Department of Book Reports: The Fall Classic

Stepping outside on a crisp autumn day, the sun shines, and you know that the World Series is right around the corner. And there is nothing sweeter to a baseball fan. (For those of you who hate baseball, your long national nightmare will soon be over.) And despite the sour season that this humble book reporter's team, the lowly Seattle Mariners had, (and the equally sour one that friend Dave von E had with his beloved Chicago Cubs) it is a time of year that excites the mind and passion.

And with a hat tip to an old friend and bookseller, Marilyn, who recently blogged about great baseball books, I wanted to point out a few of my favorites. And where else to start but with Jim Bouton's classic account of his season with the Seattle Pilots (a team that played only one season before moving to Milwaukee) Ball Four. At the time his story was controversial. The book named names; it was not a fiction. That was Mickey Mantle with his fellow Yankee teammates atop the Shoreham Hotel, attempting to glimpse through the windows of young, nubile guests! Or his manager, Joe Schultz exclaiming, "Shitfuck! Pound that Budweiser and we'll get 'em tomorrow"! Still the best parts of the book are Bouton's own descriptions of attempting to comeback, throwing a knuckleball to get out Major League batters with a modicum of success, and his relationship with his fellow Pilots, as well as trying to juggle his profession and raising a young family. And recently, I talked about Dirk Hayhurst's chronicle of his minor league career in this book report of The Bullpen Gospels.

Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer is also classic. In it, he describes his time covering the Brooklyn Dodgers team in the early '50's, followed by interviews with the players as they were in the early '70's. The Dodgers front office at the time hated the book, for reasons best known to themselves. Probably the best of the interview style books, though, is Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times. Ritter searched the country looking for ballplayers who had played in the early part of the 20th Century, and the interviews he had, which included Sam Crawford, Chief Myers (the Native American catcher and Dartmouth grad who caught Christy Mathewson), Lefty O'Doul among many others, and all of them fascinating. Not just about baseball, but about what life was like in America at that time. Another great inteview book, and broken down by season, is Danny Peary's They Played the Game, which features the baseball careers of 64 different players who played from 1946 to 1964. They played some tough baseball in the post-war era.

Books I haven't had a chance to read yet, but am looking forward to include Jane Leavy's The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood. If her previous book, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy (a biography framed around the perfect game Koufax threw against the Giants in 1965), is any indication, this book should be great. I've also heard wonderful things about Doug Glanville's The Game Where I Stand: A Ballplayers Inside View. Glanville was a good Major League outfielder and I've been told that his writing style is both elegant and poetic.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the finest of magazine reporter's, Roger Angell who's articles for the New Yorker were collected in The Summer Game and Five Seasons. In the latter book, in his discussion of one of the greatest World Series ever played, between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox, he leaves us with the following quote about why some of us take this game seriously:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

These baseball titles and many more are available from Jackson Street Books and other fine Independent bookstores.As always, books ordered here will have a freebie publishers Advance Reading Copy included as a thank you to our blogosphere friends.

Department of Book Reports: The Bullpen Gospels

Today, I'm taking a break from looking at the literature of the American paranoid style, and returning to the topic I hold very dear, indeed, Baseball.

I first learned of Dirk Hayhurst's new book, The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran (Kensington $14.95), last December when Keith Olbermann posted on his baseball blog, Baseball Nerd, that he, Keith, had read an advanced copy of the book and said it was the best baseball book in the past 30 years. High praise, indeed. So I was very excited to read it. I was not disappointed.


Written in much the same vein as Jim Bouton's Ball Four or Jim Brosnan's classic diaries of The Long Season and Pennant Race, Dirk Hayhurst chronicles his baseball year of 2007, playing in the San Diego Padre system. Beginning with his off-season workouts, sleeping on an air mattress at his crazy Grandmother (who I hope isn't reading this blog), moving onto Spring training and his disappointment at being assigned to Class A ball, in this, his 5th professional season, he moves onto the season at hand with its ups and downs. Dirk discusses his trials and tribulations, which include a promotion to Double A ball and the ultimate success of his team in winning the Texas League championship.

