The Cactus League

by Emily Nemens

An explosive, character-driven odyssey through the world of baseball
Jason Goodyear is the star outfielder for the Los Angeles Lions, stationed with the rest of his team in the punishingly hot Arizona desert for their annual spring training. Handsome, famous, and talented, Goodyear is nonetheless coming apart at the seams. And the coaches, writers, wives, girlfriends, petty criminals, and diehard fans following his every move are eager to find out why--as they hide secrets of their own.

Humming with the energy of a ballpark before the first pitch, Emily Nemens' The Cactus League unravels the tightly connected web of people behind a seemingly linear game. Narrated by a sportscaster, Goodyear's story is interspersed with tales of Michael Taylor, a batting coach trying to stay relevant; Tamara Rowland, a resourceful spring-training paramour, looking for one last catch; Herb Allison, a legendary sports agent grappling with his decline; and a plethora of other richly drawn characters, all striving to be seen as the season approaches. It's a journey that, like the Arizona desert, brims with both possibility and destruction.

Anchored by an expert knowledge of baseball's inner workings, Emily Nemens's The Cactus League is a propulsive and deeply human debut that captures a strange desert world that is both exciting and unforgiving, where the most crucial games are the ones played off the field.

Genres: Fiction, Baseball, Sports, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Novels, Adult

275 pages, Hardcover

First published February 4, 2020

About the author

Emily Nemens’s debut novel, The Cactus League, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named one of NPR’s and Lit Hub’s favorite books of 2020. Her stories have appeared in BOMB, The Gettysburg Review, n+1, and elsewhere; her illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker and in collaboration with Harvey Pekar. Nemens spent over a decade editing literary quarterlies, including leading The Paris Review and serving as co-editor and prose editor of The Southern Review. She held the 2022–23 Picador Professorship (University of Leipzig) and teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College. She lives in central New Jersey with her husband and dog.

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love baseball, and this was a gift from Lauren, so there was little doubt I’d enjoy this story. There were times when I was transported back to my visit to spring training, albeit in Florida versus Arizona, which is the setting for this story. If you are a baseball fan who also likes “imperfect” characters - aren’t we all? - then I think you’ll enjoy this book.

[Fran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing is static. "...not a man's career, especially not a ballplayer the first weeks of spring. His batting average, his ambition, his hopes: all is in flux." Salt River Fields in Scottsdale, Arizona was a 12,000 seat stadium, the new spring training home of the Los Angeles Lions, a Cactus League team. In February/March 2011, within the span of six weeks, a player could make a team, get sent down or get sent home. An unnamed sportswriter, without press credentials, jobless since his newspaper's demise, was determined to follow Jason Goodyear, the league's best outfielder. "...as much will happen in parking lots as on the field, as much in backyards as in deep left."

Jason Goodyear, left-fielder, "...has an arm like a rocket launcher." He had won Golden Glove Awards and had lucrative product endorsements. He was very competitive. "I just can't turn it off...I always want to win..." Why does "Goody" drive a battered old Jeep? Interesting...his California house was on the market.

Michael Taylor was the batting coach for the Los Angeles Lions. Early spring was sixty-nine year old Michael's busiest time of year. The players "...have to get recalibrated to major league pitching... he understands the mechanics of a swing better than any...slo-mo camera or instant replay." Why retire?

Tamara Rowland, married and divorced from two baseball players, was in her mid 40's. During a ballplayer's time of uncertainty, she was ready to offer "reassurances". Upon meeting her, "Like flipping a switch [the ballplayer's] vocabulary nose dives into baseball jargon." He might, arguably be "putty" in her hands.

William Goslin, a rookie first baseman was in awe of Jason Goodyear, so much so, that he blindly offered support to a sports "hero".

In nine chapters, "The Cactus League" by Emily Nemens is a character study of not only Jason Goodyear, but an aging batting coach, a rookie, a divorced groupie, baseball wives, baseball agents and life in Scottsdale, Arizona during spring training.

