Tag: books

Review: My Brother Stealing Second, by Jim Naughton

May 29, 2014

I recently re-read Jim Naughton’s My Brother Stealing Second, a  young adult novel that one would be hard pressed to find these days.  Published in 1989, My Brother Stealing Second is no longer in print.  In fact, I purchased my own copy through Amazon, used and withdrawn from the public library in Clarinda, Iowa.  Interestingly, perusing Amazon this morning, I feel a sense of astonishment to discover copies of this same novel on sale for as much as $150.  But never fear,  if you decide you wish to purchase your own copy to read: used copies are also available starting at a penny.

Amazon.com

Rife with adolescent angst revolving around a story that involves baseball, this novel caught and held my attention when I first read it in my early teens.  In the story, high school second baseman Bobby Connely finds himself still reeling from the death of his brother, Billy.  Over the course of the novel, Bobby confronts questions and insecurities about his own identity, finally accepting that he must now face life sans older brother.  In the meantime, he uncovers secrets and corruption surrounding his brother’s death, which forces him and his family to make some difficult decisions as they face the future.

I love the manner in which Naughton writes about Bobby’s baseball game towards the end of the book.  His descriptions about playing baseball in general always bring me a sense of nostalgia: smelling the leather of a glove, the thinking process of a player, right down to battling distractions from outside the diamond, the feel of the bat connecting with the ball, emotional highs and lows.  Naughton captures all the details and he does so convincingly.

My Brother Stealing Second reads fast, and yet it manages to pull on the heartstrings of its audience.  Sure, the teenage emotion that permeates every sentence can be overbearing at times, to a point that even I sometimes have to sigh, in spite of how much I love the book.  But this angst also makes the story that much more real, because anyone who has ever endured the teenage years of life can relate to the thoughts and perspectives of these characters.  If anything, I find that I turn to this book anytime I, personally, find myself going through an emotionally charged time.

Throughout the novel, Bobby takes a series of “dives,” in which he remembers various experiences involving Billy.  Naughton captures the experience of growing up, and through these dives, we get a glimpse at Billy, who has already passed at the start of the book.  We see how Bobby thinks and reflects on the events surrounding him, and, in their own way, these dives encourage readers to do some personal reflection as well.

In spite of the melodrama, or maybe because of it, I never find myself disappointed by this novel.  I suppose the emotional aspect of it gives me something with which to identify, and the fact that it’s about baseball gives me something enjoyable to balance things out.  Regardless of the reasons, I keep coming back to it.

Review: Ball Four, by Jim Bouton

May 8, 2014
Amazon.com

On the recommendation of–well–several sources, I finally sat down and read Ball Four.  Written by former Major League pitcher Jim Bouton, Ball Four shook the sports world upon its publication in 1970.  Not only did it expose the not-so-admirable underbelly of the world of Major League Baseball, it revealed to fans of the game that professional ballplayers are far from perfect or superhuman.

Written in a diary format, the book details Bouton’s thoughts and observations as he journeyed through the 1969 season.  And he doesn’t hold back.  Through Bouton’s eyes, we discover the licentious nature of many ballplayers, the contrived nature of integration between black and white players at the time, the less-than-amiable relationships between players and managers, and the fickleness of a club’s attitudes on player performance.  We learn about the anxiety players feel over the possibility of being traded, sent to the minors, or released.  We also get to peer into a world of drug use, heavy drinking (particularly embodied by Bouton’s depiction of Mickey Mantle), and the condescending treatment of players by owners before the time of free agency.

In exploring the baseball world through his eyes, we learn a lot about Bouton himself as well.  He discusses his mentality as a pitcher, particularly as a knuckleball pitcher, and his own personal takes on a variety of people and situations.  Furthermore, we learn about Bouton’s personal life: about his marriage, his children, and his concerns about life after baseball.

All in all, I can see how this book created waves throughout the world of sports, and particularly in baseball.  Up to this point, the idea of baseball as a “gentleman’s game” had been largely maintained, even in spite of events such as the Black Sox scandal in 1919.  Mickey Mantle’s drinking had never received exposure in the press prior to Ball Four’s publication, and team management had always managed to protect its reputation as taking care of its players.  Not only did Bouton expose the truth behind such things, he changed the rules regarding what a writer could and could not write about the game.  Suddenly, virtually everything became fair game to a sports writer.

I must confess, at various points, while reading the book, I found myself thinking, “Okay, I get the point.  How many more pages do I have?”  It only takes a few chapters to get a “feel” for the book and the types of things that made it shocking.  In retrospect, it’s easy for me, more than forty years later, to have this attitude about a book that really seems quite tame by today’s standards.  Had I read it in the early 1970s, however, I have no doubt that my perception would have been drastically different.  Like most fans who read it in the 1970s, I would have held onto every word, amazed by the secrets revealed in the book’s pages.  One might even argue that Ball Four’s very existence made it possible for me to experience this kind of insensitivity to its more radical contents in the first place. In that sense, even today, we continue to experience the impact of this narrative on our views of the game.

