Baseball books worth reading
My annual week in Colorado has multiple missions. Recharge the batteries for the football (and now NBA) push. Escape the heat and soak up the 68-degree afternoons in the mountains. Eat like a horse. Play with my granddaughter all day long. And read as many books as I can consume.
My goal is three books in Colorado and I always take four, because I’m an optimist. I’m learning that my granddaughter has moved quickly into the front seat of priorities. She’s two; we play and read and sing, and when she’s tired, then I start thinking of that other Colorado stuff I used to do.
Anyway, last week I topped out at two books — I’m just finishing the second — and as usual, the books were baseball. I don’t really care to follow baseball much anymore; I check the standings and read the paper, but in terms of watching games or keeping up with the rosters and who are the great young players, not going to happen.
But the history, I still can’t get enough. This year, my first book was “Ball Four.” I’ve probably read 500 baseball books in my life, but never this classic. I had read excerpts and heard stories, but never fully read Jim Bouton’s 1970 masterpiece. His diary of the 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and reminisces about his Yankee days in the early ’60s.
Bouton was a baseball pariah after writing the book for his frank look at the baseball culture. Read it now and it’s tamer than the sports page. But in 1970, when Bowie Kuhn was commissioner and baseball had its head in the sand, you can see why Bouton’s book was scandalous.
Here’s what I like about “Ball Four.” It’s flat-out funny. I laughed out loud 25 times. And it reads smooth and fast. The best books read that way. The pages just flow. “The Color Purple,” the best book I’ve ever read, is that way. And so is “Ball Four.”
Some things from almost 40 years ago don’t hold up. Fashion. Television. Mores. Even some books. Some of the books I read years ago, when I look at them now, they can’t hold my interest in this 21st-century world. But “Ball Four” still packs a punch.
The other book is “Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life,” by Richard Ben Cramer, written in 2000. No American sports hero is as mysterious as the Yankee Clipper, and Cramer’s 515-page book attempts to explain the strange days and ways of DiMaggio. From DiMaggio’s upbringing on San Francisco’s North Beach to his magic ride with the Yankees to his mob connections to his romance with Marilyn Monroe, this book is a fascinating look at the tortured superstar.
Alex Rodriguez and Jose Canseco and contemporary stars with their celebrity shenanigans are laughably inconsequential to the life led by DiMaggio, who was both colleague and enemy of the biggest names in America: Mickey Mantle, Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy.
Cramer didn’t entitle his book by chance. This is a discussion of heroship; what it takes to be a hero, and the cost at hand.
You won’t laugh out loud at “Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life.” But you will come away with a far better understanding of the way America was, and the way New York City was, and the way the Yankees were, and the baseball was, and the way the son of an immigrant fisherman became our country’s greatest hero, at great cost to himself.
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Comments
I just ordered “The Rivalry” per your recommendation on the Sports Animal airwaves and I’m looking forward to reading it. I was wondering if someday you wouldn’t mind posting a rundown of your favorite basketball and football books.
Took me a couple of days to ‘remember’ the title, but…..
LORDS OF THE REALM, the best historical/analytical book on baseball I’ve ever read.
Here, here, “Ball Four” is terrific, one of the best ever about baseball.