Review: 3 Strikes and You're Out
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 8, 2012
"Out in the Field," (a play on words of course), by Kate McMurray is certainly a mixed bag. The idea/concept of the novel is very good: can Major League Baseball (and its millions of fans) handle and prosper with openly "out" gay players?  This book -- as a novel -- does not provide a definitive perspective, let alone a solution. The book is far too optimistic, no matter the believable depth of the angst felt by all involved. Such integration in sport would already have happened, were it as easy as McMurray suggests.Baseball teams and their fans are NOT a big city progressive law firm, or a big liberal (such as Apple) corporation, or a thoughtful neighborhood undergoing inevitable "integration." This problem is not really about civil rights.What really harms this novel - fatally, I believe - is McMurray's need to include several long, long (and boring) "steamy" pornographic M/M sex scenes between the 2 major characters, Iggy and Matt, the gay male baseball player couple at the heart of the matter. Their sex scenes were not only unnecessary, but also quite out of place, given the good, even serious, concept of the story. Nothing like turning off all straight readers (and most gay readers as well), and turning the story into porn that would appeal, in the last analysis, to base prurient interests. Besides, does this author have credentials for such writing?That aside, the story fails again for its overly "Pollyannish" ending. Baseball fans are capable of the lowest of redneck and accompanying violent attitudes and behavior. Just one year ago in 2011, 3 L. A. Dodger "fans" beat a San Francisco fan nearly to death, crippling him mentally and physically for life. This was done in a parking lot after a game in response to nothing other than the fan was openly a Giants fan! Accepting openly gay players will never happen as incident-free as McMurray tries to suggest. Nope, we'll probably have a gay president before Major League Baseball integrates openly gay players into its midst.  Sad, but that is probably more likely than the author of this book would have us wish for. Thus, there is no "ring of truth" to the story's final 30%. And anyway, I couldn't locate the actual denouement.Character development (Matt and Iggy) is pretty good, even though some of their disagreements and differences felt manufactured. The novel's concept is very good. Actual on-the-field baseball scenes are rare and sometimes incorrectly portrayed. But, due to the 2 biggest negatives (sex scenes and unrealistic resolution of bigotry), the novel is ultimately a "swing and a miss."Thus, it's only a 2 on Amazon's rating scale.