I’ve decided that if Stew can write book reviews, well, so can I. As it turns out, we’re not doing much fun stuff, and I’m on my three-week break, so it seems a good time to mention some of the non-fiction I’ve read this summer.
The overriding theme of my summer reading has been the national pastime. I’ve read four books on baseball since June, and the kids and I have watched two DVDs from the Ken Burns baseball series from the ’90s. Here, in chronological order, is an overview of these four books.
The first was Season Ticket by Roger Angell. Last year, Summer got me a Selected Shorts CD set on baseball, three hours of readings hosted by Bart Giamatti and Roger Angell. Later that year I read an anthology of Angell’s works, and this year, while Summer and the kids were away, I picked up this one. It recounts several seasons of spring training, regular season, and playoff ball through the late ’70 and early ’80s. Angell’s voice is crisp and lucid as he explores nuances of the game—base stealing, pitching, infield defense—and the evolution of the game in one of the most overlooked periods in the game’s history. I flew through the nearly 400 page time in about a week.
The second read was a vastly different book. WrigleyWorld by Kevin Kaduk—in some ways the un-Angell of baseball writing—recounts the 2005 season, when the 26 year old author quit his sports writing job in Kansa City, moved back to Chicago, and attended as many Cubs games as possible. Kaduk has the ironic, irreverent voice of the young 21st century sportswriter, and his prose is riddled with pop culture references and reflections on the socioeconomics of Wrigleyville. It is also a highly melancholy book, as Kaduk knows this is his last shot at arrested development, his final year as a 20-something adolescent, and the ChiSox won the World Series that year, to the chagrin of North Siders.
At the same time, WrigleyWorld, while well written, was a frustrating book. I walked away from it dreaming of Ryan going to college in Chicago and inviting me up for an early-season day game in Wrigley, but dreading it too. The scene Kaduk presents is one of abject loneliness, of young and not-so-young urbanites going to games for the chicness of being Cubs fans. These are in fact not fans, or at least not baseball fans. They are fans of themselves, seeking to squeeze pleasure from a life antithetical to what I see in the game—connection to something larger than oneself. When I sit in the stands, I seek a bond to my father and grandfather, my mother and brother, the other fans, the players, my sons. When the fans Kaduk describes go to the game, they are focused on the scene, not the experience.
The third book is the understated Baseball by George Vecsey. A long-time New York Times writer, Vecsey puts together, in under 250 pages, a thorough but digestible history of the game, debunking myths and highlighting key moments in the game’s annals. Like most histories of the game, Vecsey’s spends a lot of time on the early and mid 20th century, exploring the rise of the American League, the 1919 Black Sox scandal, the Yankees dynasties of the 1920s-1950s, the role of the game during and immediately after World War II, the integration of the major leagues, and the end of an era with the Dodgers and Giants moving west. And like many similar books, this one skips over much of the 1970s and 1980s, touching briefly on free agency and the drug and gambling scandals of my childhood, before entering the post-1994 resurgence of Cal Ripken’s streak and the now-questionable home run race of 1998.
What bothered me after I finished Vecsey’s book is how it (and Angell’s works) stand in contrast to Kaduk’s, and how neither type is fully satisfying. Baseball writers tend to either eulogize the game’s past or revel in a present that is more booze and appearance than sporting event. It is as if the only options for writing about the game are the old man recalling listening to the 1941 Series on the radio, or a young writer recounting his exploits with his buddies watching a game from the sports bar down the street. I want instead a voice I can relate to, a writer who connects the game to relationships, to history, while also looking to the future with something other than regret.
For example, Kaduk talks briefly about games he saw as a child, but there is no sense of how he will pass the game on, in part because he’s living as a child who cannot fathom teaching his own son to catch a fly ball. And both Vecsey and Angell, while discussing their own childhood experiences with the game in masterful detail, never touch on sitting at a game with a son or daughter or grandchild, passing the torch. And for me, that sense of bridging the past and the future is vital to my love of the game. I just want to see it in someone else’s writing. I mentioned this to Summer, and she got a mildly horrified look in her eyes as she said, “Well, maybe you’ll need to write that book. But finish your dissertation first.”
I may have found this book—or at least something very much like it—in Sox and the City by Richard Roeper (the movie critic from Ebert and Roeper). It turns out he’s not just a movie guy from Chicago, but also a Sox fan from the South Side. Roeper’s account focuses on the 2005 World Series championship season, but he cuts away from this one year to discuss his life as a Sox fan. Born in 1959, he grew up with a range of Sox teams—the lousy teams of the ’80s, the Go-Go Sox, the heartbreak strike seasons of 1981 and 1994 when the Sox were World Series bound, only to have labor strife throw off their postseason dreams, and the Ozzie Guillen team of destiny two seasons ago.
This narrative connects Roeper to his father and extended family of Sox-afflicted fans without waxing nostalgic, and he rhapsodizes about 21st century ball without simply reveling in beerball. And while there’s no future generation to whom he connects, there is a clear sense that a fan today—true fan—is a descendant of fans who came before and a link to the future. I cannot, for all my O’s allegiance, feel the same passion for a single team, but I find his partisanship authentic and real. And I appreciate that it never clouds the larger perspective that the game is not about a player or a team, but a balance, the balance between the pitcher and batter, the past and the present, the fan and the team, the individual and the group.