Author Nemens shares her knowledge of The Cactus League having attended spring training with her dad. "We didn't go every year, but we returned to The Cactus League often enough that as I grew up I got a sense of the desert and the weird and wonderful culture that had developed around spring training baseball." An excellent debut novel.

Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review "The Cactus League".

[Book Clubbed · Rating 2 out of 5]

A slog, much like baseball itself, despite the fact that I grew up watching it myself. The baseball games are only peripheral to the stories, serving as an excuse for players at various stages of their careers to inhabit the same spring training world. Unlike The Art of Fielding, which made baseball primary to each character's identity, The Cactus League occasionally opines on the sport itself, often with little emotional resonance.

I found the characters to be archetypes. Well-described, sometimes-dynamic archetypes, but archetypes nonetheless. We have the star player with a fatal flaw, the wives worried about losing their lifestyle, the fast-talking agent, etc. This book both felt too short to properly explore all the characters, and yet too long, given the sluggish prose and lack of conflict. Tension, pacing, and character arc are hard to pull off, and not simply things for "genre" writers to worry about

Nemens is not skilled at pacing a novel, a single chapter, or a paragraph. She will often follow this pattern when two characters meet:
"Hi."
(3 long paragraphs of context, bloated and unendearing.)
"Oh. Hi."
(3 long paragraphs of context.)

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

5+ out of 5.
I don't like baseball. Never found it terribly interesting to watch. So why, then, do I find it so compelling to read? Perhaps it is the structure, a hypothesis about which Robert Coover and now Emily Nemens might agree. More so than football or basketball or soccer or really any other sport, the structure and simplicity of baseball lends itself well to narrative storytelling. 3 outs, 4 bases, 9 innings: there is a structure here.

Nemens uses the 9-inning structure to tell a novel-in-stories, about a superstar baseball player crashing out over the course of spring training. The setting is Arizona and the novel crackles with the strange cold-heat of the desert in winter. We hear from Jason Goodyear's agent, one of the co-owners of the team, a woman he spends the night with after his divorce. Characters don't recur, exactly, in the manner of A Visit from the Goon Squad but there are moments of connection and return -- and there are also stories that start and end and we've barely caught a glimpse before they that go spinning off like a foul ball or (perhaps more accurately) a player being traded to another team.
I don't know that I loved the overarching narrator device. I don't know that I cared about one or two of the stories in the way I cared about the rest. But I was riveted by the titanic collapse of Jason Goodyear, in a way I never could care about a real baseballer. And that, friends, is true talent on Emily Nemens' part.
(Also, the book is just killer on the sentence level. Hot damn.)

[Dax · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most people are probably going to focus on Nemens’ use of the multiple POV, a structure she utilizes with much success (except for the chapter centering around the team owner with a bruised ego, as well the chapter focusing on the players’ wives). Nemens appears to have logged some time at spring training herself, and she paints the whole mess with clear lines for us readers.

What really stood out to me, however, was the tone Nemens sets throughout the story. This is not a story of redemption, nor is it a story of doom and gloom. With ‘The Cactus League’ Nemens gives us the hint that things might turn out all right, but in a likelihood probably not.

A couple of readers have mentioned that baseball really is a perfect metaphor for life, and I tend to agree. Nemens does the game justice. A promising debut. Solid three stars.

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Cactus League was a delightful debut novel by Emily Nemens. It actually was a series of short stories, all loosely woven together by our narrator, a former sports journalist from a now defunct newspaper as he encourages us to settle in for the long game. The structure of this book was in nine chapters (or short stories) and reflective of the nine innings a baseball game. It is set in Scottsdale, Arizona where the fictional Los Angeles Lions have come for their spring training as part of the Cactus League at the Salt River Fields training facility.

Most likely a lot of the draw for me to this book is that I have been a lifelong fan of baseball from Saturday afternoons with my father in front of the television to being a Colorado Rockies season ticket-holder for many years. Salt River Fields, adjacent to the Talking Stick Resort, has been the spring training home for the Colorado Rockies and the Arizona Diamondbacks. For many years, it has been our hope to go down for a week during spring training in March.

