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The Elements of Hitting
"The Elements of Hitting is an often haunting and occasionally beautiful story of man's attempt to rebuild his life with two strikes against him." - Chris Bohjalian, Washington Post Book World
"Leave it to a gifted author like Jones to write a 'baseball book' that breaks the mold." - Michael Griffin, Orlando Sentinel
"Jones delivers in spades." - Chicago Tribune
Walter Innis, son of a frustrated and violent fallen baseball star and a tragically unhappy woman driven to infidelity, carries his family's legacy of torment into his own adult life - with disastrous results. Unable to let go of a childhood trapped between his father's violence and his mother's secret love affair, Walter has lost his own wife and job. When local hotshot and former employee of his mother, Henry Truxton III, announces his race for senate, Innis hatches a scheme to vindicate his mother's mysterious death and his father's valueless life. If it works, he might just get rich in the bargain. In the meantime, Innis takes a job coaching a hopeless Little League team, where his father's lessons for "the elements of hitting" come in handy. Ultimately, it is as a Little League coach that Walter discovers a route to happiness and hope beyond the reach of the past.
"Leave it to a gifted author like Jones to write a 'baseball book' that breaks the mold." - Michael Griffin, Orlando Sentinel
"Jones delivers in spades." - Chicago Tribune
Walter Innis, son of a frustrated and violent fallen baseball star and a tragically unhappy woman driven to infidelity, carries his family's legacy of torment into his own adult life - with disastrous results. Unable to let go of a childhood trapped between his father's violence and his mother's secret love affair, Walter has lost his own wife and job. When local hotshot and former employee of his mother, Henry Truxton III, announces his race for senate, Innis hatches a scheme to vindicate his mother's mysterious death and his father's valueless life. If it works, he might just get rich in the bargain. In the meantime, Innis takes a job coaching a hopeless Little League team, where his father's lessons for "the elements of hitting" come in handy. Ultimately, it is as a Little League coach that Walter discovers a route to happiness and hope beyond the reach of the past.
304 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1994
About the author
Matthew F. Jones
9 books25 followersMatthew 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.”
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