Girl Pitches Two Perfect Games with Her Knuckler

Jim Musgrave’s fictional Dipsy Izzie in “The Mayan Magician” is perhaps become real.  Here’s a young lass who is giving fits to young boys because of knuckleball control.

(CNN) — A young baseball phenom has received one of the sport’s highest honors — recognition from the National Baseball Hall of Fame for pitching not one, but two perfect games.

And while a perfect game — defined as one in which the pitcher allows no hits and no walks — is a rare occurrence for the sport, what makes this 13-year-old pitcher’s feat even more impressive is that she did it against the boys.

Yes, she.

Chelsea Baker, once a student of former major league pitcher Joe Niekro, last week donated the jersey she wore to pitch one of those special games to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. The jersey will be part of an exhibit dedicated to the importance of women in the sport, according to the museum.

Chelsea, who until recently honed her pitching arm in Plant City, Florida’s Little League program, told CNN Sunday that she feels “really honored and blessed” to be recognized on a national level at such an early age.

In addition to her Hall of Fame achievement, Chelsea was also recently featured on ESPN’s “E:60” series.

Chelsea, who says she has been pitching since she was 7 years old, boasts a fastball in the mid-60s (miles per hour) and a baffling knuckleball that has been known to make her male opponents shed a tear.

“Yeah, when I strike them out with the knuckleball, sometimes they’ll throw their helmets and start crying,” she laughs. “It’s just really funny to watch.”

It’s a pitch that was perfected with help from Niekro, who was her team’s batting pitcher before his death in 2006.

“He would always throw it to us and I could never hit it, and so I’d always beg him to teach it to me and finally one day he just taught it to me,” she says.

The knuckleball has helped propel Chelsea through four seasons without a loss with her Brandon Farms team — and her batting average isn’t bad either, hitting over .600 this season, though she notes “I like pitching more than batting.”

Chelsea is now participating in Baseball for All — an organization that advocates for women in the sport — playing on a touring all-girls team made up of players from around the country.

And Chelsea says her career is only getting started.

“I want to play baseball for as long as I can,” she says. “I want to play high school baseball and then I also want to play on the USA girls’ travel baseball team.”

Watch out, boys.

Knuckleballing Woman Makes the CBS Evening News!

Just as in Jim Musgrave’s novelette, a woman has broken into the ranks of professional baseball with a dazzling butterfly pitch!  Watch her on the CBS News.

(AP)  Eri Yoshida bounced off the mound with an ear-to-ear smile, looking every bit like an 18-year-old who had just graduated high school and was enjoying a new country.

It was what she did on the pitcher’s mound – and in the batter’s box – that set Yoshida apart.

Becoming the first woman to pitch professionally in the United States in a decade, Yoshida showed that she and her sidearm knuckler can hang with the men.

The “Knuckle Princess” was unfazed when a former major leaguer opened the game by bunting for a hit. She had a few knucklers that danced almost as much as those of her idol, Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox. She pitched a scoreless first inning in her debut for the Chico Outlaws of the Golden Baseball League, before struggling a bit by allowing four runs in her final two frames.

But all in all, the debut was a success, especially considering she hit an RBI single in her only at-bat against David Rivas of the Tijuana Cimarrones. That led to a standing ovation from the near sellout crowd on “Girl Power Night.” Even her teammates got caught up in the excitement, taking pictures of Yoshida standing on first after her bases-loaded single through the hole between first and second.

Yoshida is the first woman since Ila Borders in 2000 to play professionally in the United States. The 5-foot-1, 115-pound Yoshida is also the first woman to play professionally in two countries, having pitched last year in an independent league in Japan.

Yoshida got off to a much better debut than Borders did in her first game in 1997, when she failed to retire any of the three batters she faced for the Saint Paul Saints of the Northern League. Borders pitched four years in independent leagues, ending her career in 2000.

After former San Francisco Giants infielder Ivan Ochoa led off the game by bunting for a single, drawing jeers from the crowd, Yoshida settled down and kept Tijuana off-balance with a sidearm knuckleball that usually registers in the 50 mph range.

She got Erold Andrus on a foul pop behind home plate before inducing former Yankees bonus baby Jackson Melian to ground into an inning-ending double play. Yoshida hopped off the mound in excitement after the nine-pitch inning and exchanged high-fives with her teammates in the dugout with a huge smile plastered on her teenage face.

She fared better in her second encounter with a former major leaguer, getting Juan Melo to pop out to second base to open the second inning. She then got another former major leaguer, Kit Pellow, on a fly out to left before hitting Carlos Lopez with a pitch in the back. Juan Velasquez followed with a two-run homer for the first runs off Yoshida.

(AP Photo/Steve Yeater)

Eri Yoshida (left) is congratulated by her catcher Mike Rose after making her U.S. professional debut pitching for the Chico Outlaws, May 29, 2010.

She didn’t fare as well her second time through the order as the Tijuana players showed more patience. With two outs and nobody on in the third, she allowed three hits and a walk to her final four hitters. She got out of the inning when Melo was thrown out trying to score from second on a single to left by Pellow.