What I found fascinating with our narrator, as he set up each chapter in the series, he would go into the archaeology and science of how that part of the Southwestern desert came to be going back millions of years ago to show the origins of the topography and the prehistoric animals that roamed the earth. He also spoke of the lost tribes of Native Americans such as the Hohokam to the current Pima and Maricopa. Each of the stories focused on those involved in the baseball scene in Scottsdale from the coaches, baseball players, baseball player's wives, baseball talent agents, and baseball groupies to the essential workers helping the ballpark to function. The common thread uniting all of the various chapters was Jason Goodyear, a two-time Golden Glove winner and the star outfielder for the Los Angeles Lions. It was an exciting book that only made me yearn more for an afternoon at the ballpark.

"No, a Hohokam field was a dug-out oval coated in caliche, stretching anywhere from eight to two hundred feet. That's like the stretch from the plate to shallow center, nothing small about it. They even constructed sloped, rising sides around the field, so a crowd could gather, sit down and watch. Not a lot different from Salt River's own outfield lawn, the patchwork of beach blankets and picnic baskets that fans spread out today."

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a fan of both baseball and literary fiction I thought I’d love this book. Unfortunately, it was not sufficiently about baseball nor “literary” enough and I did not love it. That’s harsh: I just had too high expectations. The structure is: vignettes about various characters/topics on and circling around a baseball team, all weaving together, and colliding in a final event. Kind of like Tommy Orange’s “There There.” But there were too many dead weight subjects - you could sniff a hint of complexity, but just hinted at, and most characters (especially the women, to my disappointment) came off as one note. Too much of each chapter was taken up by laying out the facts of the character’s backstory, which didn’t actually add to the depth of the character. The back stories did cover a lot of ground, though: Arizona, the housing crash, opioid addition, Tommy John surgery, Frank Lloyd Wright, the stress of being an ace, closeted homosexuality, race, trophy wives/cleat chasers, minor league organists, and so on. Covered a lot of ground almost to a fault. I did like viewing a character - say, the batting coach - from different vantages. But this book would have been more successful if each chapter were able to stand on its own, as a collection of strong short stories. Which is a lot to ask, I know. Or if the cast and topics had been pared down. The writing was blah, and so is this review.

[Christine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I *really* wanted to enjoy this. Love baseball. Thought it was right up my alley. It was so SLOW, I couldn’t slog my way through it. Too much detail, didn’t care about the characters, parts of it reminded me of Bull Durham (but that story’s already been done). Made it about halfway and bailed.

[Abraham Allende · Rating 1 out of 5]

Each year during Spring Training I pick up a baseball book to ease me into the mood for the season. Normally, it's non-fiction; a biography of a former player, or a historical account of a significant season. Therefore, reading a novel about baseball was a radical change of pace for me. I eagerly anticipated reading this book after hearing an interview with the author and reading all the other reviews.
I can't express my disappointment strongly enough.
I'm an avid baseball fan, and, I must add, formerly worked for a professional team. So I was aware of players' shortcomings and missteps, especially in the matter of extramarital affairs.
This novel seemed disjointed to me. The character development seems to lead nowhere. The idea of dividing the chapters into innings is a stale and unimaginative technique.
I wish I could say something more positive, but I think I'll go back to non-fiction. To use a baseball metaphor, reading this book left me feeling like a baserunner on third with the game on the line, watching the team's best hitter strike out, and leaving me stranded.

[Scottsdale Public Library]

