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Book recommendations from the webmaster
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- Published on Saturday, 30 July 2005 18:00
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Ever read a book about football? There's a couple of biographies of Vince Lombardi around, and I remember reading a biography of Knut Rockne when I was about ten years old. If you have an above-average interest in football, The Last Coach: A life of Paul "Bear" Bryant, by Allen Barra, is well worth reading. Ice hockey? There's The Game, by Ken Dryden, that's pretty good, and Tropic of Hockey, by Dave Bidini, which is excellent. Golf? The remainder bins are full of coffee table books of pictures of courses. Basketball? Soccer? Forget it.
There's something about baseball that puts it in a class by itself, in terms of attractiveness to writers and readers. Part of it is that drama that takes place between the pitcher and batter every time there's a turn at bat that goes eight or nine pitches. Another reason is that I know that every time I go to a ball game, every player on the field has a story to tell, and only a small fraction of those stories ever get written down.
This very conveniently leads into the first book on my list, The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn. Kahn got a job with the New York Tribune to cover the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1952. He moved on to Sports Illustrated and Newsweek. In 1970, he decided to follow up on the members of the 1952 Dodger team, who had scattered to all parts of the U.S. and gone into other lines of work. His subjects include Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, and Preacher Rowe. Although Kahn is an excellent writer, he had had the good sense to let these people tell their stories. It's a surprisingly diverse group, even though they played in an era when there were no Haitians, Venezuelans, or Japanese in Major League Baseball.
Kahn also devotes considerable space to explaining how "Da Bums" were such a big part of Brooklyn culture.
Ball Four, by Jim Bouton, was a ground-breaking book at the time it was published in 1970. Up until then, sports books always read along the lines of what a great guy Babe Ruth was; and they were pretty much a waste of paper. Bouton pulled no punches in discussing incompetent coaches and baseball groupies, and he revealed that some of his teammates with the Yankees (Elston Howard is the example that comes to mind) were not such nice people.
You shouldn't get the idea from this that Bouton has some sort of axe to grind. On the contrary, it's clear that he loves the game.
Ball Four is of particular interest to Pacific Northwest fans because it focuses on Bouton's 1969 season, and he spent more than half of it with the Seattle Pilots. The Pilots existed for only one season before they were relocated to Milwaukee and renamed the Brewers. Bouton was traded to the Astros in mid-season, and this gave him some still-relevant insights on the differences between the American and National Leagues.
Ball Four contains a great deal of useful advice for any serious ballplayer. Here's a quote worth remembering: "You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time."
More extensive review by Robert Christgau: Bouton Baseball
The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris, by Mark Kurlansky, starts with a discussion of Estrellas Orientales, a team in the Dominican Winter League that has been around since 1910. Alfredo Griffin and Rico Carty played for them.
Kurlanski spent a couple of pages describing the atmosphere at Estrellas Orientales home games, and a couple of chapters about the history of baseball in the Dominican Republic. He also wrote a couple of chapters about the entrance of Dominicans into Major League Baseball. Long-term fans of the Blue Jays will appreciate the discussion of Griffin and George Bell.
However, as the title suggests, this book is primarily about San Pedro de Macoris, a town with an attractive location that was prosperous in the early 20th century when the sugar cane industry was doing well. San Pedro's population includes descendants of people who immigrated from elsewhere in the Carribean, and brought cricket with them. San Pedro gets few tourists; they mostly get carted from the airport to all-inclusive resports such as Punta Cana.
Kurlansky's target audience isn't hard-core baseball fans. He explained why the ability to switch-hit is an advantage for a hitter. However, the reason this came up is that Griffin didn't become a switch-hitter until he started playing pro ball.
Kurlansky's main topic, then, is how professional baseball has altered the culture, and especially the economy of San Pedro. The biggest impact has been the baseball academies set up by major league teams and agents. In addition to fielding, hitting, and pitching, these academies teach English, and the first three words the students learn is “I got it.” The Eastern Stars is well worth reading if you're interested in what baseball looks like in Latin America.
Baseball Love, by George Bowering, is non-fiction, but it's very different from everything else described here. Bowering is big on road trips and minor-league ballparks. This passion started with trips to see the Everett Aqua Sox and the Tacoma Rainiers, then expanded into a couple of cross-continent trips. Bowering uses these road trips to stitch together observations and anecdotes about baseball culture.
Bowering doesn't just describe teams and ballparks, although you'll learn a lot about ball caps and uniforms when you read this book. He also tells you how crowds in Dayton, OH are very different from crowds in Missoula, MT and Schaumburg, IL. His wife and agent, Jean Baird, also has some definite opinions about mascots.
There's much more in these 253 pages. Bowering played baseball and fast-pitch softball until the age of 66, and he tells of his experiences in the Vancouver-area Kosmic League, which existed in the 1970's, and the more recent Twilight League. There's a chapter about his youth in Oliver, when there was a team called the Oliver Elks which played in a league with Vernon, Kelowna, Penticton, Omak, and Chelan. Bowering's baseball travels include the Grand Forks International tournament, and he has even attended some Thunderbird home games.
What really matters, though, is Bowering's entertaining style of writing. He is, after all, the first Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, and he has won a couple of Governor General awards. The are passages throughout this book that made me laugh. Two in particular were a "first pitch" ritual at the home opener of the Niagara Stars of the short-lived Canadian Baseball League in chapter 3, and a conversation with a Department of Homeland Security employee at a border crossing in Saskatchewan in chapter 11. (Note to UBC management: Bowering likes to throw out first balls.)
