In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Allen Barra selects Squeeze Play as one of the five best novels that “take fiction out to the ballgame”:
A.B. Berkowitz—the “A” is for Ariadne—writes for the mythical Washington Tribune and covers the team that would been, had it existed in 1990, the third incarnation of the Washington Senators. Imagine her as a combination of Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Parks in “His Girl Friday” and Susan Sarandon’s Annie Savoy in “Bull Durham.” Misfits and rejects, the players she writes about are men of few words—but, then, most of them know only a few. In interviews, she manages to coax quotes out of them like “There’s no doubt about it, but you can never be sure” and “Baseballically, that was perfectionistic.” Jane Leavy’s ballplayers curse, fornicate, fight, drink, tell tasteless jokes and generally make Pete Rose seem like Cary Grant. But her affection for them is boundless. After all, “they are old before they are forty” and “washed up before they begin to be adults.”