Slightly Better than Replacement Level
There’s plenty I could say about Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos. If this were a normal review, I’d largely focus on how many aspects of Up, Up, and Away were engaging. I’d detail […]
I didn’t grow up a Mickey Mantle fan. Not only was his career after my time, but other than some mentions on Seinfeld, he wasn’t present, or even mentioned, in the popular culture I consumed. As I dove deeper into baseball history, I never got the Mantle bug, so to speak. I accrued a cursory […]
Sometimes an author swings big and misses by only a little. Such was the case with Randall Sullivan’s first full-length baseball effort. The First All-Star Game: Babe Ruth, FDR and America at the Crossroads has grandiose aims, and at times it teeters oh so close to meeting those aims. Unfortunately, at every turn, Sullivan simply […]
I’m going to let the cat out of the bag right away: this was not a good book, and it almost exclusively falls on its author, Joseph Bosco. You know the sort of writer who can’t help but write a phrase within a phrase, within a phrase, within a phrase while writing a sentence? That’s […]
James Creighton is a fascinating figure in baseball history. Death in the Strike Zone: The Mystery of America’s First Baseball Hero is a fascinating book, though it’s not quite the biography that it purports to be. Thomas W. Gilbert has woven an eminently fascinating tale. I breezed through it in a few days and enjoyed […]