If you know the Valley of the Sun, Cactus League baseball or are a fan of sports fiction, this is the book for you! Being a resident of Scottsdale, AZ, I was especially intrigued by the many local references to iconic restaurants (The Pink Pony and Don and Charlie's), Salt River Fields and Talking Stick Casino, as well as the history and archaeological information about the area that Nemens cleverly includes. The author's love of baseball is also evident in her strong characters, from an aging batting coach and a long-time organist with crippled hands to rookies hoping for a spot on the Los Angeles Lions team and a family of squatters, who all play a pivotal role. Add some women of a certain age, hoping to get involved with the handsome, wealthy, young players and a star who battles his own demons of being addicted to gambling, while dealing with a messy divorce, and you have a great read for Spring Training fans and non-fans alike. -Louisa A.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in 2011 in Scottsdale, Arizona, the fictional Los Angeles Lions baseball team is about to embark on Spring Training at the (real) Cactus League baseball park, Salt River Fields. The book is a series of interrelated short stories about an owner, a manager, coaches, players, rookies, wives, agents, hangers on, wannabe girlfriends, and even the stadium’s organist. The primary focus is All-Star center fielder Jason Goodyear, a multimillionaire player who is now facing a divorce and gambling debts.

I recently went on a trip to the Phoenix area to attend Spring Training games, so it seemed like a good time to read this book. I cannot say it is particularly realistic since it assumes the players are in the lineup the entire game, playing as they do in the regular season, which does not generally happen, but it is an entertaining story. The author throws in local color, using real restaurants, museums, casinos, and Indian tribal history.

[ash · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh I just hated this. Deeply, brutally boring with shades of wholly unexamined misogyny, homophobia, and racism. This felt like a creative writing senior thesis that should get rightfully buried on the writer's way to (maybe) better things. It's obviously trying to say something Big and Important about the way lives are interconnected, but it barely manages to say anything even vaguely interesting and I ended up skimming the journalist passages at the start of each chapter entirely. The number of instances of "the older man" and "the rookie" I paid to read... Fifteen year olds putting up fan fiction on the internet know better. I would've really liked to read the version of this book that actually cared about its characters, the one that picked a throughline and a direction and did something useful with them, but alas.

[Shaun Stanley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Cactus League is a novel written by Emily Nemens. It was originally released in 2021.

As Spring Training gets under way in Scottsdale, Arizona, the Los Angeles Lions best baseball player, Jason Goodyear, is going through a transitional period. He has gone from being known as the best player in the league to the player everyone is gossiping about because of his surprise divorce. Trying to get a hold of his new life, Jason sinks deeper and deeper into a gambling addiction.

The book is told through nine chapters (nine innings - get it?) each focusing on a different point of view connected to the fictional Los Angeles Lions spring training camp: hitting coach, club owner, players’ wives, the women trying to pick up baseball players, the number one draft pick, the stadium’s organ player, and more. These stories weave together all adding to the Jason Goodyear plot, but not as much as you would want or expect. I also kept waiting for a big climatic ending that never really materialized which left me wanting more and closure. I also felt the book was over written as if the author was trying to make this story feel much more important than it is and that it is the next great American novel. I did think the baseball parts were interesting and well researched and captured the spirit of spring training. I was really excited to dive into a baseball book but this ended up being a bit of a disappointment.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love a good book about baseball, and since the coronavirus has wrecked havoc on this year’s MLB season, this novel (made up of linked stories about a cast of characters whose lives revolve around the Los Angeles Lions, the pro team that plays their spring training games in Arizona) is about as close to the real thing I’m going to get this season.

(Confession: I am still not over the fact that FOX cancelled “Pitch,” so I might have envisioned some amalgamation of Mark-Paul Gosselear and a Hemsworth brother as Jason Goodyear, the handsome outfielder who serves as the common thread between all the book’s characters.)

See also, my one complaint: I could have done without the chapters featuring the laid-off journalist whose rambling, (geography lesson-heavy) interludes were the equivalent of a narrative record scratch every time they appeared on the page.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book crawls along like a too-hot afternoon game.
The story focuses on the pre-season decline of an aging star outfielder, told through everyone else's eyes. Yes, it's the popular structure of separate stories held together by one character or event, and here, that's Jason Goodyear, a character whom I wish had gotten more page time and been given a deeper emotional backstory in each one of the vignettes he popped through. The idea of weaving together the many people who are effected by one man's performance is fascinating enough, but the connecting thread was never strong enough and the richly drawn character studies focused mainly on appearance and setting rather than emotional motivation or revelatory backstories. The main chapters are written in the slightly outdated style of densely packed sentences filled with facts, physical descriptors, and blunt similes rather than emotional depth. The women, especially, felt superficially sketched and lacking in complexity, which I have to admit was a little bit of an extra disappointment coming from a young woman writer. There were so many characters I wanted more from, whose stories left me curious about how they ended up where they did. The splits between the chapters, written in the voice of an anonymous reporter, were the most creative and intriguing parts of the book that made me wonder what they whole thing could have been like if truly written from the bird's eye view of an obsessive veteran sports reporter.

