Baseball List

Having posted the list of baseball books earlier this week here is a recap of the highlights on the list which I'd recommend anyone to take a look at in advance of opening day:

FIVE GREAT ADDITIONS TO ANY BASEBALL FAN'S LIBRARY:

The Fireside Book of Baseball (Volumes 1-4, Charles Einstein, ed.)

My favorite one of these books was the Second Edition which included a range of items from the Ring Lardner classic "My Roomy" to the actual newspaper reports of the first night game played in New York.  What's so important about that - well it ended Cincinnati 6 - Brooklyn 0, the winning pitcher for the Reds was Johnny Vander Meer - and it was his second consecutive no-hitter.  On any given page you can find a scientific review of what makes a curve ball curve, a Peanuts cartoon featuring Charlie Brown being undressed by a line drive or an article by Bill Bryson on "Mid Career Tragedies".  Um - not that Bill Bryson - his dad - who was one of the greatest sportswriters of his era. Expertly edited, full of great photos, housing the best writing that has ever graced the sports pages the Fireside collection heats up the hot stove better than any set of books or videos ever created.

"The Impossible Dream" CD

The second one of these items I'd list would be something a bit off the beaten path.  Baseball suffers from (or is blessed by) the fact that in an age of television it remains the ultimate radio sport.  Football dominates the modern era not because it's a better sport, but because it's a better televised sport - better for advertisers, better for programmers, better for Super Bowl parties - but not, despite what ESPN would have you believe, a more complex, better designed, game.  Baseball is the sport where you have the game on as the background noise to a thousand picnics, or while you're fishing or painting the garage.  It's playing in the car as you make the trek back to college, or to visit the grandparents.  Its broadcasters remain in our heads long after the games have ended and their best calls are played again, and again, and again.  "I don't believe what I just saw", "The Giants win the pennant!, The Giants win the pennant!", "Long drive, left field - IF IT STAYS FAIR IT'S GONE- HOME RUN!", "Ground ball to Foulke - HE HAS IT..."  You can listen to baseball like no other sport.  So I picked a slightly different item for the list.  In 1967 the Red Sox completely transformed themselves from a team that drew no fans, was thinking of moving and really had no great hold on the populace, to the franchise we know today.  This is true - no 1967 - no Red Sox as we know them.  The team that year, for whatever reason, captured the region's hearts and they've never let go.  Believe it or not, the number one album in Boston, for weeks after the end of the season, was this compilation of highlights from the year, from Bill Rohr's near no-hitter against the Yankees, to Tony Conigliaro's beaning, to Yaz's incredible finish (7 for 8 over the last two must win games, with several key hits and great fielding plays). It includes the famous "Carl Yastrzemki Polka" as well as Ken Coleman's oft quoted poem:  "This is really a love story, a tale of a town and a team, a town that had waited and waited, for what seemed an impossible dream". Given what would come in later years this was both timely and prophetic at the same time.  Don't miss this album if you get a chance to listen.

3.  "Baseball" and "The Tenth Inning" - Ken Burns

Ken Burns makes documentary films and has, particularly with his three biggest and most ambitious projects, tried to define the range of things that makes Americans "Americans".  He seems to have identified three major challenges that run through the entire history of the country - the continuing struggle to overcome our problems with race, the ongoing struggle to control the power of wealth without infringing on individual freedom (labor v. capital) and the difficulty faced by a nation of immigrants when attempting to identify something that is uniquely, collectively, "theirs". "The Civil War", his best known work, certainly addressed the topic of race (after all, the war was about black slavery), and also sort of touched on the other two topics (the government wanted to tell people that a certain type of "ownership" was wrong and the war forged a new idea of a country "of the people, by the people and for the people" as opposed to a group of co-equal States), "Jazz" dealt with the growth of an art form that was uniquely American in its history and that was predominantly created and fostered by blacks; but only "Baseball" squarely deals with all three issues.  The history of race in baseball shows the game consistently at the forefront of the issue, both for the good and the bad.  Jackie Robinson's story, as told in the documentary, is an epic in and of itself.  Combined with the story of baseball's labor wars surrounding the "reserve clause" and the identification of baseball as "our sport", the documentary serves as a virtual microcosm of America's history and the country's various struggles.  But the reason why it's truly great is because while telling this story it also serves as a repository for all the game's great moments.  You can pop in one disc to see actual footage of how Walter Johnson looked to opposing hitters and the next to see the same re: Sandy Koufax.  Watch Babe Ruth call his shot or Bill Mazeroski defeat the Yankees in 1960.  It's like the Smithsonian of videos - you can spend days watching it and still find something new to enjoy each time.  Just the thing to watch to get you psyched for opening day.

Baseball When the Grass Was Real - Donald Honig

There is a whole class of books made up of interviews with players from given eras - oral histories that seek to convey through the words of the players what it was really like to be a ballplayer in a certain time. Two stand out - Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory of Their Times" which used interviews with ballplayers from the first two decades of the 20th century to describe how the "major leagues" came to be major, and Honig's less well known book about players through the depression era up to World War II.  Both are great but I like Honig's a bit better.  The interviews with Wes Ferrell and Cool Papa Bell, Spud Chandler and Lefty Grove (and many others) bring the game from the point where teams travelled on trains to the edge of the jet age.  It's a great read that can be dipped in to at any page numerous times.

The Summer Game - Roger Angell

Roger Angell's stepfather was E.B. White.  Amongst most of us E.B. White is famous for "Charlotte's Webb" and "Stuart Little".  Amongst teachers E.B. White is famous for helping produce Strunk and White's "Elements of Style", the ultimate guide on how to construct sentences in the English language.  Since Roger Angell embodies pure style when it comes to writing about baseball it's obvious he paid attention to what Mr. White had to say.  "The Summer Game" his first collection of baseball essays, was given to me by my grandfather with the simple statement - "Read this - it's the best book about baseball ever written".  He was right, and in my mind it still hasn't been eclipsed.  Angell analyzes baseball from 1962 to 1972, beginning with the expansion of baseball to include the Mets and finishing on the edge of the era of free agency.  It's an incredible snapshot of the times (one of the reasons a "Glory of Their Times" type review of the 60's in baseball wouldn't really work is that Angell has already done it so much better) - but more than what it's about it's the way the book is written that is transformative.  His description of baseball as a game without a clock is one of the best bits of writing - baseball or otherwise - that has ever been done.  Angell has written other books, almost as good, but to me this is the gold standard - like I said, Grampa got it right. 

Other Authors to Check Out:

Read any of David Halberstam's books and you'll be a better person for it, Thomas Boswell's stuff is great and if you want to read a good baseball biography, Richard Ben Cramer's DiMaggio book is really good.  The book called "You Gotta Have Wa", about baseball in Japan, is quite entertaining, and the Bill James Abstracts are worth checking out to understand the new statistical revolution in the game.