How many baseball stories are there? How many good ones?

D. Gilb story in the New Yorker this week, Uncle Rock, is about young boy whose single mom is obviously gorgeous and goes through a string of relationships, each guy trying in different ways to impress her by being nice and generous to her and to the young boy - story concludes with a trip to a Dodger game at which the visiting (Phillies) players kindly sign the boy's baseball and then one tries to hit on the mom (gives the boy a note to pass to her), which the boy foils (tosses the note away). That's it - could be a whole novel but is compressed into a (very) short story. Maybe it's part of a novel, however, as so many New Yorker "stories" turn out to be. It's a pretty good story - I always admire compression and economy (don't always practice it, however). Was once told a story I'd written could/should be expanded to a novel and my thought was, why? You'd probably read it and say it should be short story. I wish this one didn't fall back on the old trope of a boy's love for baseball, the obvious parallel of his looking for heroes on the field and disappointment in his father/uncle/et al. How many baseball stories are there? Millions! How many are any good? Not many. This is on the bubble, and maybe couln't truly be called a baseball story. I do have a problem with any story that has a 10-year0-old catch a home run barehanded - doesn't happen. And then just happens to see the Phillies bus and they sign the ball for him? You'd have to wait outside the park for hours, right? Reminds me of a Paul Auster essay about meeting Willie Mays outside the Polo Grounds and not being able to get an autograph because he (Auster) didn't have a pencil, from which he learned to always carry one with him - yeah, right, a writer's concoction if every I heard one. Two good baseball stories: Kinsella's about his "season" playing with the Giants (can't remember the title), and Ethan Canin's "The Accountant" - that's 3 stories that include Willie Mays!