Review: A People’s History of Baseball, by Mitchell Nathanson

March 25, 2014

Through his book A People’s History of Baseball, Mitchell Nathanson offers up a fresh perspective on the history of our beloved national pastime.  In the same way that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States explores and tells the histories of the underrepresented populations of America, Nathanson’s book delves into the untold stories behind the scenes of baseball.  While popular baseball histories tell of patriotism, virtue, and heroism, Nathanson probes deeper to uncover a world of player oppression, power struggles, racism, and questionable politics.

Nathanson debunks myths about the perfection and nobility of baseball, as portrayed by the owners and the media.  He points out, “[J]ournalists often assume the passive role of stenographers, copying down what is said rather than actively probing their own angles, digging behind the scenes, searching for the story that perhaps is not the one presented to them but the one that lies behind it. …. [C]lub owners … gravitated toward this vehicle in their continual quest to get their preferred message across to the American public.”  Through this book, Nathanson attempts to rectify this lack of journalistic muckraking.

He breaks apart the idea of baseball’s beginnings as a “gentleman’s game,” and forces readers to take a harder look at the perception of baseball as a game of patriotism, pride, and morality.  Through exposing myths, Nathanson does not merely provide an alternative history of baseball, he offers readers a sort of history of baseball’s history of myths.

When looking at the Black Sox Scandal, for example, the author does not merely perpetuate the common argument over whether the players really did throw the World Series.  Rather, he explores the mindset of baseball and of the nation as a whole, reveals the motives of the forces involved in the decision to ban the players, and considers the position of the players themselves.

Nathanson also delves into the “Great Experiment” of bringing on Jackie Robinson as Major League Baseball’s first black player.  Breaking the color barrier, he argues, would have worked with just about any player at the time, because America had experienced enough social pressure leading up to this point that the event became inevitable.  Furthermore, the expectation of Robinson to maintain an impeccable moral character created a double standard that only served to indirectly continue black oppression.

He describes the revolutionary publications of Bill James in the 1980s, who introduced a new way of looking at baseball statistics to the American public.  Contrary to popular belief, baseball presented a wide array of complexities that went beyond merely throwing, catching, and hitting.  Nathanson reveals how Bill James’s work only marked the beginning of a whole new outlook on statistical baseball, as embodied today through social media and fantasy baseball.

In many ways, one could almost title this book A Player’s History of Baseball, as Nathanson devotes much of the text to the defense of baseball players against their owners and the media.  In his quest to expose the hypocrisy and self-service of baseball’s owners, Nathanson wound up placing baseball players on a pedestal, making it appear as though the players could do no wrong, and they were merely victims of an unfair managing body.

While Nathanson does touch on a number of subjects throughout baseball history, the scope of the book also proved limiting.  Though it seems that the brevity of coverage certainly provided for an unencumbered reading experience, in a book of breakthrough revelations, a more in-depth collection of descriptions and explanations would have brought more life to the histories contained within its pages.

Nevertheless, Nathanson presents historians and baseball fans alike with an engaging book that challenges readers to look at baseball with a fresh perspective, and he does so in an easily accessible and readable format.  He pulls no punches in his analysis, which provides a refreshingly objective approach in the midst of the uber-patriotism that continues to surround the game.

Review: Becoming Big League: Seattle, the Pilots, and Stadium Politics, by Bill Mullins

November 5, 2013

Over the weekend, I finished reading a book that had been gifted to me by a good friend who lives in Seattle.  She’s always known me as a baseball fan and an avid reader (not to mention my interest in history), so when this book about the Seattle Pilots came out, she made sure that a copy landed in my hands.

Bill Mullins’s Becoming Big League provides more than just a recap of the Seattle Pilots’ only season.  It brings to us the story of the relationship between the city of Seattle and Major League Baseball during the 1960s and 1970s.  This book delves into the economics and politics involved in, first, bringing the Pilots to the city of Seattle, and second, the attempt–and failure–at keeping them there once the season ended.  I was not around to witness the glorious debacle that was the Seattle Pilots, but after reading this book, I kind of wish I had been.

