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Walter Innis, son of a frustrated and violent fallen baseball star and a tragically unhappy woman driven to infidelity, carries his family's legacy of torment into his own adult life - with disastrous results. Unable to let go of a childhood trapped between his father's violence and his mother's secret love affair, Walter has lost his own wife and job. When local hotshot and former employee of his mother, Henry Truxton III, announces his race for senate, Innis hatches a scheme to vindicate his mother's mysterious death and his father's valueless life. If it works, he might just get rich in the bargain. In the meantime, Innis takes a job coaching a hopeless Little League team, where his father's lessons for "the elements of hitting" come in handy. Ultimately, it is as a Little League coach that Walter discovers a route to happiness and hope beyond the reach of the past. Praise "Leave it to a gifted author like Jones to write a 'baseball book'; that breaks the mold." — Orlando Sentinel "The Elements of Hitting approaches issues more important than keeping one's eye on the ball and taking a level swing: the nature of forgiveness, the importance of self-respect, the many faces of love. At its core…[it] is an often haunting and occasionally beautiful story of man's attempt to rebuild his life with two strikes against him." — Chris Bohjalian, Washington Post Book World "Matthew F. Jones has given us a tough, tender, beautifully realized novel…a book for all seasons." — Donald Honig, author of Baseball: The Illustrated History of America's Game "This important novel demonstrates how sports can be redemptive. The baseball is impeccable, the coaching scenes wise, the whole heartwarming yet unsentimental. An artful evocation of the way in which our lives become playgrounds of our parents' struggles, played by rules not our own and scarcely understood." — Joan Mellen, author of Bob Knight: His Own Man ["The Elements of Hitting"] is a highly original novel that delights and amuses even as it instructs. Jones is a quirky late 20th-century Charles Dickens who better than most notable novelists understood life is at most times laughable, even absurd, but that it's liveable if one is willing to take what few gifts he receives from the almighty – or whatever force it is that hands out brains, looks and talent – and makes the most of them." — The Wichita Eagle