Results tagged “Baseball” from One Hour to Read

Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball

I was skeptical of this book at first. I'm not a fan of syrupy books about baseball, nor about fatherhood. I don't think Leitch is either, and it's not what he did here, despite the title making it sound like that and despite its release near Father's Day. This is mostly a memoir of a baseball fan with an entertaining father who is also a baseball fan.

Some of it feels familiar, if only because I've read so much of Leitch's writing. He's mentioned some of the same stories in "Life as a Loser" and on his many autobiographical posts on Deadspin. That's okay. For someone who writes as much as Leitch, it's only natural that he repeats some stories. They're good stories too, so it's not like he's retelling anything dull.

This is basically the second book in a row I've read about one baseball game. The last one was about one of the greatest games ever and turned out to be a sort of a lackluster book. This is about a rather lackluster game that turned out to be sort of a great book. It took some time to grow on me though. As much of a fan as I am of him, I wasn't sure what I thought in the early innings.

I kept looking for some grand, overarching theme. I don't know that there really was one. In interviews, he says that the book is about his belief that this is the golden age of baseball, and how baseball is the way he communicates with his father. There's more than that here though. It's really just a meandering baseball memoir of a fan, and that's great.

It also feels like the type of book only an established writer can write. If I were to go to a publisher and ask, "Hey, I'd like to write a book about my observations as a fan," they would laugh at me. Luckily, they didn't laugh at him. In fact, you can tell how much the publishers like Leitch in that they let him keep in one chapter which was essentially a list of all the interesting baseball games he has ever attended. I want a publisher to like me that much.  

Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime

Things I learned while reading this book:

Someone named Squeaky tried to assassinate Gerald Ford.

The first game of the 1903 World Series was probably fixed.

Eddie Futch, Joe Frazier's trainer, wouldn't allow Frazier to start the 15th round against Muhammad Ali in the "Thrilla in Manilla."

You'll notice that none of these are about Game Six of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds, which is what this book is presumably about. This is a book of tangents. For example, Gerald Ford's son was at the game, which somehow led not only to a discussion of the two assassination attempts on Ford but also to a page and a half about Patty Hearst. It became maddening at times.

I love the whole notion of a book based on one game. Daniel Okrent wrote a wonderful one called Nine Innings, and the next book on my baseball docket is Will Leitch's latest, which is set during one Cardinals-Cubs game. Still, I can't help but feel that Frost is padding this book. I mean, this book is about what some would call the greatest baseball game ever. I don't need to be reading about Spiro Agnew, "stagflation," and the Boston Red Stockings of 1882.

Having said all that, it wasn't an awful book, just frustrating. It was basically a not-so-great book about a great game, so in the end I still enjoyed reading it.

Incidentally, my parents were at this game. Unlike so many others, they really were. My father had season tickets, in the roof boxes above the third base line. However, because the Red Sox needed extra seats for the press, they made him move down below on the third base side, about twenty rows behind the visiting team's dugout. He was pretty happy about this, because in exchange they gave him three times as many tickets.

As the game was winding down, with the Reds winning 6-3, the owners of the Reds left their seats, presumably to get ready for the celebration in the locker room. One of the ushers who usually worked in the roof box seats was nearby. He recognized my parents and asked if they wanted to sit in those seats for the end of the game. ("I never really tipped him during the season, but I guess the people I sent down to use my seats tipped him really well, and he knew that.")

And so, they were in great seats to see Bernie Carbo's three-run homer, Dwight Evans' famous catch, and Carlton Fisk's game-winning home run. For my father, Dwight Evans' catch in right field, the one that stole a home run from Joe Morgan in the 10th inning, was the biggest moment. From his vantage point on the third base line, it seemed utterly impossible that Evans could catch that ball, and yet he did.

Oh, my father also enjoyed the part about the 1882 Boston Red Stockings.

This book was written over thirty years ago, and two of the three umpires primarily featured in it haven't spoken to the author since. One of them, Harry Wendelstedt, denies he even talked to Gutkind for the book, which is impressive since Wendelstedt is such a frequent presence in it.

