Crying in Baseball

Set against one of baseball’s most dramatic World Series, a piercing, lyrical debut about fathers and daughters, what we keep from each other, and what brings us together again.

In the fall of 1997, Paloma arrives in suburban Miami to root for the Florida Marlins with her father, Richard. It’s the team’s first championship play in franchise history, and Paloma and Richard relish in cheering on the ultimate underdogs until one night Richard makes a confession that upends their carefully calibrated world.

Both Paloma and Richard are reeling from loss and withholding the truth of their pain, a deepening distance calcifying between them. But over the next eight days, they tentatively begin to reveal the tender, guarded parts of themselves to each other. As they cultivate Richard’s garden, slice mangoes into city blocks, and drive through the lush Florida landscape, the language of baseball—errors, saves, and strikes—becomes inseparable from the language of family. In Spanish, poetry, sign language, and wordless acts of care, they reach for what cannot easily be said.

Evocative and language-bending, Crying in Baseball is an aching meditation on connection, devotion, and the fragile ways families break and repair.