Customer Reviews

Good Enough to Dream

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

With the explosion of coverage of minor-league baseball over the past several years, it is hard to remember a time the game did not merit a national nod on ESPN and regional-cable outlets.

Roger Kahn takes the reader back to that time in Good Enough to Dream. In 1983, the best-selling author is looking to purchase a minor-league team and ends up with the Utica Blue Sox in the Class A short-season New York-Penn League.

Without an affiliation with a major-league club that can stock the club with up-and-coming rookies and help underwrite other expenses, Kahn builds his team with minor-league cast-offs and undrafted players.

Kahn masterfully chronicles the building of the club and the frustrations & joys that go with a field of dreams for those chasing that one break or who want one final season before hanging up the spikes.

Though the transportation for road games is in an old school bus and the stadiums are hardly modern, Kahn links the reader not only to the child's vision of one day becoming a major leaguer and hitting that homer in the World Series, but importantly shows why we should aim for the stars in the batter's box of life.

Roger Kahn's lyrical narrative is not a page turner. Rather it slowly sucks you into the story with wonderful analogies, good charachter description and a flat out good sports story to tell.

It is the story of a baseball dreamer who decides to explore the sport first had running a bankrupt team in habited by an interesting roster of charachters. Whats great is that the author seems to know going in, that the business, money, and personell side of baseball will be a rough ride that might tarnish his school boy image of the sport. But he takes the plunge anyway _ almost as if saying I love this sport so much I want to see it all _ good bad and funny.

It has a happy ending too.

Though a little paternalistic, this is a baseball book I pick up every few seasons. Roger Kahn follows the fortunes of the Utica Blue Sox and makes you care about the results of the 1983 New York Penn League Class A championship. The relationships in this book work, because they are frankly about work. Anybody who has been forced into tight living, or working quarters with a group who share skills, if not temprament can relate to the players, management and hangers-on who populate this rich story. The life lessons go down easy, the epiphanies are done lightly, the love of the game shines brightly. The title, spoken by a minor member of the minor league team, is another of this sweet stories many hits

Having played for Coach Gattis in college I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Ten years may have mellowed the man some, but, I could feel the same intensity from the book that he brought to the field. The book really captures the essence of what it is to be a ballplayer that is a border-line "pro". Or, as the title aptly states "Good Enough to Dream".

...anything about minor league ball. no matter how great a fan you are of mlb, even if you've followed a season or two of japanese ball or watched some action in the caribbean, the giant stream of talent that flows through the minors is probably invisible to you. in fact, unless you have a minor-league team in your home town, i'll bet you've never seen a game.
pity. in the giant caste system of baseball, nothing matters but getting to the show. but there would scarcely be a show were it not for the training and tempering provided by teams like the utica blue sox.
even that central place in the workings of the game wouldn't make this a great book if it weren't written by Roger Kahn, whose heart-breaking Boys of Summer may be one of the most delicious American history books ever. Kahn is a master and the fantasy that he acts out for all of us in Good Enough to Dream is a masterpiece.


Lynn Hoffman, author of The New Short Course in Wine

Lyrical, hilarious in parts, and true-blue as the sky over central New York in September, Roger Kahn's story of the trials, tribulations and all-around fun of owning a minor league baseball team is a joy to read.
I've read it twice, and enjoyed it as much the second time as the first.

In 1983 Roger Kahn went in search of a minor league baseball team to buy. After his first choices fell through, he ended up owner and president of the Class A Utica Blue Sox in the New York-Penn League. Lacking a major league affiliation, he put together a rag tag group of players who had been dropped by various major league club's minor league affiliates or who were never drafted. This book establishes Kahn's life long love of baseball and then follows the Blue Sox from opening day to the final game of the 1983 season. Many books on baseball have used this inside the clubhouse format. Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" and Pat Jordan's "A False Spring" come readily to mind. "Good Enough to Dream" is different from the others in that it is told from the perspective of the front office.

The machinations of the front office, the relationships among the players and the manager, the descriptions of the long bus rides, the dreams and hopes of the players, and the hardships that all involved are willing to withstand for the love of the game are all interesting and well told. The one area which failed to hold my attention was the long narrative of the Blue Sox's run for the league title. Kahn attempted to heighten the drama with repeated illustrations of why the team felt that the league office was working against their success and he left no doubt about the strong will to succeed that drove everyone in the organization, but in the final analysis I just couldn't seem to care enough about who won the 1983 New York-Penn League championship to do more than skim through the last one hundred or so pages. That having been stated, this is a very good book about a part of baseball that few fans ever get a chance to see.