News Release for One Batter One Pitch

For Immediate Release: Contact: Jocelyn Kelley 617-680-1976
kelleyandhall@comcast.net

“(Four Stars) The novel’s structure takes on the character’s persona—frenetic, in your face, and like Rocky, it reaches to accomplish great things. The novel gives readers a wild ride grounded in truth and gritty fact. Anyone who faces the doldrums of middle age and appreciates the Boston attitude, baseball, weight lifting, and a glimpse at the movers and shakers in corporate America will embrace Rocky and this novel.”
Dawn Goldsmith, Foreword Clarion

“…fans aggrieved with certain ticks in the modern game will take Rocky’s “Action B Baseball League” as a respectful sendup of the Major League…Rocky’s conversations with friends and colleagues have a special vitality…the book has an endearing protagonist…[and] moments of great humor.”
Kirkus Discoveries

One Batter One Pitch: Entrepreneurship; the Action B Baseball League; the Penultimate Sports Bar; and Reverend Green’s Life Training and Development Center by Michael Connelly.
I-Universe, 2008

West Palm Beach, FL—As Kevin “Rocky” Collins, hard-working, beer-drinking, agnostic, Irish Catholic CPA from just outside of Boston, approaches middle age, he becomes sadly aware that he’s losing his fastball. Not that his athletic prowess ever blazed to begin with. His friends say that he is seeking that “illusive middle ground between snob and slob.” His children, although essentially well adjusted and likeable, often emulate his worst traits. And his loving wife, Kelly, remains cheerfully optimistic about their family’s future, spiritual as well as fiscal, despite Rocky’s career foibles. And so it goes…this hilarious amalgam of Harvard Business School’s case studies and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four.

Author Michael Connelly’s latest novel, One Batter One Pitch: Entrepreneurship; the Action B Baseball League; the Penultimate Sports Bar; and Reverend Green’s Life Training and Development Center, is a sequel to An Informal Boston Education, which introduced Rocky, the hard-drinking, nearsighted, underachieving, undersized, wisecracking, ball playing, weightlifting son of a hard-drinking, overbearing, equally underachieving, ex-minor-league-baseball-playing, Boston cop father. Amid the joking, drinking, cheering, rooting, and jeering, we follow Rocky from the near-impossible task of maintaining profitability as CFO of a medium-sized manufacturing company severely squeezed by its largest client to his ultimate redemption in joining venture capital-type entrepreneurs in eventually turning around two small companies.

Along the way, amid the joking, drinking, working out, and male bonding, Rocky has to deal with family issues, including good but feisty children, and then decides to invent a new way to improve the game of baseball by increasing the amount of playing and decreasing the amount of standing around staring and scratching. He lives the dream of middle-aged barroom jocks by actually starting the “Action B-Ball” independent league, where action is the driving force. With an accountant’s mentality, Rocky calculates that the typical amount of real playing time in a professional baseball game is 6.65 minutes or only 3.7% of the average 3-hour game. Rocky’s rules accelerate the ball in actual play to almost 15%—two strikes and you’re out, a limit on foul balls, 10 seconds for a pitcher to deliver a pitch, an expanded playing field with longer base paths and deeper fences, a livelier ball…to name a few of the many improvements.

In addition to all these frenetic activities, Rocky, his friends, and business associates manage to open the greatest sports bar ever conceived (where the likes of Patriots quarterback, Tom Brady, hangs out) and partner with a charismatic, black minister to build a “Life Training and Development Center” for inner city Boston youth.

The book is an inspirational testament not only to hard work, persistence, positive thinking, and competent, ethical business management, but also to both family and friendship—including Rocky’s group of funny middle-aged white guys’ unique bonding with a charismatic young black man (Taurean Green) who works for Rocky. As Rock says: “Despite the obvious differences not only in race and background, but also in age and marital status, we certainly do have intense work, baseball, boxing, weightlifting, and especially the ol’ edgy, semi-combative humor well in common. So why not?”

Author Michael Connelly, also a CPA and CFO, is a Boston Irish Catholic, semi-pro baseball pitcher, who had a fastball, he now grudgingly admits, that equaled the velocity of Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball, and who has spent the better part of his life lifting weights in over 250 commercial gyms—a non-feat of which he is perplexingly proud. That he knows and has lived Rocky’s life, and wisecracked and drank with Rocky’s friends is evident. The details of the business situations are depicted as accurately as the authentic and notable Red Sox games that are being telecast in the background of these bars.

One Batter One Pitch is extraordinarily real, funny, and most often authentically profane. It captures the middle-aged angst preceding a good man’s last hurrah.


About the Author:

Michael Connelly has had a long career in senior financial management as a CPA and CFO in companies in the United States and in Europe. He has a B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Massachusetts and a M.S. degree from Northeastern in accounting. He grew up in a blue-collar, Irish-Italian neighborhood of Hyde Park, just outside of Boston, where he inherited his police captain father’s love of baseball and the Boston Red Sox. He has also been an avid exercise enthusiast and weight trainer for over 45 years. Michael retired from the business scene to West Palm Beach, FL, with his wife of 30 years. The Connellys have one daughter, a graduate of the University of Florida, who works as a teacher. Michael now writes and blogs full time (www.writingbaseballandfitness.blogspot.com).