While visiting family in Ohio last week, I bought myself an early present, The Girl that Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King..  I needed some fiction, but of course baseball is hard to avoid, so I decided it would be a good fit.  What I didn’t expect was to enjoy the book so much.

Though the real Gordon doesn’t appear in the book, one can tell that King has spent some time sitting in Fenway park, and he does a wonderful job of pulling out names that take me back to 1998.  The story follows a 9 year old Patricia McFarland, who on an afternoon hike with her mother and brother through the woods of Maine, wanders off the path because nature calls, and then decides to take a shortcut back.  Of course, her shortcut gets her lost.  With only a small lunch, a rain poncho and her portable radio she survives in the woods for more then a week.  Its the sounds of Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano broadcasting the Red Sox games each night which help her ward off the scary creatures of the woods. The baseball references not only helped Tricia keep up her strength, but as I read the last few chapters on the cold December morning they began to warm me as I ready myself for spring.  Baseball is a connection to spring, and to life beginning again. King’s Gordon is a character of strength, even as fictionalized as he is in the book, and with all that is going on is sports these days, its nice to belive in  a world where the guy who saves the game also can save us too.  Too bad its fiction.