While the Pilots are remembered today with some nostalgia and romanticism for the past, the reality behind their stint in Seattle was less than glamorous.  Mullins traces the initial struggle to bring Major League Baseball to the city by Dewey and Max Soriano, and the wariness, if not outright resistance, of Seattle’s citizenry and leaders.  In spite of its growth and self-identification as a city open to new things, when it came to sports in the 1960s, Seattle was still very much a college town.  The city had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, through the door to becoming “Big League.”  Mullins shows us how the Pilots became the first ugly steps through that door, and how that ugliness and constant political bickering resulted in the Pilots’ demise.

Interspersed between chapters of the discussion of stadium politics, Mullins includes chapters about the Pilots themselves.  I found this to be a nice touch, reminding the reader that, for all the politics and business involved in baseball, there is still a game that takes place on the field–and the appreciation of that game is what makes such a struggle worthwhile.  Readers get a glimpse of the team, the personalities of its players, and get to follow the Pilots through their one and only season in existence.  While the team’s final record was mediocre, at best, the Pilots nevertheless exceeded performance expectations for an expansion team’s first year in existence.  Unfortunately, as Mullins details for us, the politics of stadium-building hindered the desire for would-be baseball fans to come out to the ballgame.  By the end of the year, the Seattle Pilots were bankrupt.

There is no doubt that copious amounts of time and effort went into the research and writing of this book.  The scope of the book covers not only the Pilots themselves, but also explores the character of Seattle, its citizens, and its leaders in the 1960s and 1970s.  Mullins elaborates on the mindsets of the citizens and of the city’s leaders, as well as the struggle to convince Seattleites that Big League baseball was what they wanted, even if they didn’t know it yet.  He untangles the knots of political debate, the economic struggles, and the business decisions involved in the Pilots’ birth and plight, and he does it in a way that is not drab or cumbersome, as I have found in so many other books about history and politics.  Mullins manages to take this overwhelming labyrinth of a subject and lays it out in a way that is not only understandable, but also enjoyable to read.

“Baseball,” by Linda Pastan

June 26, 2013

Here’s a poem out of a book that a close friend gave to me a few years ago.  The book is Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, edited by Elinor Nauen, and it is a collection of stories, poems, essays, and memoirs about baseball written by women.  I love the layers of meaning in this piece.

Baseball

When you tried to tell me
baseball was a metaphor

for life: the long, dusty travail
around the bases, for instance,

to try to go home again;
the Sacrifice for which you win

approval but not applause;
the way the light closes down

in the last days of the season–
I didn’t believe you.

It’s just a way of passing
the time, I said.

And you said: that’s it.
Yes.

Quote of the day

June 22, 2013

What’s true for the people who play baseball is true in different ways for those of us who mostly just watch it. On the one hand, a baseball stadium becomes a kind of home for many of us who go often. Whether it’s a big league stadium where you can leave your peanut shells scattered beneath your seat or a high school field where you know the person who chalks the base paths every Thursday, it’s a personal space. You can keep score with your private notation system, sound of authoritatively on what Bud Selig is doing wrong, or tell an ump that he’s missed a call even when you are 140 feet and a bad angle away from the plate.

~Eric Bronson, Baseball and Philosophy

Quote of the day

June 16, 2013

One more thing! If he does make it, sometime, would we please write him for tickets? He sure would be pleased to see us again. And I him, and my father and my son, and my mother’s father when the married men played the single men in Wilmot, New Hampshire, and my father’s father’s father who hit a ball with a stick while he was camped outside of Vicksburg in June of 1863, and maybe my son’s son’s son for baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all fathers and all sons.

~Donald Hall, from “Fathers Playing Catch With Son”

Blockade Billy, by Stephen King

May 23, 2013

 

blockade billy

A couple days ago, I sat down and read Stephen King’s novella, Blockade Billy.  As a baseball fan and a Stephen King fan, I don’t know how I managed to not hear about this book for so long, but a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a review and knew that I had to check it out.

Very briefly, it is a story about a young, rookie catcher, William Blakely, as told by New Jersey Titans third base coach, Granny Grantham.  Billy is small in stature and a bit slow in the head, but he’s also a phenomenal ballplayer, whose willingness to stand in the way of any baserunner coming down the third base line earns him the nickname “Blockade Billy.”  Keep in mind, however, that the writer of this tale is Stephen King, not W. P. Kinsella.  I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that it was precisely the kind of twist that one would expect from the author.

It’s not quite as graphic as some of King’s other writing, but his trademark style and voice definitely shine through.  That being said, this obviously isn’t meant to be a bedtime story for the kiddos as they get tucked into bed tonight.  It does make for an interesting bedtime story for a grown-up, however, as the story is so short, I’m not sure it even qualifies as a “novella.”  Even with large print, the book is only 125 pages long, and I was so caught up in the story, it seemed even shorter than that.

If you’re looking for a short, entertaining-but-blood-chilling read, I’d definitely recommend Blockade Billy.