The story is a sad one – Mike Coolbaugh, 35 years old, was killed by a errant line drive during a minor league baseball game on July 22, 2007 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was likely a man you had never heard of – his 91 plate appearances scattered amongst 44 Major League Baseball games produced a .256 batting average, with two home runs and seven RBI to his credit. He spent the majority of his professional career toiling in the minor leagues, often passed over in favor of players drafter higher or signed for more money than he was.

While his death was one that didn’t exactly rock the baseball world, it certainly had its effects – base coaches must wear batting helmets because of him. But even that is something that could be overlooked, a notation in the baseball timeline that doesn’t necessarily have his name attached to it. A notation that even if you scour the play-by-play notes, aren’t likely to find – the game was stopped after Coolbaugh was hit in the 9th inning – meaning the game ended after eight innings. In a twist that only baseball could provide, the at-bat that killed a man never even happened, at least not in the baseball record books.

But to dig into the life of Mike Coolbaugh as S.L. Price has done, one finds the story of a man who loved baseball and understood that when the game kicks you in the teeth, you have to stand back up and smile.

Price, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, employs a successful blend of journalistic reporting and creative prose to shape not just the profiles of Coolbaugh, his family, and Tino Sanchez, the player who hit the fateful shot that found a spot on the back of Coolbaugh’s head so small, that had it hit an inch away in any direction, he would still be alive. He does not canonize Coolbaugh – but Price is fair to his accomplishments and to the quality of man that those who knew him found him to be.

Coolbaugh played many positions in the game of life – a son, a brother, a ball player and teammate; he was a husband, a father, a coach and a mentor.

Of course though, the story of Coolbaugh’s death is more than just about him – it is about the scout that discovered him, a man named Al LaMacchia, a lifer of the game who spent 52 years of scouting after playing 2 1/2 seasons in the Major Leagues in the mid-1940s. It’s also about Jon Asahina – a pitcher for the Tulsa Drillers, the team that Coolbaugh was a hitting coach for, who had been been hit in the head by a line drive during a game while his pitching coach, Bo McLaughlin, watched from the dugout and immediately flashed back to his own run-in with a baseball some 26 years earlier.

The book is also about baseball – parts of it, one of which is the historical side that touches on Ray Chapman, the only Major League player to be killed on the playing field, to many lesser known players and coaches who have been injured not just playing the game, but by batted balls to which they were defenseless. Heart of the Game is also about the “love of the game,” the respect that players and fans need to have for a game that rarely does anything but take from the individual – it can leave you frustrated, disappointed and embarrassed, but it’s when you have that true love of baseball that you’re willing to get back up and get right back into it.

Price takes both the story of Mike Coolbaugh and the moments leading up to that fateful play and delivers them to the reader remarkably well. Most notably, the pages that tell how Coolbaugh’s friends, family, and teammates learned of the news and processed it was striking. To think about watching a coach sustain a life-taking blow, or having to make the phone call to his wife, or to be a teammate walking into the hospital – all are remarkably complex topics that Price handles with both sensitivity and sympathy, as well as a deft use of words that both inform and impact the reader.

This book is about much more than just Mike Coolbaugh and a line drive that took his life – it is about how baseball gets into so many people, bringing them from all over the world with their struggles, their challenges, their hopes and their dreams. It is about hope, loss, and the challenge of moving on after an event absolutely turns your world upside down. Heart of the Game is an absolute gem of a book that should be read  by any fan who loves the game of baseball.