Keller's Designated Hitter: a Keller short story

Keller's Designated Hitter: a Keller short story

Right around the turn of the century, Otto Penzler invited me to write a story with a baseball theme for an anthology, MURDERER'S ROW. I agreed, wrote a story which I called ALMOST PERFECT, and did as I always did—sent it first to Alice K. Turner, fiction editor at Playboy. If she passed on it, I intended to send it to Otto...but Alice crossed me up by buying it, and so I had to pass the news (good for me, bad for him) to Otto. <br /><br />"Oh," he said. "Well, can you write another baseball story for me?" I replied that I'd love to, but I really didn't have a viable idea for one. Long pause. "Well, that's never stopped you in the past."<br /><br />And a day later I had an idea, and some days after that I sent in KELLER'S DESIGNATED HITTER, which appeared in due course in MURDERER'S ROW and was later subsumed into HIT PARADE, third of the Keller episodic novels.<br /><br />This is its first publication as an eStory for Kindle. I've always liked it, and I'm grateful to the two people to whom it owes its existence: to the late and much-missed Alice Turner, who snatched ALMOST PERFECT off the table, and to Otto Penzler, who's always known better than to take no for an answer.