Who's on First? Baseball and Identity in the Novels of W. P. Kinsella

In Diamonds in the Rough: The Untold History of Baseball, Joel Zoss and John Bowman claim, "...[w]hole magazines are now devoted to baseball writings, critical articles dissect and celebrate them, anthologies are made of the best of them, university courses are taught about them" (253). The most successful contemporary writer in this genre is William Patrick Kinsella, author of four novels and numerous short stories involving baseball. The importance of baseball as a means of establishing various forms of identity is clearly at the foundation of Kinsella's baseball novels set in the United States: Shoeless Joe (1982), The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), and Magic Time (2001).