Joe Donnelly’s “Bonus Baby” brings us to the ball game but from inside the very center, from the pitcher’s point of view. The story takes place during a game—not just any game but a possible perfect game. We see how the pitcher’s life has led him to this moment.

The pitcher’s tics, familiar to any baseball fan, are his way of controlling what little he can in the uncontrollable game and in his life. He uses his tug, wipe, and touch to his cap to “harness energy and deliver it.”

“Bonus Baby” is in the mythic tradition of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, in which baseball is treated as a variant on the Trojan War and the players like demigods and great warriors—but in Donnelly’s vision the pitcher is a Midwesterner and speaks with the inherent groundedness and modesty of that region. He’s the son of former athletes, homecoming king and queen, whose lives rolled downhill after high school. They spend their adult lives cooped up indoors, his mother as a secretary and his father as an alcoholic mechanic in a textile mill. Their positions are as different as can be from the pitcher’s at the center of the playing field. The lesson they teach their son is that glory will not come, and the pitcher must throw beyond his inheritance of failure in order to win. The reader is with him every inch of the way.

–Laura Furman, series editor

Bonus Baby is amazing. Is the author or was the author a professional pitcher? I don’t really like the game of baseball but this story helps me appreciate it. The main character — he seems like a gem of a person. And humble. Definitely humble. It is a very good read.
–Jane Hinrichs, amazon customer review