Passion for baseball and a memorable team of characters, including a hero unaware of his greatest strengths, make The Fat Lady’s Low, Sad Song a winner.” –INDIE READER
A new baseball novel focuses on the exploits of Courtney Morgan, a female knuckleball pitcher, playing for the fictitious Fort Collins Miners in Colorado. Brian Kaufman, author of The Fat Lady’s Low, Sad Song, believes that the idea of a female playing major league baseball is overdue. In fact, a real-life pitcher named Stacy Piagno recently pitched and won for the Sonoma Stompers, an unaffiliated minor league club located in California.
Piagno was not the first woman to play men’s professional baseball. Three women played in the Negro Leagues in the 1950s, and in the last two decades, several women have earned minor league contracts. But Piagno is just the third woman to record a win as a pitcher in the men’s pros, and her success serves as a reminder of one barrier yet to be broken.
The knuckleball, though hard to master, does not require the arm strength of a fastball or slider. “Women play college ball now,” Kaufman notes. “It’s a fast game, and the women are fine athletes.” The idea for his novel came from watching the Colorado Silver Bullets, an all-female pro baseball team, managed by ex-major leaguer Phil Niekro. Famous for pitching the knuckleball, Niekro might well have developed someone like Kaufman’s character, had the team not folded so quickly.
A female ballplayer would be a marketing dream come true for a major league team. “Imagine how much money in endorsements she’d make!” Kaufman, a lifelong baseball fan, says, “I’d stand in line to buy a jersey. What a great thing that would be for the sport!”
Kaufman played high school ball, and actually threw a knuckleball, though his sports “career” was less than stellar. “I was a zero-tool player,” he jokes. “Couldn’t run, couldn’t throw, couldn’t hit. But that knuckleball? It was money.”
Copies of The Fat Lady’s Low, Sad Song are available at all major booksellers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Black Rose Writing.
About Black Rose Writing
Black Rose Writing is an independent publishing house that strongly believes in developing a personal relationship with their authors. The Texas-based publishing company doesn’t see authors as clients or just another number on a page, but rather as individual people… people who deserve an honest review of their material and to be paid traditional royalties without ever paying any fees to be published.