That ended the night for Yoshida. She allowed five hits, four runs and one walk in three innings, throwing 47 pitches on the night.

Spurred by the interest in Yoshida, the Outlaws are streaming all of their home games live on the Internet this season. About 25 media outlets were credentialed for the game and the team drew a much larger crowd than usual Saturday.

Mika Kuriyama, a Chico State alum from San Leandro in the Bay Area, made the three-hour-plus drive to take her 5-year-old daughter Hannah to the game. Hannah was decked out in a kimono and held a sign for the “Knuckle Princess.”

“I admire her,” Kuriyama said of Yoshida. “It takes a lot of guts to come out here and pitch. I really admire her. I wanted my daughter to be able to see that.”

Yoshida learned to throw the knuckleball as a young girl by watching Wakefield. She taught herself the pitch and never had any formal coaching for how to throw the knuckler until meeting her idol during spring training in Florida earlier this year.

Yoshida became Japan’s first female pro baseball player last year when she pitched for the Kobe Cruise 9 in the Kansai Independent League. She was 0-2 in 11 appearances with a 4.03 ERA in 10 2-3 innings.

She then went to the Arizona Winter League this past offseason, where her manager on the Yuma Scorpions was former Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Mike Marshall. She went 1-1 with a 4.79 ERA in Arizona and impressed Marshall enough to get a shot in Chico, where Marshall is the president and general manager.

Marshall said he has no doubt Yoshida has the makeup to handle this historic challenge. He said the biggest factor in determining how far she will be able to take it will be how much stronger she gets in the next few years.

“There’s going to be a draft here in a couple weeks and there’s probably only a handful of 18-year-old high school kids who are going to get drafted who could come here and play. Men,” Marshall said. “Look at the rosters. You have Double-A, Triple-A, big-league guys. This isn’t affiliated rookie ball; this isn’t affiliated A-ball. This is way up there. These are 25- to 35-year-old men she’s playing against.”

Despite the disparity in age, experience, gender and cultural upbringing, Yoshida is fitting in well with her new team. Manager Garry Templeton, an admitted skeptic when he first saw her pitch this winter, said the players missed her when she didn’t make a season-opening road trip to Mexico.

He said Yoshida has been taken to kangaroo court, where she was fined a dollar, like all newcomers to the court. The only special treatment she gets is separate locker room facilities to change in and her own hotel room on the road.

“They’re protective of her,” Templeton said. “She blends in well. She’s just a ballplayer. They see her as a ballplayer, not as a girl.”

Jim Musgrave’s Story Makes Hoffer Award Short List

Eric Hoffer Prose Award Short List

As the annual judging draws to a close, a small set of grand prize award finalists is announced for the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose. This small list or “short list” of finalists is an honored distinction of its own and is announced publicly during the summer of each award year. Below are the current short-listed entries in alphabetical order by author:

2010
Jim Musgrave, “Letter to the President of the United States of America”
Deborah Rise McMenamy, “Love, Like Stew”
Adam King, “Outer Spaces”
Talia Carner, “The Maidens and the Messiah”
Beverly Akerman, “The Sea of Tranquility”
Rachel Maczuzak, “Wasted”

Story Selected for Publication in Best New Writing 2011

Jim Musgrave’s short story, “Letter to the President of the United States,” has been chosen from over 2,000 entries and will appear with 15 other stories in the upcoming Fall anthology, Best New Writing 2011.  In addition, the story is still being considered for the first place award and three editor’s choice awards.

Jim’s story is a psychological drama that takes place at the beginning of the war in Iraq in 2003.  An Iraqi engineer who worked for Saddam Hussein has lost his memory due to traumatic events, and a U. S. Marine Sergeant and Arab-American translator gets his psychiatrist father to assist him in recovering the engineer’s memory along with what might be called his “soul.”

The US Review of Books Likes TMM

The Mayan Magician and Other Stories
by Jim Musgrave
CIC Publishers
reviewed by Peter M. Fitzpatrick

“There’s still time for you to wake up and use your infinite minds and forget your lousy peepholes.”

This collection of twenty-six short stories will have you laughing out loud and perhaps even finding tears rolling down your cheeks. It is powerful fiction that can catapult you right into the center of situations both modern American and beyond. The soul of the misplaced body of a young Iraq war soldier cries out from beyond the veil. A young meth-addicted girl gives voice to her entrapment and lurching attempt to escape. A bankrupted sub-prime mortgage investor is rescued from alcoholic ennui by mysterious bird-women who call to him from the sea.

Musgrave manages to hit quite a few contemporary targets with a subtle hand. He likes to assume the viewpoint of the weak, the unpowerful, and the disenfranchised. The horrible isolation of an autistic child’s mental anguish; the Falun Gong member of mixed race stuck in Communist China; the strange and terrifying power play between a sexual psychopath and his intended victim–these are just a few instances where the humanity and pathos of normally hidden and silent ranges of existence are given powerful and moving voices by the author.

