Associate Professor Scott D. Peterson won The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Fiction for his book, “A Month of Game Days.” (Photo by Derik Holtmann)
Scott D. Peterson still has vivid memories from more than two decades ago of the summer days he’d spend at baseball and softball diamonds around central Maine as he coached three of his kids’ teams.
Peterson, now an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the First Gentleman to his wife, Chancellor Kristin Sobolik, lived in Orono, Maine, while both were faculty members at the University of Maine. Peterson came to look forward to the ritual of those games while doing his best to navigate some of the politics that come with being a parent-coach of a community youth sports team.
“Orono was kind of unique in that it was part of the district with Bangor, Maine, Stephen King’s hometown,” Peterson said. “Bangor hosted the Senior League Baseball World Series every year, so the district had an automatic bid. Of course, Bangor was the juggernaut – third largest city in Maine, with 33,000 people, the largest talent pool to draw from – and we just kind of cobbled together a team from smaller towns. Every year there was the hope that maybe this year we’ll beat Bangor. That was the dream for the senior league players.”
Peterson and his kids never got to experience that thrill, but he came away with plenty of other stories and lessons from his time in the dugout. They helped inspire some of the tales shared in his book, “A Month of Game Days,” which was published last year and received The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Fiction from The Twin Bill quarterly literary journal.
“A Month of Game Days” includes a series of connected stories about a baseball-obsessed father, Lou Mallett, his family that includes a wife and three sons, and their New England hometown.
“I started writing stories in a town modeled after Orono, but I call it Webster after the original 19th century paper mill family,” Peterson said. “I wrote two or three, and I realized that I had the possibility of a linked stories novel, something like ‘Love Medicine’ by Louise Erdrich or ‘Winesburg, Ohio.’ They’re connected stories where there’s recurring characters, and then I got the idea to put the Mallet family at the center of it and then use the stories and tell them from different points of view to introduce the reader to the many facets of the Mallet family.”
The title is a nod to the idiom, “a month of Sundays,” but all of Peterson’s stories are set in 2004 and are meant to take place over the span of roughly a month, from mid-May through mid-June, to match the contours of the youth baseball season.
Peterson, who earned an interdisciplinary PhD in American literature and culture at Maine and has published books on the development of 19th century baseball journalism and the history of Orono, said he first began writing about the fictional Mallett family around 2007. He presented separate stories featuring the characters at the Sport Literature Association’s annual conference and in its quarterly journal, Aethlon.
“After I read two of them in consecutive years, one of my colleagues says, ‘I think you might be working toward a collection. And maybe more,’” Peterson said. “That kind of put the idea in the back of my head.”
Peterson left the Malletts and returned to the family on a couple occasions in subsequent years, and as he added more stories, he decided he needed a novella to complete the work.
The novella is called “Odyssey,” but is really inspired by James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which itself drew inspiration from Homer’s epic poem. “Ulysses” follows the ordinary, daily movements of three main characters across Dublin, and Peterson’s novella similarly tracks Lou Mallett through a single, long day of baseball as he coaches two of his sons and crosses paths with the third, from whom he is estranged. Peterson, a fan of Joyce’s work, has left a few easter eggs that harken back to Joyce for readers to discover.
Peterson really started pitching the book for publication in 2024, and it was rewarding to see it in print last year. He was also appreciative of the response, including an invitation to discuss it on The Twin Bill Baseball Book podcast with founder Scott Bolohan last August. As part of that discussion, Peterson learned that the book was under consideration for the annual prize.
“It was really gratifying to have somebody appreciate it for what it is and kind of be my ideal reader,” he said.
Peterson’s book has also gained some media attention in Dayton, Ohio, where Peterson previously taught at Wright State University. More recently, he’s had the opportunity to do book signings at The Cozy Book Nook in Dayton and at Main Street Books in St. Charles.
