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For a pitcher, Sitka's Ron Rau twirls a darned good tale

Not that it matters. Rau did not, as we say in the news business, bury his lead in "History of the One-fingered Fastball: A Baseball Memoir, 1950-2010."

By the time Rau gets around to telling about the pitch he invented -- and still throws, at age 68 -- he is well on his way to delivering a gem.

He takes readers from his childhood in Flint, Mich., to the crazy pipeline-era days in Fairbanks (Chapter 17: How Getting Stoned For the First Time MAY Have Made Me a Better Hitter) and finally to Sitka, where he has lived for 25 years and still plays baseball for the Harbor Rats, a team of commercial fishermen that's been around since the 1980s.

For 30 years, Rau worked as a commercial fisherman in Wrangell and Sitka, a job that let him earn enough money in the summers so he could spend his winters writing.

And here's the deal: "History of the One-fingered Fastball" is the rare self-published book that reads like a dream.

Rau can flat-out write, something Sports Illustrated recognized in 1974, when it printed "The Killing of the Shrew," an article he wrote about shooting an arctic shrew one night in Fairbanks. It was the first of several pieces by Rau the magazine published.

His voice is distinctive and his book is funny and tender and filled with characters and stories too outrageous not to be true. Almost every chapter has a laugh-out-loud moment, especially for baseball fans or Alaskans. You don't need to be either to enjoy it, although it helps if you know the difference between pitching from the windup and pitching from the stretch.

Robert Creamer, Rau's editor at Sports Illustrated, wrote a blurb for the book that praises Rau's work: "Rau's writing has a tone and a surprise and a drive that makes me think of great jazz musicians.

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