The Last Good Swing — A Novel by Hemming Allen Grant

I didn’t feel the last swing in my hands.

That’s the opening line of a novel I’ve been building for a long time. It’s called The Last Good Swing, and it’s the story of Thane Weston Briggs — a neurodivergent third baseman who plays eighteen seasons across two teams, hits 545 home runs, wins four World Series rings, and walks into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

But this isn’t a baseball book.

It’s a book about the rituals that hold a person together when the noise gets too loud. It’s about a man who sets his alarm for 6:44 every morning — not 6:30, not 7 — because 44 is his number, and the number is his anchor. A man who puts his left sock on before his right, tapes his wrists after games because it calms him down, and walks to the plate with a pinky wiggle that fifty thousand fans think is swagger but is actually the only thing standing between him and disappearing.

You can look, but you can’t reach me.

That’s the pinky wiggle. That’s the boundary. That’s the whole book in one gesture.

Thane lives by something he calls the Code — an unspoken set of laws carved into him by a junior high coach who benched him for hot-dogging, a father who never lectured on the drive home, and a mother who kept score in pencil because mistakes should never be permanent. The Code isn’t written in any clubhouse. It’s learned through bruises and silence.

Swagger before the pitch. Respect after the duel. Endurance through everything in between.

He walks out of a talk show because the fluorescent lights click too loud and someone’s going to ask him to be seen. He burns a love letter because he already knows it by heart and can’t bear to hold the proof. He plays his entire career to the sound of one song — “Again” by Alice in Chains — not because it’s a hype track, but because it turns chaos into rhythm and pressure into music.

And at the end — after 545 home runs, after the MVP, after the final twenty-one-pitch duel against the Rival who never spoke and never flinched — the story doesn’t belong to him anymore. It belongs to a girl named Kalia, who caught his 500th home run in Section 212 with a glove too big for her hand, and grew up to carry the Code forward in her own voice, with her own walk-up song, and her own swing.

She’s not the next him. She’s the first her.

The Last Good Swing is literary fiction. It’s told through the voice of a man who was never taught how to be known, only how to win. A man whose body speaks in ritual what his mouth cannot say in words. A man who finds his ending not in a record book, but in a diner on Main Street in Cooperstown, eating burned hot dogs with his uncle and the girl who made the Code louder than he ever could.

I’ve been living with Thane for a while now. He’s ready to meet you.

More to come.

— Hemming Allen Grant

Wonderous Worlds of Words · WWOW LLC