[Brad Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure what to say but in the end I was disappointed.

I got this book as a birthday present. My mom knows I love baseball. I just don’t get it. As some of the other reviewers have said, the character development starts well but is incomplete. The “chapters” seem to be more like separate stories that interconnect, sort of but in such an awkward way it is difficult to understand why and how. There are some good ideas that aren’t developed and story lines with potential that just stop. Oh, and there really is no ending. I turned the page, and, instead of getting the closure I read the acknowledgements. I thought that maybe some pages were missing. I noted that Sandy Alderson was credited for help with this book. He is a brilliant baseball mind. I wonder if he actually liked the book.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you need to love baseball, spring training, and Scottsdale to enjoy this book? No, but it sure makes it more fun.

[Erica Bauermeister · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not a big baseball fan, but I picked up this book on a recommendation of a friend, and after reading a few pages I was hooked by the author's use of language and her ability to capture characters within a paragraph. This is a series of interconnected stories, set in Phoenix during spring training. There is a narrative arc that runs through the whole book, but what really matters is the insights into each of the characters who are all remotely or intimately connected (more of the former than the latter). A great read.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Cactus League is a novel made up of linked stories. I think it quite accomplished, perhaps the best new fiction I've read in a while. I have to say I'm aware aware that such rhapsodic praise might be colored by the fact that I love baseball novels, which this is. The Cactus League, though, is a different kind of baseball novel. It's not so much about the drama of the game, of any one particular game, let alone one that casts life-defining moments and lessons on unguarded characters ready to absorb them. Some of the characters are indeed players. In fact, every field position is represented at some point. But most are people only around baseball in some way. Nemens peoples her stories with players' wives, agents, an organist, concession workers, groupies, and many more. Their lives center around a game they don't play as they run the bases of life's circumstances.

The stories (yes, there are 9 of them) of The Cactus League follow the spring training practices and exhibition games of the Los Angeles Lions (yes, it's a fictitious team) in 2011 around Scottsdale, Arizona. The roster of the Lions is filled with players at every stage of their careers. As you'd expect, there are crusty veterans who make up the foundation of the club. There are youngsters with raw talent trying to make the regular squad. As one established star says, every player there has spent a life being the best everywhere they've played, and now they find themselves in a place where they're not. The players are surrounded by coaches and equipment men, women who love them and women who want to love them, and the men who make money off their careers. The most prominent player is the all-star leftfielder Jason Goodyear. I believe he's penciled into every story in one way or another, though only a couple are actually about him. Just as Goodyear is the star and key to the L. A. Lions success as a baseball team, he's also the vein of mineral, sometimes bright as gold, sometimes coal black, running through the stories.

An element of the novel I like is that each chapter has a prologue which acts as both foreshadowing and as a glimpse back into Arizona's geologic and evolutionary past. Written in the point of view of an unnamed character I take to be a sportswriter, they treat us to views of this ancient seabed now scattered with shark teeth, or the 2011 landscape sprinkled with verdant baseball diamonds which was once stalked by dinosaurs before the mountains around Scottsdale were lifted. If the sportswriter views the modern inhabitants with a disillusioned eye, he sees their forerunners--Pime, Maricopa, Hohokam--as authentic and resilient. Primitive life on the edge has morphed into the game the novel's concerned with, but it's still a life on the edge.

