Customer Reviews

How Life Imitates the World Series (The Penguin sports library)

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This is the first of several superb baseball narratives by Tom Boswell of the Washington Post. Moving around the major leagues, Boswell speaks with players, coaches, scouts, executives, etc. Among the stars he interviews are Reggie Jackson, Tommy John, Rod Carew, and others, and readers come away learning something every time. The book is a bit dated and Boswell doesn't spread his time equally between every team. Still, this is a remarkably readable and informative book for baseball fans. Readers should also see his later books (WHY TIME BEGINS ON OPENING DAY, HEART OF THE ORDER) as well as the similar efforts by Roger Angell.

Baseball rewards attention like no other sport, and no baseball writer today is more attentive - or funnier or more loving - than Thomas Boswell.
In this collection of already classic pieces he brings to life such superstars as Reggie Jackson, Pete Rose, Tommy John and Rod Carew; he muses on the art of the spitball, the Big Bang Theory of run scoring, and Earl Weaver and the Baltimore Orioles' winning ways; and he evokes the texture of baseball from the sandlots to the minors to Cuba to the majors.

"How Life Imitates the World Series" is a collection of 34 baseball essays. Each of the essays explores some aspect of our national pastime -- a team, a player, a classic game or series. It was a fun book to read in 2010. The stories were published in 1982, so most of the commentary is a few decades old. It's obvious that the game has evolved a lot since the early '80s, but its essence remains the same.

It's clear that Boswell has a keen knowledge of the game, and ample talents to convey that knowledge through his writing. As a journalist, he was interacting with players very closely and he certainly got to know some of them well. I thought the best essays are those about the mercurial superstars of the day: Reggie Jackson, Pete Rose and Earl Weaver, among others. Boswell is careful not to vilify anyone, nor to throw them too many bouquets. It comes across as reasonably well balanced, and quite interesting if you've followed the game for a number of years.

I suspect that "How Life Imitates the World Series" would be a tedious read for people who aren't big fans of the game. But for those who follow baseball closely, and who have done so for a long time, it's an enjoyable book to read any time of year.

Thomas Boswell is certainly the best sports writer of the '80s and this collection of baseball essays are wondrous. We are also happy that being based in DC prior to the Expos relocating there as the Nats, he was on the Earl Weaver era Baltimore Orioles beat. Read his succinctly titled "Why Baltimore Wins More Games Than Anybody Else" and shed a tear now for how bad the O's are. Where have you gone Brooks and Frank Robinson?

There so much great in here that even as I write this in 2009, it's worth going back and reading. Boswell writes some terrific pieces on Latin baseball--an area of the baseball map still largely overlooked by American-based sportwriters.

Definitely the BEST book on baseball in the '80s.

(Why does the listing say this paperback is only 30 pages long. It isn't. I don;t have my copy right at hand but it's a normal 200 plus page paperback.)

As I've gotten older, I've discovered I'd rather read about baseball than watch it on TV. Maybe it's because I was spoiled growing up on the 1970s/early 1980s version, which didn't have month-long postseasons, steroid rumors, and the extreme small-market/big-market imbalance. Thomas Boswell's "How Life Imitates The World Series" would seem a good fit for me then, as it covers exactly the period when I cared most about the game.

Consisting of a number of baseball-player profiles and other pieces, many of which appear a little too long for Boswell's 30-plus-year main employer The Washington Post (he was also writing for magazines like Playboy back then), "How Life Imitates The World Series" was published in 1982 when stars like Rod Carew and Tom Seaver were still going concerns. Boswell spends a lot of time around them and other Major League players, but also takes sidetrips to Little League games and a winter league in Puerto Rico.

Boswell's stories are interesting and pleasantly told but they don't reach out and grab you across the mists of time. They were written for contemporary audiences, and Boswell's writing betrays this with references to events of the time that will likely fly over the heads of most readers now. More problematically, Boswell doesn't work too broadly. His interviews seem to center around a small group of superstars, guys like Seaver, Pete Rose, George Brett. Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver gets so many quotes he seems almost worthy of a co-author's credit.

At one point, in a vibrant if light profile on Reggie Jackson, Boswell notes the time when Jackson approached him, pointed to a paragraph in a column Boswell had just written about him, and said just two words: "So true." The paragraph was not altogether flattering, so Boswell sees it as making a point about Jackson's integrity.

But it makes another point to me: That Boswell, while not a flatterer, was writing with some dominating concern about what players would think. Sports columnists aren't supposed to care about this stuff, but Boswell does, or at least seemed to at this time. He's not burning bridges with people, even harder cases like the ornery pitcher Steve Carlton. That comes across most strongly in a soft-soap profile on Pete Rose, whom Boswell plays up like an avatar of honesty though later events proved otherwise. That essay also offers up too many puns on Rose's last name.

Most of the articles here are better than that. The two best articles in this book are really great, keepers in any collection. One is a statistical argument for something Boswell calls Total Average, a way of measuring offensive production that Boswell invented and believes works better in that regard than basic batting average. I think it does, too, and Boswell explains it in simple, entertaining style.

The other keeper here is a long profile on Bill Veeck, the colorful baseball executive who Boswell finds living a painful but still cheery life in retirement. "For thirty-five years, with various hiatuses for exile or illness, Veeck has been both baseball's most intellectual sage and its most gleefully vulgar wizard," Boswell writes at the outset, then proceeds to lay out the milestones of Veeck's career with the subject himself providing color commentary, in between gasps from his breathing device and a visit to a local bar.

Reading Boswell's book was a modest but solid pleasure for me, being someone who knew the time it is from. Would someone without that background enjoy it as much? I suspect not, but the good pieces are good enough for people willing to read yesterday's news.

Boswell is one of the all time best sports writers and this is one of his best works. What makes Boswell's writing so memorable is that he writes about how sport discloses (exposes)the character of the people who play the game. Highly recommended. Mark Friedman