The Elements of Hitting

by Matthew F. Jones

Walter Innis, the son of a violent ex-baseball star and an unhappy, unfaithful woman, finds an escape from and a new understanding of his dysfunctional past when he takes over as a Little League baseball coach. By the author of The Cooter Farm.

Genres: Novels, Fiction, Baseball

Hardcover

First published April 1, 1994

About the author

Matthew F. Jones is the author of seven novels and several screenplays. His novels have been widely translated and named on several best novels of the year lists. Three of his novels have been made into major motion pictures. Jones wrote the screenplay for the 2013 film adaptation of his acclaimed 1996 novel A Single Shot, a novel Susan Salter Reynolds in a review for the Los Angeles Times described as “The finest portrait of guilt since Crime and Punishment.” Novelist Daniel Woodrell, who reviewed the book in the Washington Post, declared it “One of the finest novels of rural crime and moral horror in the past few decades.” Patrick Andersen in a Washington Post Review of Jones’s novel Boot Tracks termed the phrase ‘literate noir’ to describe the tense, psychological nature of Jones’ work. His latest novel is A Reckoning Up Black Cat hollow (February, 2026). In his review for the Wall Street Journal Tom Nolan described the novel as, “A terrifying and Gothic-tinged story… A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow, written in an expressionistic style that evokes such writers as Rimbaud, Dickey, Conrad and (yes) Poe, is a harrowing and unforgettable work.”

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sweet, kind-of love story.