He also has an innate feel for the absurd. It can be in the negative sense of nothingness that a lonely train passenger feels when witnessing a suicide-by-train. But this author is too kind and creative to dwell very long on simple existential angst. His characters may well be mired in postmodern complexity. They meet it head-on. A sixty-eight-year-old street salesman outsmarts the spirit of Death to save the life of nine-year-old boy. The soul of a retired baseball great really does enter the soul of a cat who then brings good luck to his family.

The powerful and corrupt are indeed given an artful and effective send-up in this book. Throughout all the wit and ingenious invention that makes this collection such an enjoyable read is an intrinsic sense of moral courage. The surface of things he portrays are perhaps surreal and absurd. Deep down inside the stories, however, glimpses of a purpose, rather strong intimations of meaning, start to emerge. The effect is powerful and stirring.

The US Review of Books
PO Box 11, Titusville, NJ 08560
www.theUSreview.com

New Review By Fellow Author

The Mayan Magician and Other Stories by Jim Musgrave

Reviewed by Sharon Cupp Pennington, author of Hoodoo Money

In a short story collection of Musgrave’s caliber, the dilemma becomes which tale to review from The Mayan Magician and Other Stories.

With “The Mayan Magician,” this compilation’s lead story and namesake, Musgrave weaves a mystical tale of love, courage and resolute faith in the great Mayan Warrior God, Kukulkán. Musgrave’s story revolves around a contemporary young Mayan woman, Isabel Velasquez, or “Dipsie Izzie,” as she wows baseball fans and wins over male colleagues and skeptics with her almost-supernatural knuckleball. She becomes the first female pitcher for the minor league Yucatán Leones — and later, the first woman awarded a major league contract, signing with the San Diego Padres. A million-dollar contract, no less.

Anyone, who is a fan of baseball — or even those readers like me, who possess little more than a headline-recapping knowledge of the sport — will appreciate Musgrave’s erudite interlacing of baseball and the spiritual Mayan culture. Musgrave affords his readers the privilege of accompanying Isabel on her extraordinary journey of acclamation, unwavering faith in her Mayan religion, betrayal, kidnapping and the realization of true love. What more could you ask of a short story? I give this one a huge thumbs up.

Throughout the “other stories” in The Mayan Magician and Other Stories, Musgrave flexes his creative genius and satirical, oft times irreverent, humor as he navigates the reader through a cross-genre exploration of diversity, acceptance, greed, community, faith, political corruption, cyber-lust, conformity and the lack thereof.

Whether the vehicle Musgrave chooses to transport his fictional characters is a black widow using the internet to feast and fornicate, a hurricane with human-like qualities, a text-messaging mime or a depraved ride on Amtrak’s Sunset Limited on the brink of its demise, this writer weaves his tales with wit and wisdom. Is there rhyme or reason to this anthology, an interrelated theme? No. Nor is there the coziness of chicken soup. But if you love short stories, thought-provoking reads and quality entertainment, The Mayan Magician and Other Stories will not disappoint

………………………………………………………………………………………..
Hoodoo Money, a romantic suspense novel set in contemporary
Louisiana and Texas, released May 2008
Available at Amazon and other fine booksellers
Author’s Website – http://www.sharonpenningtonwrites.webs.com/
Publisher – http://www.draumrpublishing.com/

Life Imitates Art: 16-Year-Old Female Knuckleball Pitcher Gets Pro Contract

Five foot, 114 pound Eri Yoshida will pitch for the new Kobe 9 Cruise in the Japanese League.  She says she learned from her father and she wants to be as good as the Boston Red Sox Tim Wakefield some day. Those who are skeptical of Jim Musgrave’s novella The Mayan Magician should now believe it’s possible for a woman to succeed with this “equalizer” pitch!

Eri Yoshida

Download Sampler from The Mayan Magician

The first woman signed to the San Diego Padres is a Mayan Indian. She has a mysterious control over her knuckleball. Does she pitch for her god, Kulkulcan, the Warrior Serpent of the End of Times in 2012? Or, is she controlled by the N.A.S.A. scientist hired by her owner? Jim Musgrave’s latest collection of short fiction includes this novelette, along with 25 other remarkable stories, ranging from contemporary to science fiction and even a few horror tales. Award-winning short fiction author, Jacob Appel says, “With the publication of The Mayan Magician and Other Stories, Jim Musgrave joins the ranks of George Saunders, Steven Millhauser and Kevin Brockmeier at the heart of the modern American short story’s second great renaissance.”

You can read a few sample excerpts from the new short fiction collection by Jim Musgrave. There are 345 pages, 25 stories and one novelette in the complete version, soon available online at all major bookstore retailers.

Download Here (Note: you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed to read this.)

Flash!  The Mayan Magician and Other Stories is now available in paperback at Amazon.com.

TCM Reviews Publishes Assessment of The Mayan Magician

Dr. Tami Brady has published her review of Jim Musgrave’s new book at TCM Reviews.

Mobipocket Now Carries All Titles By Jim Musgrave

You can now purchase ebook titles by Jim Musgrave at Mobipocket and most other online ebook retailers.  Ebooks can be read on your hand-held devices, including cell phones and personal computers.