counting the players on his bench.

Lou leans in closer, studies my eyes, surreptitiously sniffs my breath. “If we act like professionals and respect the game, Mr. Umpire, we’ll be fine.”

This pisses me off all over again. “What I see as a professional umpire is that you only have eight players in your dugout, Manager Mallett.”

Lou gives me his ugly look, the one he used when he had to kick me off his Senior League all-star team six years ago. “Number nine is on the way, Umpire Mallett. I’m sure you can work with me for half an inning.”

Not having enough players is supposed to be an automatic forfeit, but I nod and let it go.

The fog seeps back out of the Maine woods as the Webster Expos come up to bat. Who chooses a lame-ass franchise from Canada for his Little League team? Lame-ass Lou Mallett, that’s who. When I was that age, it was the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Mets. We didn’t travel to other towns to get eaten alive in bughouses like New Canaan. Lou’s Red Sox were always stacked with the best players to create the best opportunity to beat Bangor during the district all-star tournament. Instead of paying attention to the warm-up pitches, I search the bleachers on the visiting side for Bette, but she isn’t there. Where is she, I wonder. When did she stop coming to games? What else has changed at home?

What hasn’t changed, I’m sure, is that Lou still follows every out of every Red Sox game whenever he’s near a TV or a radio—even when the games start at 10 o’clock on the West Coast. Whenever I check the standings and the box scores, I see that his Sox have been jockeying with the Yankees for first place with players whose names I hardly recognize: Pokey Reese, Kevin Youkalis, Kevin Millar, and David McCarty. You’d think Lou would have learned his lesson the year before when the Sox were five defensive outs from getting to the World Series when the wheels came off and the Yankees went instead.

The New Canaan pitcher walks the first two hitters. J.J. is so nervous when he steps into the batter’s box he forgets to do his whole Nomar Garciaparra routine with the toe tapping and the batting glove adjusting. He even ignores Lou, who tucks his scorebook under his arm to go through the charade of giving J.J. all sorts of signals. I want to say something to my kid brother to calm him down, but of course I can’t.

The fog starts to fill the little bowl carved out of the woods. The setting makes me think about those B-52 air crews during the Cold War, the ones circling the North Pole, not able to do anything but hold their fingers on the buttons. This is nothing like that, but I still relate to those guys somehow.

J.J. works the count full. The next pitch is close, and I delay my call to frame it in my mind—at least that’s what I hope it looks like. I’m not sure at all how close was, and the one thing an umpire has to do to be successful is to sell his decision with complete certainty. On top of that, according to Lou’s directions, we’re supposed to call strikes on anything close enough to hit. When Lou claps and says, “Way to work that walk,” and J.J. lays down his bat to start toward first base, I make the reflexive call of “Strike three!” J.J. turns and looks at me, but I give him the same blank expression I give every other player and point toward the outside corner of the plate. Lou claps his hands again and says, “That’s all right,” but J.J. doesn’t look at him as he walks past and goes to the end of the bench.

“Sports reveal character as much as they develop it.” Lou shared this mantra at the start of the very first practice he ran when I was nine. I don’t have to look at him now to know he’s saying it again under his breath as he writes the backwards “K” in his scorebook next to my brother’ name.

The Expos score two runs on a triple, the ball all but disappearing into the fog from my position behind home plate. I will try not to get too deep in the weeds with game details, but a certain amount will be necessary. The inning ends with the runner still on third. I am about to call Lou over for a discussion about forfeiting the game. Just then a wild-haired woman pulls up in a beater and drags the ninth player toward the dugout. Lou sends the little guy out to right field. Yes, that’s where you come into this sad little tale. It took me awhile to recognize you. If I could have seen the tattoos on your chest and your arms and your ankles, I would have placed you right away. What really got me was the way you looked at your son as he trotted out to the bare spot. I can’t remember Bette ever looking at me like that during any of my games.

J.J. is the most accurate pitcher the Expos have. Unfortunately, he is also Lou’s best catcher. J.J. strikes out the first two hitters, but the next two reach on dropped third strikes. J.J. pounds his glove after each one and Lou paces faster in the dugout. I’m still trying to place you when Lou Mallett yells for time and comes out with his scorebook. I point toward J.J. and tell him to deliver the next pitch, so Lou yells “Time!” even louder and takes three more steps toward me.

“I heard you the first time, Manager Mallett,” I say without looking at him. “And I’ll remind you that you’re not to leave the dugout until you’ve been granted time.”

Lou gives me that ugly look even as he nods. “What do you have for a count, Umpire Mallett?”

My ears are ringing as I squint down through the fog—real or felt—at the plastic counter in my hand. “Three and two.”

“I had a full count before that last strike,” he says. “The batter should be out.”

I can tell he’s not going to let it go, so I slowly raise my arm to take a closer look at the numbers in the gloomy light. “Nope,” I say after a moment of study. “Count’s full just now.”

“Can you get some help from the other dugout, Mr. Umpire?” Lou asks.

I turn in the general direction of the log hut on the third base side and ask, “What do you have for a count?”

The New Canaan managers look at one another, and the assistant manager, who is holding the scorebook, says, “Full count: three and two.”

The fog retreats enough to allow me to lean close and speak in a hoarse whisper. “Apparently, Manager Mallet, you are the only one who sees it that way.”

If you’d like to see how this story ends as well as the rest of A Month of Game Days,
order now and have it shipped directly to you when the book is published in Spring 2025.