On a humid morning in mid-July, John Grisham was lounging under a candy-striped awning at Cove Creek Park, a multimillion-dollar youth baseball complex outside Charlottesville, Virginia. He looked comfortable and sweatless in the heat, wearing a crisp white button-down with the sleeves rolled up, slate-colored chinos, understated sneakers and a wristwatch with a slice of an MLB baseball mounted onto its dial. He was surrounded by 40 or so acres of cow pasture that, in the 1990s, he’d transformed into a ballpark with money earned from his greatest talent: imagining stories and selling them.

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Persons: John Grisham, he’d Organizations: MLB Locations: Charlottesville , Virginia