The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 - When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

'One of the funniest baseball books I've ever read' - NEW YORK DAILY NEWS 'Before money corrupted the game, players had to corrupt it themselves. Mike Shropshire's account of baseball's raucous pre-agent era will leave any fan laughing and smiling at the bad old days' - DETROIT FREE PRESS

Product Description

There are baseball books and there are baseball books.

But for the baseball cognoscenti, there are just a few "must-have" classics: BALL FOUR by Jim Bouton. THE LONG SEASON by Jim Brosnan. WILLIE'S TIME by Charles Einstein. And SEASONS IN HELL by Mike Shropshire, which was a hilarous first-person account of Mike's travails serving as a daily beat writer covering the hapless 1972 Texas Rangers.

Now, in The Last Real Season, Shropshire captures the essence of a different time and different place in baseball, when the average salary for major leaguers was only $27,600...when the ballplayers' drug of choice was alcohol, not steroids...when major leaguers sported tight doubleknit uniforms over their long-hair and Afros...and on July 28th, 1975, the day that famed Detroit resident Jimmy Hoffa went missing, the Detroit Tigers started a losing streak of 19 games in a row. On the day that the Tigers blew a 4-run lead in the bottom of the ninth, Shropshire recalls: "I drank three bottles of Stroh's beer in less than a minute and wrote that 'Jimmy Hoffa will show up in the left field stands with Amelia Earhart as his date before the Tigers will win another game.'"

And so it goes. Filled with just the kind of wonderful baseball stories that real fans crave, this is the funniest baseball book of the year.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (May 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446401544
• ISBN-13: 978-0446401548
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #407,918 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ah, Major League Baseball--with all its warts--1975 style, May 21, 2008

By	armchairinterviews.com (Minnesota) - See all my reviews

Today in major league baseball the use of steroids is rampant, while the average salary of even a journeyman ballplayer is half a million dollars. This has not always been the case. As recently as 1975, before the advent of free agency, the average professional baseball player's salary in the majors was $27,600. Except for a handful of superstars, baseball players had other jobs or at least played in Latin America in the off-season to make ends meet.

Mike Shropshire, a former Fort Worth Star-Telegram sports writer, recounts the highlights of the 1975 season in his personal journal as he follows the trials and tribulations of the Texas Rangers and their American League opponents.

Shropshire writes in a lighthearted gonzo style, where his antics are as much of the story as the events and the people he is covering. This cynical offhanded approach is incorporated with a tendency toward exaggeration, which is the want of many a sportswriter. What is clear is that players of that day and the journalists who covered them, drank to excess, smoked or chewed tobacco incessantly, and chased women with abandon. It would also appear that at least in the recent past, baseball was rife with more than their fair share of characters.

Shropshire's chronicle is not for the faint of heart, the politically correct or the prudish. But if you long for the day when booze was the drug of choice, and the ranks of baseball consisted of men like Ferguson Jenkins, Sparky Anderson, Reggie Jackson, Charlie Finley, and the irrepressible and mercurial Billy Martin - this may be the book for you.

Armchair Interviews agrees.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Billy Ball Redux, November 3, 2008

By	Scott A. Kallick "Pugwash" (Pittsburgh) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For anyone who has had the pleasure to read "Seasons In Hell", baseball can never really look the same. Told from a boozy, shambling perspective of a fly-on-the-wall beat writer for the Texas Rangers in their inaugural seasons, it exposes the players as less than serious competitors, and the managers as part strategist, part baby sitter, part comedian, and part cheap psycho-analyst.

"The Last Real Season" begins with more lofty intentions, with a forward from the great manager Earl Weaver on the competiveness of the 1975 season, and the quality of hunger of the athletes pre-free agency.

It then springs into the contrast between the Big Red Machine of the Cincinatti Reds and the Boston Red Sox and Yankees and Orioles and fading dynasty of the Oakland A's of the American League. It talks of the changes big money would bring to baseball, and ultimately the corporate aspect would ruin both the fun of the game, and the on-field product.

However, it does not sustain this track at all. Mike Shropshire goes into a continuation of his first book, and picks up his beat of the Rangers from where it left off.

Still, this is not a bad thing. He shows the contention minded Rangers and their mercurial manager, Billy Martin self destruct. Along the way, we see the hilarity of Shropshire's own actions, the quirky nature of many of the teammates, from Willie Davis, the zen meister, to Mike Kekich, the wife swapper, to Steve Hargan, equally hilarious in this book as the last, and of course, Billy Martin, who is the proverbial train wreck you can't shield your eyes from.

In many ways, every bit as funny as its' prequel, missing the shock value, because it is more of same.

I would have liked to have seen a prologue detailing the careers and lives of the principals after the 1975 season ended, as well as some information on Shropshire's post beat career, as well.

In many ways, these stories bring out the joyousness of pro baseball. On seeing how futility plays out among the players, how second division managers cope with disappointment and frustration, and why they continue to come back for more punishment, even before the money kept them there.

Recommended reading for any pure baseball fan.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Sorry, But I'm Disappointed, August 18, 2008

By	C. W. Emblom "Bill Emblom" (Ishpeming, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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Sequels rarely live up to the original. Mike Shropshire wrote one of the funniest baseball books I have ever read in Seasons in Hell. I enjoy anecdotes about players more than I do baseball statistics, but I found The Last Real Season to become a tiresome read of profanity and players over-indulging in alcohol and other drugs. To me at least I found my interest waning by the time I read two-thirds of the book. I imagine another author could write a book of any team and include similar anecdotes. I realize the story of the Texas Rangers of 1975 is a light-hearted effort, but I personally prefer a book about The Summer of '41, The Boys of Summer, October, 1964, or The Tigers of '68. I brought three copies of The Last Real Season prior to reading it, one for myself, another for a friend, and a third for the school library. My mistake! It was three copies too many.