Of course, you'd deny having anything to do with the author too, if you were depicted running around the locker room butt naked, except for a small t-shirt with a swastika and the words "Super Kraut" on it. (As bad as that sounds, it wasn't meant maliciously, in that he was making fun of himself for being German, but, you know, still...)

This is a different kind of book than Bruce Weber's, depicting the hard-living life of an umpire. While I enjoyed it, I don't entirely blame the umpires for hating Gutkind. In the afterword, he explains all the lengths he went to to get his stories, such as pretending to be passed out drunk during critical conversations between umpires. Much of his method involved getting the umpires drunk, while only pretending to get drunk himself. It feels a little seedy at times, and yet the result is fascinating

Finally, here's an important life lesson courtesy of umpire Doug Harvey in a discussion with a fellow umpire:

What I'm going to say now is the most important thing I have ever tried to tell you. This is the key to being a good umpire. This is what separates the men from the boys. This is what makes a man's man out of a mortal man. Now listen to me, Art . . . . I tell you now like I was your father, I talk to you with the warmth of a brother, so you listen to me closely and you listen good 'cause here it is: Don't let anybody ever call you horseshit.

This week has been all umpires all the time, on the reading front. I wrote a column partly about this book, so I will refrain from saying too much here -- except that this book was a revelation. It truly was, because up until reading this, I had never even thought about umpires -- unless I felt they were screwing over the Red Sox. In this young season, I've already been concentrating on umpiring more than I have ever done before. 

Here's something I learned about the strike zone, which I had never really thought about:

The zone as it is represented on the television screen has a number of obvious shortcomings. One is that it isn't adjusted for the stride of the hitter. Second, the television strike zone is two-dimensional but the strike zone is three. Usually, the represented zone is set on a plane at the front edge of the plate, which means that any pitch that doesn't pass over the plate's front lip won't show up on the screen as a strike; in the big leagues especially, pitches break so sharply that they frequently go around the front of the plate but enter the strike zone from the side.

My only real umpiring experience came in fourth grade when a few friends needed someone to call balls and strikes. The whole thing is a bit foggy and frankly doesn't make a lot of sense. We were eight.  Were we even tall enough to have strike zones? And yet I have a clear memory of messing up a call when I called a clearly foul ball fair. It was such a bad call that even the beneficiary of it was a bit embarrassed, and everyone on one team ended up hating me.

Of course, as an umpire, I knew I could not admit I was wrong, and so I didn't change the call even when I knew how bad it was. What I did was calmly wait a minute and make an excruciatingly bad call in the other direction to even things up. This only resulted in everyone on the other team hating me too, and I knew even then that I couldn't be handle the pressure of being an umpire. It would take a few more years for me to figure out that I couldn't handle the pressure of being a ballplayer.

I Saw It on the Radio with the Boston Red Sox

Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione seems like a really nice guy, so I feel bad saying this, but here goes: This is not a good book. In fact, as they say about movies, it's often so bad that it's good. It's just a weird little book that seems to be in desperate need of an editor.

Sure, he occasionally has some interesting things to say, but there are also long sections where he talks about his favorite restaurants in the cities he visits. (In Baltimore, he actually recommends a food court.) Granted, the book is chock-full of behind-the-scenes details, but those details are often about the hotels he stayed in while on the road and the food in the press boxes of stadium which sometimes don't exist anymore.

Here, for example, are the last two paragraphs of the book, in which he discusses his participation in the Hall of Fame exhibit for the 2004 Red Sox, surely an exciting day:
 

I was honored to cut the ribbon for the exhibit, which included Curt Schilling's bloody sock. That night, I stayed at the beautiful Otesaga Hotel on Lake Otesage, within walking distance of the Hall of Fame. I was one of eight guests. I had the Otesaga's great brunch the next morning, then drove onto Franklin Pierece for a class.

November. We are still basking in the glow of the series victory and the trophy's tour. I hope we can repeat it next year.

Okay, maybe he did have editors, because you just know that the first draft listed all eight of the other guests and what he had for brunch.

By the way, it may seem like I'm on a baseball kick lately, having finished this and the Simmons book this week, but I really started the Castiglione book way back in the summer. It just took me six months to get through it.
 

