The Prospect

by Dave Gehrke

Baseball. America's game. But to some it's more than a game, it's life itself. “The Prospect” is the story of a college baseball pitcher about to turn pro until he drives under the influence, has an accident, injures himself, his business major girlfriend, an elderly couple and loses the major league baseball contract he'd just signed with the Minnesota Twins. Abandoned by his injured and angry girlfriend, disowned by the father that sacrificed everything to give his talented son a chance to succeed, the Prospect, who no longer seems to have any prospects, runs away from his failures until he accidentally stumbles into a retired military officer/cattle rancher that not only seems to have all life's answers at his fingertips, he also knows how to coax a young man back into believing in himself.

Mindy, the Prospect's former girlfriend and a summa cum laude marketing graduate, now burdened with a child she hadn't expected, finds herself on the "mommy" track instead of the corporate fast-track she had imagined for herself; a situation she blames on her vanished boyfriend.

Bobby Green, the Prospect's catcher, best friend and roommate, now without the teammate that inspired him, is selected in the later rounds of the baseball draft and given little chance to succeed. But the catcher learns to play within himself and plods his way through the minor leagues towards his own major league career.

In the meantime, the Minnesota Twins are having problems of their own; the team hasn't been winning many games, attendance is down, revenue is down and a plot is being hatched to "contract" the ball club out of existence. The Twins eccentric general manager gets wind of the scheme and enlists the aid of a washed-up sports reporter and a twice-divorced team manager who knows players better than women in a counter-plot to save the Twins. By a fluke of fate, the Prospect, Mindy and Bobby Greene are brought back together by the Twins and the question becomes whether or not a mixed bag of scarred and talented personalities can come together in time to save the Twins ball club as well as themselves.

533 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 25, 2022

About the author

I grew up "reading" comic books in my uncle’s toy and hobby store. I hadn't started school yet so I just stared at the pictures and tried to figure out what the words might meant. I think the first word I learned might have been “Pow!”. “The” came next. And from there I slipped my way into literacy. My uncle, when he grew tired of me being in the way of paying customers, started sending me home with a comic, purportedly so my parents could read them to me. Fortunately both my parents were prodigious readers themselves and soon had me reading to them.

I gained two skills from those early days; how to manipulate my uncle into sending me home with new reading material and how to read at an early age.

Reading itself opened up a whole new world for me; a world of knowledge, fascination, entertainment and imagination. And that world lay just across the alley from our home at the Dyckman Free Library. The comic books were soon replaced by works of fiction and my vocabulary grew accordingly. By the time I reached the second grade my uncle had christened me “Professor” and before I reached the eighth grade I’d proven to Mrs. Dombrowski, the librarian, that had I was ready to graduate from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and move into the adult fiction section.

By high school my standard explanation to any teacher wondering how I happened to know something esoteric or arcane was “I read that somewhere.” Which usually also brought a groan from my fellow classmates.

Writing, it seems to me, is the next step up in the reading chain. And when I discovered I could wow both my classmates and my instructors with my completed writing assignments, I decided at sixteen that I would someday become a writer of books.

That was before life got in the way; college (I’ve earned three degrees), marriage, kids, various business pursuits, teaching, coaching, school administration and half a dozen hobbies. But I never lost the desire to become a novelist. So I studied people (future characters); their mannerisms, how they spoke, the way they conversed, what motivated them, how they reacted in various situations, how they expressed their hopes and their dreams, the way one wrinkled her nose when she laughed, the way another tended to begin the answer to any question with “basically”.
And I gathered reams of notes; character descriptions, possible storylines, potential plots, locations, time periods, etc. And I continued to read, sometimes for entertainment and sometimes to study the different techniques used by my favorite authors in crafting their books.

Then, when my kids were off having kids of their own and I retired to my own semi-isolated place in the countryside, I focused on what I felt had always been my "true" calling; writing.

Life, as they say, goes full circle. It's just that some circles have larger diameters.