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Cobalt reprints “Granddad’s Ballgame”

by Jeff Fleischer

My short story “Granddad’s Ballgame,” originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 2016, was a finalist for the Cobalt Earl Weaver Baseball Prize, and is republished in Cobalt’s annual baseball issue.

An excerpt:

When my Granddad was just a boy, to hear him tell it, there were only three things he ever wanted to do in his life. One was to get the girl who lived on the farm catty-corner to take a shine to him. Another was to see the world, or at least some part of the world outside Indiana. The third was to make a ballplayer out of himself.

Now by the time he left school, truth be told, he hadn’t made a whole lot of progress. The neighbor girl, Katie Lee, had taken to a chaste courtship with an older man, though Granddad reckoned that arrangement would prove temporary, on account of the wife everyone knew the man had back in town. The farthest Granddad had yet ventured was down to Bean Blossom for a couple of FFA get-togethers, which showed him so little of the world he deemed it statistically insignificant.

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