“The Curious Case of the Cleveland Indians” by Yellow Springs resident Phil King charts the realms of fiction, memoir and baseball history. The book is available for purchase on Amazon. (Submitted photo)
Villager publishes new novel — a blend of fiction, memoir and baseball history
- Published: July 17, 2025
If you could go back in time and change just one thing — big enough to have an impact, but small enough that you wouldn’t change the entire course of human history — what would it be?
For the protagonist of villager Philip King’s debut novel/memoir, the answer is simple: He’d go back and make sure the Cleveland baseball team could clinch the 1950 World Series.
“The Curious Case of the Cleveland Indians: A Time Traveler’s Memoir” was published in March by BookLocker. The book’s title — which refers to the name of the Cleveland team before its 2021 change to the Guardians — clues potential readers into its intentions, signaling a blend of science fiction, baseball history and a dive into the author’s own early personal history in Yellow Springs.
The main character of King’s book — never referred to by name, but alternatingly as the (capital P) Protagonist, the Boy, the Young Man, the Old Man and other descriptors — is more or less a stand-in for the author himself, despite the book’s sci-fi trappings.
“I’m a big time travel fan,” King told the News in a recent interview, citing the 1970 book “Time and Again” by Jack Finney as a favorite. (The Protagonist temporarily adopts the name Simon Morely, from “Time and Again,” as his own time-traveling pseudonym, in tribute.)
“I think my book started out as just fiction, but I read somewhere that often a first person’s novel is always autobiographical,” King added. “I’m not sure that’s true, but it seems reasonable.”
Rather than beat around the bush, King’s book jumps into the time travel conceit from its opening pages: The aged Protagonist travels to Cleveland in 1948 to convince team leaders Bill Veeck and Hank Greenberg to make a number of changes to their roster.
Within a few pages, the Protagonist is traveling in time again, but this time within his own memory, as he thinks back on a youth spent in a 1950s small town. The book moves forward and backward, tilting between one time and another, sometimes orienting the reader in time and place with extrapolations on baseball history — and how it might be changed — and others in feeling and memory.
“I wanted to get the time travel out of the way right away, and I didn’t want it to be linear,” King said. “It seemed boring to do linear.”
The book isn’t King’s first foray into writing; he earned advanced degrees in both psychology and political science, and as a researcher and professor in the arena of dreaming and dreams, is familiar with academic writing and publishing. “The Curious Case of the Cleveland Indians,” however, represents a departure from his academic work — in part, he said, by giving him the freedom to be “self-indulgent.”
“That’s why I have all the arcane baseball stuff in there — there may be 10 readers out of 100 who would even be interested in that, but it’s what I’m interested in,” he said. “It’s a mishmash — I’m not an amateur in writing, but I’m an amateur in fiction writing, so I just said, ‘To hell with it,’ and did what I wanted.”
The book, King said, ends up being partially a paean to Yellow Springs — a town that, like the Protagonist, is never named outright, but will be recognizable to those familiar with the village’s history. Some of those people might also be referred to in the book, though similarly unnamed.
King said he aimed to set down on paper a bygone Yellow Springs from his own young perspective, pointing out — but, again, not naming — extant institutions such as Antioch College and even the News, but also places and things that have since passed out of visibility and, for some, memory. Noting what no longer physically exists in the village, he said, can highlight the ways that the identity of Yellow Springs is often unique to the experience of each person who has lived here.
“There are these parallel worlds, all called ‘Yellow Springs,’ and they connect in the sense that the bank building has always been there, or the grocery store or the drug store, but it’s just ships passing in the night,” he said.
The book is also concerned, naturally, with how baseball fits into the identity of both the wider nation and Yellow Springs in the 1950s when King was coming of age. At the time, baseball diamonds populated every neighborhood — there were seven on the campus of Antioch alone, King said — as young players organized and ran their own games. Now, as “America’s favorite pastime” is mostly confined to organized leagues, from youth all the way to professional play, neighborhood diamonds are mostly a thing of the past.
Still, King said, the signs of the sport’s impact on American history are still there. As the book’s Protagonist muses from an airplane window: “Scattered here and there are baseball and softball fields, several visible at any glance. … An archeologist from another planet would take note: perhaps they are the grounds for religious rituals, central to this civilization’s patterns and meanings.”
Moving between memoir and fiction, past and present — often connecting them with dreams recorded throughout nearly a half-century of maintaining a sporadic dream journal — King said his book aims to examine his own life and some of its major preoccupations.
Interpreting the past through the lens of the present, joy and sadness, regret and acceptance are all bedfellows in King’s book. As the Protagonist points out: “It had been a good [life] overall, maybe not great, but how many persons’ lives are actually great, in the aggregate?” he muses. He later adds that, though his mission to augment the Cleveland ball team’s history might be “insignificant in the greater scope of things, it’s an attempt to create meaning and some satisfaction in the time remaining.”
That thought might serve well as a one-liner to describe the aim of the book itself; King said he likes to think that “for every human being, there’s a coherent narrative, some sort of arc.”
“Either that’s true or not — or you can make it true by writing it,” he said.
“The Curious Case of the Cleveland Indians” is available for purchase on Amazon.
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