Baseball’s Unconventional Pitch Offers A Lesson In Family And Faith

There are baseball books you read because you love baseball, and then there are baseball books that remind you why you loved the game in the first place. Brian Gaffney’s “School of Hard Knucks: My Three Sons and Baseball’s Wildest Pitch” belongs in the second category.

It is ostensibly about the knuckleball, that strange pitch that seems to have escaped the laws of baseball physics. But Gaffney has written something warmer and more surprising: a book about fathers and sons, persistence, failure, faith, growing up, and learning when to hold on and when to let go.