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One Fine Season
By Deborah S. Hildebrand
When Danny Grace loses his two best friends in a car accident right after college graduation, he is left to go on living the life the three of them had planned - alone. For Danny that means a shot at baseball stardom; something Pete and girlfriend Haven had hoped to savor with him.
One Fine Season is meant to be the story of a young man's ability to overcome an overwhelmingly tragic event and his subsequent shattered faith through the spiritual guidance and deep friendship of a coach and two team mates. However, the difficulty is that the anger and conflict Danny is meant to feel never comes through sufficiently to create the type of tension or character arc necessary to be a truly great story.
Instead, Danny seems to be living an idyllic life when he goes from being a Single-A short stop, a position he had expected to fill for at least a few years, to major league pitcher. And so his major league career and meteoric rise to fame begins as he becomes the most celebrated rookie pitcher of all time for the new Sacramento expansion baseball team the Miners.
Played out over approximately fifteen months this story about a wunderkind of baseball who not only earns bonuses by breaking a number of records, pitches up to an incredulous 115 m.p.h. and meets and woos the girl of his dreams, makes it difficult to sympathize with the character. Through it all the pain Danny is said to feel about losing his friends is mentioned relatively few times and never seems to impact his ability to make the right decisions and live a good, wholesome life that many would envy. In fact, it seems that everyone in the book except for one exceptionally shallow ball player - Double-D - and a self-promoting newspaper reporter - Bill Boylan - missed out on the human flaws that most of us struggle with everyday. In this story everything is black and white: you're good or you're bad.
It's not until near the end of the story that an incident occurs which threatens to rock Danny's world and destroy his career. But when you're taking a 230 page journey, the ride can seem a bit too long if there's no curve in the road until page 185. Add to this the fact that Danny is never personally involved in dealing with the bad situation -- it's all resolved within a whirlwind 48 hours by Coach Marshall and Danny's team mates - and the reader can be left wondering why this didn't happen sooner.
Author Michael Sheehan clearly loves and understands the sport of baseball, and his writing is the strongest when he is talking about the game and the players. Filled with interesting tidbits of real-life baseball history and fun snippets of games being played, Mr. Sheehan ably colors his story with baseball images and lingo. However, his religious leanings can sometimes seem a bit heavy-handed. It's more enjoyable to have the spirituality interwoven into the story and revealed as part of each character's growth process rather than dropped on you like too much mustard on a ballpark frank; and one promising idea about Danny receiving spiritual messages written on his bedside notepad never really hits a homerun.
In general, the writing style is enjoyable. There are a few typos and an occasional awkward sentence, not unusual for a self-published piece. And having Danny's two closest team mates named Josh and Johnny made it important to read very carefully to catch which character was speaking. But overall, the story moves along quickly.
While One Fine Season can boast a few similarities to Shoeless Joe by William P. Kinsella, probably best known as the movie Field of Dreams, beyond baseball, faith, and secret messages, they are worlds apart. Not likely to find its way to a best seller list, some might find One Fine Season a pleasant summer diversion.