How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, With a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank and the 2004 Red Sox

In the approximately 421 Red Sox books that came out after they won the World Series in 2004, I somehow forgot about this one. That's too bad, because it's one of the best. For some reason, I instead read the horrible diary by Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan, a book that managed to be about the Red Sox winning the World Series for the first time in 86 years and yet was somehow boring. Before reading it, I didn't think that would have have even been possible.* 

Simmons, meanwhile, is not at all boring and also very funny. He's great at capturing the spirit of a fan. His columns are strangely much better to read in book form, if only because they don't seem quite so long. Online Simmons' columns seem so long that I get discouraged from reading them. I just don't have any patience reading online. But they were really just a few pages in a book. I think it will be much easier to read his columns in the future, if I think of them as chapters instead of columns.

And it's amazing to relive those games. The four-day stretch at the end of the Yankees series is something I will never experience again. There were so many ways that the whole thing could have ended in shambles, and yet they somehow still won.

Like many New Englanders, I made a lot of ridiculous purchases after the Red Sox won, including the 12-disc collector's edition of the 2004 World Series with all 7 ALCS games and all 4 World Series games. Of course, I've never had enough time to watch any of it, but I'm thinking now that I might pop a few of the games in.

* I also read Johnny Damon's "memoir," which was not my finest moment in reading.  

I was thinking a lot about Daisuke Matsuzaka while reading this book on Japanese baseball. Whiting wrote this profile of Japanese baseball in 1989, but there's so much in here that makes me understand the debacle that has been the Dice-K signing for the Red Sox. (I know he was good in September, and I know he could be better next year, but he hasn't exactly ridden the gyroball to the promise land, as we were led to expect.)

 This year, it was learned that both sides are unhappy. Matsusaka doesn't like how the Red Sox like him to train, and the Red Sox don't like his incessant throwing between starts. After reading this book, though, it makes sense that Matsuzaka would want to throw often between games. In here, Whiting describes the history of Japanese baseball, in which practice has always been almost as important as the game. One manager's system "came to be known as shi no renshu (death training)."

 At the turn of the century, the training regimen for one university baseball team "was nicknamed Bloody Urine, for it was said that the players practiced so hard they urinated blood at the end of the day." Trust me, it sounds a lot better in Japanese.

 According to Suishu Tobita, a legendary manager through much of the 20th century who was known to some as the God of Japanese baseball: "A manager has to love his players, but on the practice field he must treat them as cruelly as possible, even though he may be crying about it inside. . . . If the players do not try so hard as to vomit blood in practice, then they cannot hope to win games." It's really sort of the anti-Manny approach to the game.

 I also was reminded that the strike zone in Japan is an inch wider on each side, which would explain Daisuke's frustrating nibbling around the corners of the strike zone. Then again, the fact that he keeps reporting to spring training out of shape cannot be explained at all by this book.

 Moving beyond my Boston-centric reading , this is a great book, a fascinating look into another culture. Baseball in Japan and the U.S. may seem like the same game, but it really isn't. The Japanese game is so cautious and slow. Americans who played there often complained about how the fear of making mistakes seemed to be the driving force behind every decision. Practice and hard work were emphasized so much that players were often exhausted by the last weeks of the season.

The Americans who played there mostly seemed frustrated. A few openly challenged managers which caused serious cultural problems. Well, it did, if they didn't have a savvy translator. I love this account from one of the translators: "If a gaijin says something like 'I don't give a fuck!' well, I'll say, 'I'll try harder' instead. It avoids trouble."

Finally, the Japanese were ahead of us in some respects. For example, this 1989 book contains this quaint quote about Japanese television:

Graphics during televised games show the inning, score, number of outs, and the ball-strike count on each batter after every pitch. Some stations even indicate the speed of every pitched ball as well as its location on a superimposed strike zone.

 Back then, they probably had announcers who never stopped talking too.

Talking My Way into the Big Leagues at 40

Sorry, I haven't been around these parts lately, mainly because I'm on page 840 of this. But I have been reading this Ken Levine book occasionally while watching baseball. It's nice to have a baseball book going for when you need a break from Russian literature.

