The Pitcher's Kid

New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen spent his career telling other people's stories. The Pitcher's Kid is his own, a memoir of his first eighteen years, finished just before his death in 2002 and never lived to see published.

Born in Indianapolis in June 1925, Jack Olsen grew up chasing his father across a Depression-era America of unpaid bills, midnight departures, and furnished rooms abandoned in the dark. Ole "Swede" Olsen was a man of spectacular invention, a charmer, a bigamist, a gambler, and a compulsive fabricator who claimed to have pitched for the Detroit Tigers, wrestled crocodiles for Ringling Brothers, and shaken hands with Mr. Pike himself at the top of Pikes Peak. Young Jack believed him. Most people did.

The family eventually landed in Philadelphia, where Swede managed semi-pro baseball teams, rubbed shoulders with Connie Mack and Mickey Cochrane, and once watched Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson play at a grimy field at 44th and Parkside. Jack grew up in the bleachers, proud to be the pitcher's kid, heir to a legacy that was equal parts genuine love of the game and breathtaking fiction.

But there was also just a boy. Sharp as a tack and relentlessly curious, young Jack absorbed everything: the Depression-era streets of Overbrook and Highland Park, the Polish and Danish immigrant grandparents with their old-world pride, the semi-pro ballplayers tramping through the family kitchen, the Philadelphia of Shibe Park and Baker Bowl. Neighbors froze to death on their front steps. Fathers lost their jobs and never recovered. Jack watched all of it with the wide-open eyes of a boy who didn't yet know he was taking notes.

What shaped him wasn't just his father's chaos but his mother Florence's quiet endurance, a Jersey City girl who married Ole at eighteen and spent the next two decades compensating for his spectacular unreliability. Between them, they gave Jack everything he needed to become one of America's greatest journalists: an eye for the lie, an ear for the story, and an unshakeable instinct for the human beings underneath.

Warm, wry, and often hilarious, The Pitcher's Kid moves between heartbreak and laughter with the ease of a natural storyteller writing about the only subject he never got to cover professionally: himself.

It is the last gift Jack Olsen left his readers. And it is the most personal thing he ever wrote.