from Intro

We’ve had the idea and wanted to do some kind of “best of our online baseball issues” for years, and here is one iteration of that book. We’ve been doing it for so long (this year is our 13th!), we have too many favorites, so we made some arbitrary rules. Though we’ve been foremost devoted to fiction as a journal over the years, we found ourselves pulled toward some of the baseball creative nonfiction we’ve published, and the fiction that felt like, or played with, nonfiction. Stories about Dock Ellis’ famous LSD no-hitter, Herb Washington as the only “designated runner” in MLB history, Jim Joyce and his blown call that cost the Detroit Tigers’ Armando Galarraga a perfect game.

contributors

from Intro

In 2003, Hobart was only a year and a half old, and I was still scrambling until the last day of every month to put together an issue of the website for the coming month. At some point in March of that year, I realized how excited I was for the approaching baseball season, and how many of the writers I knew were also baseball fans. I had the idea that this excitement should be represented on the site, so I emailed a few friends, asked if they had any baseball-related short stories or essays that they would let me publish, or if they might be interested in trying to write something in the next week or two. Nearly everyone responded with similar enthusiasm, and thus was the birth of our annual baseball issue, every April. Of course, there was no idea of it being an annual tradition at the time. There was certainly no idea Hobart would still exist twelve years later.

It’s become fun, and an honor, to every year hear people say that they look forward to ourbaseball issue as much as Spring Training, that Hobart is as much a part of their Spring as the return of baseball itself. I’ve tried, over the years, to explain “why baseball.” Because of its literary history, I’d propose. Because it is the most narrative sport, because it has the greatest opportunity for metaphor. But, really, it’s just because I like it. I grew up playing catch and backyard homerun derby, collecting baseball cards, going to games with my dad.

That’s always been the most fun aspect of Hobart—having an idea and following it through. Because… why not? It rarely mattered how silly or goofy seeming the idea, and we never really put any consideration into if readers might share our enthusiasms. What mattered was that we found the idea interesting, fun…it excited us. And so, that’s become something of a mission statement, for our journal that never had much interest in mission statements. Follow where your excitement takes you.

— Aaron Burch
Michigan, June 2015