Obviously, I have a very high opinion of this book. I'll admit to some bias here. Bowering shares my dislike of the Yankees and the designated hitter rule. He also spends some time praising Jim Piersall, who I saw play many times when he was with the Washington Senators in the 1960's.
Excerpt: Oliver's golden baseball (chapter 4)
Pitching Around Fidel, by S.L. Price, is a book you won't enjoy very much if you're an admirer of or an apologist for the Castro regime. That's all the more reason for reading this book. Like Ball Four, it doesn't pull punches, and it isn't very kind to some of the athletes who have defected, either.
Although Pitching Around Fidel is ostensibly about the entire Cuban sports scene, baseball gets the most column inches, with boxing coming in second. The general theme is how the Cuban government exploits athletes, and gives them little in return. (Yes, you can argue that lots of other countries exploit athletes, too, but Alex Rodriguez, Michael Vick, and Wayne Gretsky are laughing all the way to the bank.) The most poignant example is Teofilo Stevenson, a three-time gold medal heavyweight who could have been financially set for life with one title shot. Instead, he lives dependent on the kindness of strangers. The book tells how a few overage ballplayers were allowed to play in Japan for a couple of years, in order to earn a few bucks, but this arrangement was canceled without any explanation given.
The book is not all negative, however. Price attended several Cuba National Series games. Like other writers who have done this, it's described as a journey back in time; AAA-caliber ball played in ballparks similar to Ebbetts Field, with low ticket prices, no $6 hot dogs, and musical entertainment.
Like the other books described here, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, by Richard Ben Kramer documents a past era of baseball. DiMaggio broke into pro baseball in the 1930's, when a ballplayer's status could quickly change from earning a living to extreme poverty as a result of an injury or being replaced by a hot young prospect. In later years, it became conventional to regard Ty Cobb as a person that nobody liked, but Cramer points out that Cobb's "every man for himself" attitude was more the norm than the exception.
DiMaggio's life is documented in great detail here, and there's a lot of territory to cover; his school-dropout childhood in San Francisco, his not-very-good relationship with his brother Dom (a star with the Red Sox) and his son, his marriage and long-term relationship with Marilyn Monroe (he believed that the Kennedys killed her), and his later career as a TV salesman and money-grubbing bat autographer.
The Northern Game: Baseball the Canadian Way was written by Bob Elliott, who writes for the Toronto Sun and canoe.ca. The quality of this book is a little uneven. I mean, are Canadian baseball players really more aggressive on the basepaths than Venezuelans or Cubans? And, if so, is it because they played ice hockey when they were growing up? (On the other hand, Elliott's contention that there are more left-handed Canadian baseball players is interesting, and deserves further research.)
Having said that, the chapter on Larry Walker alone is worth the price of the book. There's chapters about the demise of the Expos, the 2004 Olympics, and Ferguson Jenkins. There's a chapter specifically about British Columbia, and yes, there's some information about Terry McKaig and Jeff Francis. Overall, there's a lot of information and some good stories packed into 262 pages.
I'll finish up here with one work of fiction, Shoeless Joe, by Canadian writer W.P. Kinsella. If you've seen the film "Field of Dreams", it was based on Shoeless Joe, and is faithful to it. (If you haven't seen "Field of Dreams", go to Blockbuster or Rogers Video and rent it. When you return it, take out "Bull Durham" and "61".) The main difference is, the J.D. Salinger character was removed from "Field of Dreams" and replaced with Terence Mann, who was specifically designed around James Earl Jones. The inside story here is that Salinger is a hard-core recluse (you might be, too, if there were idiots running around saying that they murdered John Lennon because of something you wrote that they read) and threatened the film makers with all sorts of nastiness unless they left him out of it. Jones, on the other hand, very much wanted to be in "Field of Dreams".
Now, if you haven't seen "Field of Dreams", the basic premise is that the main character, Ray Kinsella, hears voices telling him "If you build it, they will come", and he proceeds to convert part of his Iowa farm into a baseball field, complete with a manicured infield. It turns out that the reason he's been told to do this is to provide a place for the ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson and other ballplayers of his era with a place to play.
Jackson was a star player for the 1919 Chicago White Sox, who accepted bribes from gamblers to intentionally lose the World Series. Jackson and his teammates were banned from baseball for life as a result.
This book tries to make a case that Jackson wasn't treated fairly. The way this goes is, he hit .375, threw out five baserunners, and handled 30 chances in the outfield with no errors.
This is an example of how there's more to baseball than statistics. How did Jackson do when there were runners in scoring position? How many of his hits came with two outs and the bases empty? You could go over contemporary newspaper stories and get answers to these questions, but you still wouldn't have the whole story. Did Jackson make the same effort to dive for fly balls and line drives that he did during the regular season? We don't know, because they didn't film baseball games in 1919. You can find a discussion of this in answers.com. It is a fact that Jackson got $5,000 from the gamblers, and spent it.
The overall message of Shoeless Joe is that playing baseball is a valuable experience. In the fantasy created by W.P. Kinsella, the characters, including Shoeless Joe Jackson and Ray Kinsella, are given an opportunity to redeem an opportunity that they squandered.
Good article about Shoeless Joe and "Field of Dreams" by Jeff Merron: Lost in a 'Field' of imagination
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