Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America »

S. L. Price, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated since 1994, has written two other books—Pitching Around Fidel, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Far Afield, which Esquire named one of the top five books of 2007. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his family.

From the author of Pitching Around Fidel and Far Afield comes an account of the accidental death of minor league first base coach Mike Coolbaugh, illustrating the many ways in which baseball still has a hold on America.

Heart of the Game centers on the death of Mike Coolbaugh, a minor league coach who was killed on a sweltering Sunday evening in Little Rock in July 2007 when a foul ball rocketed off Tino Sanchez's bat. Coolbaugh died almost instantly, his body carted off the field of the Double-A Arkansas Travelers. He was thirty-five years old and the father of two; a third child was on the way.

Mike's exemplary life—his devotion to the game and to his family—is the spine of the story. But it isn't the drama. The drama is in the telling of what can happen when a projectile hits the human body, of the narratives of the remarkable people who happened to be in the ballpark at that fatal moment, of the impact of Coolbaugh's death on the man who hit the ball, and of all the lives left behind.

Price reveals anew that classic heart of Americana—small-town sports, small-town lives—and makes us understand that a game played away from the mindless churn of Internet blather and highlight shows can be more important than those played on the national stage.

Publishers Weekly

On July 22, 2007, minor league baseball player Tino Sanchez Jr. hit a foul ball that struck his team's recently hired first base coach, Mike Coolbaugh, at the precise point on the back of his neck to cut off blood to his brain, killing him instantly. Price (Far Afield) builds upon the article he wrote for Sports Illustrated to flesh out the lives of Sanchez and Coolbaugh, two "lifers" who devoted everything to the sport and got only fleeting glimpses of the major leagues in return. Price leans a bit too hard on the melodrama at first, but this story doesn't need a hard sell. As he gets into the ordinary, working-class struggles of his two subjects, the men become real, vibrant personalities-and the tragedy, when it finally comes, takes on all too human dimensions; Sanchez's despair over the accident is as heartbreaking to read about as the anguish of Coolbaugh's family. Price isn't the first to argue that minor league baseball, bracketed off from the glitz and scandals of the big leagues, is where the game's true emotional core can be found. But he's found a story that makes a powerful case for that argument. (June)

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