SOURCE: Collins, Richard. “Stealing Home: John Fante and the Moral Dimension of Baseball.” Aethlon 12, no. 1 (summer 1994): 81-94.

In the following essay, Collins investigates the role of baseball in Fante's novels and short fiction.

One of John Fante's early claims to fame was being portrayed as the pinball maniac Willie in William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (1939). But long before he became a writer, gravitated to Hollywood, where he met Saroyan, and turned to more sedentary activities like pinball, gambling and golf, John Fante's first love was baseball. Growing up in Colorado, Fante attended Regis College, a Jesuit boarding school, where the priests taught ethics in the classroom and stole bases on the playground. But Colorado, with its long winters, was a bad place for a baseball player, and the young John Fante longed for Spring and enough money to take him to California for a try-out with...