The Inaugural Pitchers & Poets Reading Club

Here at Pitchers & Poets we don’t shy away from the literary side of things -- the site is called Pitchers & Poets, after all--and lately we’ve all felt the drive to take our literary pursuits somewhere new. We think the recent publication of The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach provides the perfect opportunity to do so.

(For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s a much-hyped and well-received novel centered around a small college baseball team in Wisconsin.)

With that we’d like to announce the first installment of the Pitchers & Poets Reading Club.

As a part of the reading club, we’ve invited some friends and fellow baseball writers to join us as we work through the The Art of Fielding a few chapters at a time. We’ll discuss the book, our feelings, and whatever else comes to mind as we move along, and hopefully generate conversation with you -- the readers -- who will read along with us at home. The plan is to read a certain number of chapters in a given time period with everyone tagging along, and at the end of each predetermined reading section we’ll provide our thoughts and invite fellow reading club members to participate. (Expect to read somewhere in the range of 100 pages every week.)

We’ll ask you (politely) to contribute your thoughts in the comments section, then bump a lot of those comments up the book club posts themselves. There will also be live chats, tweetathons, and whatever else comes to mind.

Our reader/commenters will include Dayn Perry and Navin Vaswani of Fangraphs' NotGraphs, Adam Webb of Everyday Footnotes, Pete Beatty who edits books and is futurely of The Classical, and of course ... us.

So pick up the book on your digital reader, at your local independent bookseller, or from Amazon if you hurry. We start next week with preliminary expectations, hopes, and fears. Then there’s no waiting for slackers.