And what is playing in the minors like? There are long bus rides, with bus drivers getting lost, and not arriving at hotels till 7 A.M., just a few hours before game time. There are the BS sessions in the bullpen where such questions of whether or not gay sex is all right if the Taliban had a gun to your head. Some of the dialogue and the juvenile behavior between the players makes a fraternity party sound like it has the sophistication of New York literary cocktail scene. And what do you when you discover a tarantula in the bullpen? Then there are the clubhouse Kangaroo courts where fines are meted out for flatulence as well as referring to oneself in the third person. Or getting promoted to the Bigs and not taking along your teammates. Hayhurst is rich in anecdote and humor. I had many a belly laugh while reading.

It is also a journey of self-discovery. Dirk comes from a dysfunctional family with an angry and alcoholic brother and parents that can seem emotionally distant. He finally finds success when he realizes he has to stop worrying about failure, and that he cannot let baseball define his whole being. LIke all the great books about baseball, the book is not just all about baseball. It is about what matters in being a human being. Dirk Hayhurst is very human; he is also very humane. I really cannot say enough good things about The Bullpen Gospels. Read it, even if you are not a sports fan.

Dirk is currently on the 60-Day Dl on the Toronto Blue Jays and he has his own blog: and, if you are in the twittersphere, you can follow him. I hope to see him on the field soon.

The Bullpen Gospels is available at Jackson Street Books and at other fine independent bookstores.As always, books ordered by friends of the General get a freebie publisher's Advance Reader Copy included in the shipment.

Department of Book Reports 62: Baseball Season

Mike Urban has mad photo skillz!

Ah, the first pitches have been thrown, the first swings have been taken, and the season starts. How could April be the cruelest month, when baseball is here? In Seattle, Safeco Field had the roof closed for the Mariner opener; outside there was snow, then hail, followed by bursts of sunshine, as if the game were being played in the Midwest in early spring.

There is an adage when it comes to sports writing that the smaller the ball, the better the writing. I’m not familiar with great writing on golf or tennis, so I guess that leaves me to recommend some new baseball books.

Jim Reisler’s The Best Game Ever: Pirates vs. Yankees October 13, 1960 (Carroll and Graf $26.00) is fine baseball writing. After years of cellar dwelling, the Pittsburgh Pirates had slowly rebuilt their team during the 1950’s, signing good pitchers such as Vernon Law and Bob Friend, as well as position players like Dick Groat and the great Roberto Clemente. In 1960, the Pirates put it all together and won the National League pennant. In the Series that year they faced the Yankee juggernaut, a team that included Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Yogi Berra. In the seven game series, the Yankees proved very dominant indeed in the games they won, beating the Pirates by scores of 16-3, 10-0 and 12-0. But the Pirates hung tough and won three games of their own, going into game seven.

Reisler weaves his account of this game around each inning with deft social history and biography of the people involved. Pittsburgh was still ‘steel town’, a working class city that at that time ranked 16th highest in US city population. (It is now 51st). The players did not belong to a union, and though they were well-paid for that time, they were certainly not rich, and most held off-season jobs. 1960 was also an election year, and both Kennedy and Nixon campaigned heavily in Pennsylvania.

The game itself was a see-saw affair, with the Pirates taking the early lead, only to lose it to the Yanks. Pittsburgh came back to lead again, only to see the Bronx Bombers tie it up in the top of the ninth, setting up Bill Mazeroski’s at bat against Ralph Terry in the bottom of the ninth. As Reisler reminds us, no one who was alive in Pittsburgh on that day will ever forget where and when they heard on the radio Maz’s shot over the left field wall of old Forbes Field to provide the only walk-off home run to end a seven game World Series.


Another fun book is from the group at Baseball Prospectus and edited by Steve Goldman, It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over (Basic Books $25.95), which examines some of the classic Pennant races over the years. It looks at such teams as the 1967 ‘miraculous’ Red Sox, the 1964 Cardinals that won over a Phillies team that had lead most of the way, the 1944 St. Louis Browns in the only year that franchise won a pennant, and, my favorite, the 1959 LA Dodgers who blended an old team of the “Boys of Summer” with new players like Sandy Koufax and Maury Wills. (My favorite because I was a nine-year old lad who was fortunate enough to have his grandpa take him the third game of the World Series that year; the Dodgers beat the White Sox 3-1.) This book is geared to statheads, but isn’t limited to them. The races are well-narrated so that even those fans who don’t like stats will enjoy the book.

Both of these books are available at Jackson Street Books and fine Independent Bookstores everywhere!

Well, I’m off to my fantasy baseball draft. Wish me luck.

democommie™™™™™©®ç åü is taking batting practice in the hitting cage.