joy to work with, as well as the ideal diagnostician who told me what the book needed but knew when to let me find my own solutions. She also helped me cut a lot of things that you will never have to know you didn’t need to read. (She could have improved this paragraph.) Thanks also to Elana Seplow-Jolley for her thoughts, and to everyone at Ballantine in copyediting and production.
I am so indebted to Stephen Thompson, my great friend whose adventures in single parenting informed my interest in it and my high regard for it. I regret any time he may have to spend explaining that this book is not about our friendship (it isn’t). To the Thompsley family, including my dearest Katie Presley: I love you all.
My thanks to Margaret “Hulahoop” Willison, who read the first pages of this book years ago and never lost her ability to throw handfuls of figurative confetti every time I picked it up again. Other early readers who helped me see things more clearly included Alan Sepinwall, Marc Hirsh, and Sarah Wendell.
My friend Julia Whelan stepped in to help the first draft see the light of day, as did the generosity of Breck and Mary Montague and Carter Williams.
I was fortunate to have the wise counsel of people in and around publishing and writing who answered tricky beginner’s questions like, “I don’t know anything that happens after I write THE END.” They included but were not limited to Pam Ribon, Jennifer Weiner, Rainbow Rowell, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, Rachel Fershleiser, Maris Kreizman, and Danielle Henderson. Thanks to Michelle Dean for the DMs and for being just far enough ahead of me in the publishing process.
I greatly appreciate the baseball and baseball-adjacent writing I read while I worked on this story. It includes all or parts of: Jason Turbow’s The Baseball Codes, Rick Ankiel’s The Phenomenon, John Feinstein’s Living on the Black, and Jeff Passan’s The Arm, along with David Owens’s 2014 article about the yips in The New Yorker. I also greatly appreciate the openness that guys like Mackey Sasser and Steve Blass have shown in talking about the yips. Thanks to Will Leitch and Joe Posnanski for writing about sports, always, in a deeply human and deeply entertaining way that has helped me stay connected.
A special thanks to Hilary Redmon. (Hilary, look what happened.)
Thanks to Sarah Bunting, Tara Ariano, and Dave Cole for their role in everything that has happened to me since 2001.
Thanks to all the friends: my high school friends, my college friends, my recapping friends, my law school friends, and the Minnesota friends I miss terribly, including my treasured Alexanders. Thanks to my NPR family, including Jessica Reedy, Gene Demby, Barrie Hardymon, Mike Katzif, Audie Cornish, and many others. Thanks, too, to my boss, Ellen Silva.
Thanks to the people who were once strangers who became readers and listeners as well as pals. Thanks to the sprawling collection of audio people who have taught me entirely new things about good stories. (And I hope PJ will forgive me for appropriating his dog’s likeness.)
Thanks to Glen Weldon, whose enthusiasm for the book meant so very much to me that it got me through several awful convulsions of doubt. (I promise, Glen: I am only hugging you in my mind. And I always will.)
Thank you to Alex Kapelman, whose unwavering belief that I could do anything I wanted to do was—and is—like plugging myself into a supplemental power supply. You are the absolute greatest, my SVP of Hustle, and I wouldn’t trade you for anything.
This book was written to the sounds of the Avett Brothers. High-fives to the FedEx office outside Colonial Williamsburg. Thanks to Spruce Head Island, Rockland, Camden, Spruce Spray, Pooh, Captain Gargan, and the St. Paul Saints. Thanks to the Phillies, Twins, and Nats. Thanks to my distressingly tall nephews and my brother-in-law, all of whom love baseball so much.
I decline to thank my dog, only because he can’t read. Besides, he knows how I feel, because sometimes I feed him peanut butter off my fingers.
Thank you to people who do beautiful things with words that make me want to assemble mine half as well.
Thanks to all my teachers, including but not limited to Nona Smolko, Christine (Powell) Tate, and Kerry Brown.
Thank you to my family—my clever grandmothers, the kind-hearted grandfather I knew and the kind-hearted one I never did, my aunts and uncles and cousins, and especially my fabulous parents and spectacular sister.