Authors of short story collections are like major league hitters. Each story is a trip to the plate, a time at bat where one can hit a home run or strike out on three pages. In Japanese Baseball and Other Stories, only four of Kinsella’s stories can truly be called home-runs, but the other seven are anything but strike-outs.

The title story revolves around Craig Bevans, a gaijin – non-Japanese – player and his wife Miyoshi, whose ever-present maid regards our hero “with the defected tolerance one extends to a large, unwieldy pet.” There is a new depth and gentleness to Kinsella’s storytelling here, a more subtle nuance than his readers may be accustomed to. In “The Kowloon Club,” the baseball club is persuaded to hire a Feng Shui master to determine the site for their new park, as the game itself must have been designed by a geomancer, its strange permutations determined by the life force. Kinsella’s wistful humour is much in evidence here.

As one can tell from the title, “The First and Last Annual Six Towns Old-Timers’ Game” is vintage Kinsella. The author’s traditional oral storytelling devices of repetition and circumlocution are given the green light here, though some of the base-runners have “all the speed of waste passing through a long dog.” Characters from previous games make cameo appearances, and the whole story of a how a team can “profit from wrongdoing” is made mellow by several rounds of “Heathen’s Rapture, or bring-on-blindness, logging-boot-to-the-head homebrew.”

The final extra-base hit is a deeply felt, introspective look at the half-lived life of an umpire and the reasons he continues to be a part of the game, even when his marriage is going foul.