From his Q & A with Michael Hickins at the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:
‘The Art of Fielding’ is ostensibly a baseball book, although it’s really about a lot more than that. Were you afraid of being pigeonholed as just a baseball writer?--Marshal Zeringue
I didn’t have a fear of being pigeonholed, but from the very beginning I knew I did not want to write a book that was really about baseball. Or not entirely about baseball. That just didn’t interest me, to write a book that was strictly about baseball.
But you love baseball?
I love baseball quite a bit, and I grew up playing the game. Part of my very early memories are of my father in the living room, pitching Nerf balls to me when I was two or three years old. I played through high school. Also, I grew up in Wisconsin, in a not terribly intellectual community, so all through my adolescence, I pretty much spent all my time playing and thinking about sports. That’s what young men do in that part of the world. So sports became kind of fundamental to my way of thinking about all sorts of things. When I’m thinking about writing or editing, anything I do, I find myself...[read on]