The stories are gritty. The characters don't belong on a box of Wheaties. But the novel does. As a baseball novel it's a champion.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read the very favorable reviews for this debut novel and was intrigued. I started reading it this morning and was caught only after about 10 pages. As I read past 100 pages, I wondered if someone else took over the writing. The narrative no longer flowed; the characters and situations were muddled and totally uninteresting.
I’m surprised and saddened by this author’s inability to continue the narrative as she had begun. Then maybe again, perhaps it’s me. Either way, I struck out.

[Curtis Edmonds · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What Nemens does in THE CACTUS LEAGUE --- and brilliantly so --- is to describe the quietly desperate lives of the various characters and invite the reader to find not only empathy with them, but communion as well." Read the rest at Bookreporter.com.

[Mimi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a big fan of character novels as well as baseball. However, one of the things that I have learned is not only do I like character driven novels, but they must be likable - or at least redemptive - characters. This book is a series of interconnected short stories about awful people doing awful things. The baseball element does not outweigh this muck.

[Nick Moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found its stride in the second half, and the final third was an absolute delight.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in the baseball and baseball-tangential microcosm of Scottsdale, Arizona, this novel is about various characters connected directly or indirectly to the Lions baseball team -- from Michael, the baseball player who never made it to the big leagues and is now some kind of team coach and perhaps soon to be out of a job; to Tami, the aging baseball-bunny, a la the Susan Sarandon character in Bull Durham; to Stephen Smith, the married, black, part-owner of the team perhaps hiding a secret about his sexuality; to Jason Goodyear, the star outfielder with a broken marriage and gambling issues; to Herb, the ailing big sports agent who represents Goodyear, though we never find out what his medical problems are; to Goslin, the rookie; to young Alex S, who, with his mother and sister, are squatting in empty houses, owners away, or foreclosed upon, or only partially built before developer money ran out, and whose mother works concessions at the Lions' new stadium. The author knows baseball, and all the baseball lingo (of which I don't know a ton) and it wasn't dumbed down, which I appreciated, but there was a lot of it. The book seems to want to show both the microcosm of baseball within a particular team, and the changes that have come to Arizona, from its prehistoric time when it was an ocean, perhaps (and this is a guess because it's not clear) intended to demonstrate how baseball affects or is affected by the world at large. Through the book are interstitials - what seems to be sections of an article by a one-time sports writer now out of a job because of what's happened to newspapers in general - which did not work for me - the idea of connecting prehistoric Arizona with the vagaries of baseball felt way too attenuated; I kept trying to figure out if the book was supposedly the reporter's telling of the story; indeed we learn that the reporter is paying sources, including Sarah, the sports agent's assistant, and Alex S, the homeless boy. Billed as a novel, this reads more like loosely connected short stories, and I think would have worked better if each of the chapters, set off as "innings" (which felt trite and childish) had actually been short stories. We are introduced in each inning to a new character, learn their backstory and what's happening in their lives, baseball-related and otherwise, and once the next inning begins, that character about whom we've learned a lot (and are supposedly invested) simply disappears, aside from perhaps a line that tells us they are still around, seen or heard by the character whose turn it is to be featured. What is odd, too, is that the love of baseball that the author clearly possesses, doesn't really shine through the characters. Perhaps that's supposed to be one of the points, that loving baseball renders everyone miserable. What I appreciate is that one doesn't expect a baseball novel to be written by a woman, so brava for that.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timed this to read during the closing of spring training and opening of baseball here in the U.S.! Will say I went from nearly abandoning it in the early stages to really interested before midway and I didn't look back. It has all the feels of an independent film, so if that isn't your thing, this may not be for you. I, for one, know it's going to send my imagination spinning throughout the season. Play ball! ⚾️⚾️⚾️

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this story based on the Arizona "Cactus League", which is the intense spring training season that takes place every year in Arizona.

The interwoven story followed players, coaches, agents, fans, players' wives/ex-wives/girlfriends/ex-girlfriends, and stadium employees. The narrator was a sports writer trying to uncover what happened to cause the downfall of a star player.