At different points in my life, I have wanted to be both a writer for "Cheers" and a baseball announcer. And so, it's a bit odd to discover that Ken Levine left his day job writing for "Cheers" to live out his dream of being a Major League baseball announcer. It's one thing when someone leaves a boring desk job to fulfill his lifelong dream, but it's entirely different when that person leaves one of your dreams to fulfill another of your dreams. It doesn't seem entirely fair.

Nevertheless, Ken Levine seems like a good guy, so I can't complain too much. This book is a diary of his first year in the Majors in 1991 when he did radio play-by-play for the Baltimore Orioles with the venerable Jon Miller and Chuck Thompson. I loved reading the stories of the announcers, as well as players like Cal Ripken Jr., Dwight Evans, and all the other journeymen who starred on a 6th place team. Sometimes, when you decide to do a diary of a baseball season, you end up with a championship team like Stephen King did in 2004. Other times, you end up with the 1991 Orioles.

I definitely recommend it, and I feel a little guilty having paid only a buck for it at a used bookstore. My only complaint is that I have been reading this book about the 1991 season while watching the 2009 Red Sox. The parts about David Ortiz testing positive for steroids and the Red Sox getting swept by the Yankees really need a lot of work, but the rest was excellent.

The World of Baseball Scouting

This is a wonderful book, but I don't know if I can quite explain why. As a study of baseball scouts, it's a great work, but the book really shines when Kerrane allows the old baseball scouts to speak for themselves. There are long passages of oral history included here that rival anything in Lawrence Ritter's classic "The Glory of Their Times."

Kerrane spent the entire 1981 season with baseballs scouts. Admittedly, the book does seem a bit dated now, and I have a feeling that it may have seemed a bit dated even then, as it was in many ways a book about a bygone time. Scouting changed dramatically after the institution of the amateur draft in 1965. In the old days, scouts would spot a prospect and then be able to sign him on the spot. After the draft started, the personal connections made between the scouts and the players mattered much less when the team had a 1 in 30 chance of drafting the player.

In 1981, starting salaries were still somewhat reasonable, but now a player's signability matters almost as much as his talent when being drafted. Even the term "dollar sign on the muscle" has become obsolete. This referred to the dollar amount a scout placed on a player, "the highest figure you would go in order to sign a player if he were on the open market."

It was usually a number below $100,000, but when, for example, a number one draft pick like Stephen Strasburg is expected to get a $20 million bonus from the Washington Nationals after being drafted tomorrow, these numbers begin to mean nothing.

Perhaps the most enjoyable chapter is the one on the language of the game where I was able to learn several important items such as the distinction between horseshit and bullshit.

Horseshit: A universal term of disparagement in baseball -- Any baseball talent, body, body part, effort, action, player, team, city, or scouting assignment can be horseshit. The term covers everything but the world of words -- the world of stories, explanation, and scouting reports -- at which point bullshit takes over.

A real sentence spoken by a scout discussing a former colleague: "His written report was all bullshit, and that's when I knew he was a horseshit guy."

Bullshit can be a verb; horseshit can't. ... Novices sometimes elide the word into horshit, but the veterans get the first s down deep in the throat, with the tongue at the back of the palate, lots of air whistling past the lower teeth, and then they follow through for full emphasis. Horsse-shit!

Now, that's scouting. So to summarize: Kevin Kerrane, definitely not horseshit; this post, possible bullshit. That is all.

The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero
 
Continuing on the theme of place in reading, I read the majority of this book in exactly one spot: on my couch in front of the television during the commercials of Red Sox playoff games. For those of you whose teams make it into the playoffs, I highly recommend reading a book during the games. Obviously, it's not good if you're watching with others, but if you're watching on your own, reading during the commercials can be a very calming influence.

There are many benefits to this, including:

1. You will not have to listen endlessly to the same commercials over and over again. I may be the one Boston or Tampa fan who doesn't want to kill Frank Caliendo after all his Frank TV commercials. I'm not saying that I want him to have a career, but if I happened to see him on the street, I would not accost him, unlike the majority of baseball fans.

2. When the umpires make a bad call and the networks go to a commercial without showing a replay, you will at least have a way to simmer down.

