Gelf Magazine - Looking over the overlooked  Books | Sports
September 4, 2007  Frank Deford's Fellow Traveler  The veteran
Sports Illustrated writer tries his hand at baseball fiction.
Adam Rosen  Like eating Cracker Jack on a Sunday afternoon,
Frank Deford's The Entitled is rife with cliché. And that's just
how it should be, as modern baseball is a great big paean to
nostalgia, replete with mock-classic stadiums, uniforms that
haven't changed since the 1920s, and countless other
anachronistic quirks. Still, writing sports fiction is one
thing; writing baseball fiction is another game altogether. Not
only are Bernard Malamud's The Natural and Don DeLillo's
Underworld lauded as some of the greatest sports epics of all
time, they're firmly embedded in the American literary canon.
Six-time Sportswriter of the Year and a longtime Sports
Illustrated writer he may be, but when Deford set about to craft
his own take on America's pastime, it was no minor-league
affair.  Frank Deford "Fiction writing is certainly mo