After living in the Phoenix area for 25+ years, I loved the all the local references.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emily Nemens’ “The Cactus League,” a novel in interrelated stories, looks at the behind-the-scenes lives of players, coaches and fans at the beginning of one spring season in Arizona for the fictional Los Angeles Lions baseball team. Linked by the musings of a recently unemployed sportswriter, the stories explore the marital issues, financial woes, health problems and romantic yearnings of a cast of characters who then briefly appear in other stories (similar to the structure of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge books or Tom Rachman’s “The Imperfectionists”). I enjoyed this structure a lot—the stories (packaged here as “innings”) felt complete on their own and if there was a character or plot line I wasn’t crazy about (I’m looking at you, Tami!), it wasn’t long until a new character and story took over. Each of these smaller narratives, however, contributed to the novel’s overarching storyline of Lions phenom Jason Goodyear, whose seemingly perfect life is spiraling out of control, and this narrative through line gave “Cactus League” a sense of momentum and continuity that kept me engaged throughout. If you’re looking for some light spring reading to get you in the mood for baseball, “The Cactus League” is a great choice.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an ARC of this title in exchange for my honest review.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book. Anyone who can tie in jazz legends Bill Evans, and Scott LaFaro to the drama of spring training in Arizona is a great story teller. Well developed characters. Stadium organ player Lester Morrow a favorite. Don’t we all wonder how they get the gig? I recommend this one even if you are not a baseball fan but all the more if you are.

[Gayle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full review at: http://www.everydayiwritethebookblog....

Emily Nemens’ debut novel, The Cactus League, is a book about baseball told through interconnected chapters set in Scottsdale at the beginning of spring training in 2013. Jason Goodyear, a two-time MVP outfielder for the fictional L.A. Lions who is going through a tough stretch, is a recurring character threaded through the chapters (of which there are nine, of course), but the book is told through the point of view of other characters living in varying distances from the sport.

Warning for baseball fans: The Cactus League may take a bit of the sheen off the sport. These characters are down on their luck, for the most part, dealing with personal demons. The book opens when a late-career minor league hitting coach arrives in town for spring training to the grim discovery that his Arizona house has been looted and trashed by squatters. A hotshot sports agent is, we learn later, sick with what appears to be cancer. One of the team’s owners makes an impulsive but career-changing decision about a star outfielder after his ego is bruised. These people, some in town only during spring training and some of whom live in Scottsdale year-round, struggle with their self-worth and the prospects for their future. There is a lot of detail and atmosphere in The Cactus League, all of which add up to a richly textured depiction of this strange but revered desert ecosystem.

But spring is a period of renewal and hope. Nemens describes beautifully how the pre-season awakens in players the drive to start over with a clean slate, to erase past failures and claim their rightful lineup spot or win the title that’s escaped them through their years in the majors. For the industry hangers-on – the stadium organist, the wives, the woman selling hot dogs in the new stadium – they too express their hopes and resolutions amidst the warming sun and green grass of the newly mowed field. Will they find redemption?

The Cactus League is a rarity – a beautifully written, character-driven novel about sports. As for whether you need to be a baseball fan to enjoy it? I can’t answer that. I will say that as a baseball fan, I absolutely loved it.

[Anne Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

In excitement for a Spring Training-related trip to Arizona, I read The Cactus League, my first fictional book about baseball. Admittedly, I knew nothing of the author nor did I know anything about the plot, but I needed a baseball book to soothe a lack of baseball in the dreadfully long off-season.

The Cactus League is a series of short, slice of life stories connected by one team and its MVP, Jason Goodyear. Baseball is always about humanity, but this book is less about the game and more about the humans of Scottsdale, Arizona. From the team owner with a secret to the caretaker working for the star player’s sickly agent, the reader gets a peek into the quiet lives of those one or two degrees away from Jason Goodyear.


Unfortunately, I am so biased towards baseball stories. I might be a poor judge of who might enjoy this book. I would say it’s good for everyone because there is very little gameplay, and not much need to understand the inner-workings of the sport. Though, I understand this book may not be for everyone because of the nature of the topic.


While The Cactus League is an absorbing and subtle book, it does start to drag towards the end. Though, it was perfect in satisfying my need for baseball when opening day is still well over a month away.