3. All those brain cells killed by your drinking of beer during the game and/or listening to Chip Carey or Tim McCarver can be magically revived through the power of reading.

Obviously, a sports book works best, though I've found any non-fiction book works well. For me, fiction doesn't particularly work, simply because the constant interruptions don't allow me to get immersed into the story, but your mileage may vary. And don't worry. I wasn't stupid enough to try to read Crime and Punishment during a baseball game.

As for the book, I picked it up because Roberto Clemente was probably the best player who I didn't really know anything about. I'm glad I read it, because Maraniss is right that Clemente may have been baseball's last hero. I can't see today's players doing as much for the poor as Clemente did.

Unfortunately, for me at least, the Red Sox did not make the World Series, or else I would have finished this book a lot earlier.They were eliminated with about 100 pages left, and it took me awhile to get around to reading those final 100 pages. While the book was well done, I have to say that I was disappointed at times.

Maraniss seems to be primarily a political reporter in his work for The Washington Post, and he sometimes goes off on tangents that I didn't particularly care about. For example, when I picked this up, I have to say I wasn't thinking, "Gee, I wonder what Richard Nixon thought of Roberto Clemente?"

He also spends a lot of time going into the background of the owner of the plane Clemente died in as well as the pilot. It makes sense, as Clemente's tragic death was due to the negligence of these people, but sometimes I think I just wanted to read more about baseball. 

 

Curt Flood's Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports

In some ways, reading this was penance for reading the Jose Canseco book. I meant to start the baseball season with a good baseball book, you know something substantial. But I was stuck reading Vindicated instead. A Well-Paid Slave, of course, is a much better selection. In here, Snyder does a great job of explaining the battle over baseball's reserve clause.

Admittedly, it's not your typical baseball book. Let's just say that I don't usually come across quite so many Supreme Court Justices in my normal baseball reading. This one is chock full of them. Thurgood Marshall, Whizzer White, Arthur Goldberg, Chief Justice Warren Burger, and all your favorite justices are here.

The other reason I read this is that I didn't know much about Curt Flood, and for that I felt a little ashamed. While Flood ended up losing his case at the Supreme Court, his challenge to baseball's reserve clause led to the creation of free agency in the 1970s. In terms of impact on the game, he is one of the most important players of all time, and yet most fans probably don't know who he even is. His attempt to fight for free agency led him to give up over $100,000 of salary, lose several years of his career, and flee the country in despair.

While Flood deserves his status as a hero, it's painful to read about him. Sadly, the case practically ruined him. Mostly destitute after losing the case and blackballed from baseball, he ended up living in an alcoholic stupor for the next fifteen years. Finally, in the late 1980s, he was able to give up drinking. By then, also, more players began to recognize his sacrifices. Thankfully, he seemed to enjoy the last ten years of his life, but it's amazing he made it there.

Brad Snyder is a lawyer by trade, so there are long discussions about Supreme Court precedents, which at times were over my head. Still, the story is fascinating. The strangest part is to see how judges handled a trial about baseball. Justice Harry Blackmun, a fanatical baseball fan, wrote the majority opinion in favor of Major League Baseball. The opinion started with a "27-page ode to baseball history," including the entire text of the poem "Casey at the Bat" and a list of Blackmun's 79 favorite baseball players.

Here was a man who could clearly have used a blog in 1971. Having no outlet for his opinions on baseball, Blackmun was forced to include them in a Supreme Court opinion. The next year, he wrote the opinion for Roe v. Wade, which to the best of my knowledge does not include a list of Blackmun's favorite abortionists. I

t's tough to be a baseball fan and a judge deciding baseball's fate. Consider this exchange between the original judge of the case, Irving Cooper, and baseball star Joe Garagiola who was testifying as a witness for Major League Baseball:

"Do you always have a smile like that?" Cooper asked.

"Yes, always," [Garagiola said.]

"That is a blessing."

Garagiola returned the compliment: "I wish you were on a bubble gum card, Judge. I'd have you."

Mind you, this conversation actually took place on the witness stand. So much for impartiality. Apparently, back then if you were a star baseball player, you could use your bar pick-up lines on judges too. Who knew?

The less said about this the better.