Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

The book is fine. But it centers on the 1975 Texas Rangers, not baseball in general. It is interesting to read about Billy Martin getting fired and then hired a couple of weeks later by the Yankees. But there are no inside looks at what baseball was like in its last season prior to free agency. Nor does it really discuss how baseball changed once free agency became an accepted part of the game.

If you want to read about the 1975 season of the Texas Ranger's, then this book is for you. But if you want to read about what baseball was like prior to free agency, then keep looking.

This book begins with a review of the 1974 Oakland-LA World Series. When Catfish Hunter leaves the three-time World Champion A's due to a contract technicality,author and beat-writer Shropshire writes about how his hometown Texas Rangers can be considered favorites to win the 1975 AL West.

Shropshire does a terrific job of weaving significant events outside of the baseball world that year with his own and the Rangers' escapades during what became a disappointing season for the Rangers.

This book brought back fond memories of teams that were built from strong minor league systems--A's, Reds, Royals, Dodgers, et.al. before the Free Agency era led to the destruction of fine organizations (Pirates, Reds, Royals) and the continued dominance of the large market teams.

"This is a baseball biography. Not of a player, but of a season."

Mike Shropshire's newest book focuses on one of his favorite subjects....the 1975 Texas Rangers and how terrible they were. The Last Real Season actually looks at major league baseball during the 1975 season. Back in the good old days when major league players made an average of $26,000 a season, and negotiated their contracts without agents. Billy Martin (just crowned Manager of the Year for the previous season) was at the helm of the Rangers...the team who had managed a second place finish the season before. The very Texas Rangers being mentioned as a World Series possibility. With amazing recall for someone who imbibed his way through the baseball season, Shropshire recalls those days when players played for the love of the game, the drug of choice was usually on ice after the game, and the players modeled $49.00 leisure suits in the pages of the local papers. The Last Real Season holds nothing back, the infighting, the power struggles, the skirt chasing, the drinking, the weirdness that was the 1975 Texas Rangers (but no mention of the player who kept a gun with him in the bullpen or the night a batboy grabbed an open mike during a national telecast and asked "hey, Cosell, how does it feel to know the whole state of Texas hates your f@!!**@* guts?). Under the "leadership" of pugnacious Billy Martin (who was harder to control then any of the team) the Rangers began to implode before the All-Star break. Shropshire also serves as an eyewitness to Martin's final days (and possible behind the scenes high jinks that landed him at the helm of the Yankees a few day later) ...........and provides the ultimate fan quote "... I guess if you can get rid of the president of the United States, you can get rid of Billy Martin, too."



The Last Real Season is the chronicle of a bygone era. Shrophire looks at the entire 1975 season throughout the major leagues. The 1975 season was the last year before free agency took hold, when polyester ruled, baseball had many larger than life personalities and the hope for the Rangers to make it to the World Series was not yet tainted by years of "almost made it". This book covers one of my favorite times. I worked at the big orange monstrosity called Arlington Stadium and suffered through 1975 with all the rest of the fans (and people who had to be at the fall games when the season was already over). Working for the Rangers for the three years before I moved away to go college, was the best job for a baseball loving Texas girl and provided me with memories of people, a time and a place never to be seen again. The Last Season brought it all back and made me laugh out loud.

...on page 42, there is an easily avoided mistake. Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson were teammates on the Yankees, and NOT the Indians. They were never teammates on the Indians. According to Retrosheet, Kekich was traded to the Indians on June 12, 1973 and was released by them on March 28, 1974. Peterson was traded to the Indians on April 24, 1974 (in the Chris Chambliss trade) and afterwards was traded by the Indians to the Texas Rangers on May 28, 1976. Nit-picking, to be sure, but it makes you wonder what else is wrong.

Calling this book the "Last Real Season" gives it more breadth than it actually has. As a Texas Rangers beat writer, Mike Shropshire just didn't have the exposure to the other 23 teams to give the fun little insights he does for his home team. I loved Seasons in Hell so much that I bought the paperback even after I bought the hardcover, but "Last Real Season" left me a little disappointed. I guess the only way it would have been able to provide me with what I was looking for would have been if Shropshire asked a beat writer from each team to have a few drinks with him and to assess his team's 1975 performance, warts and all. Oh well, I'd give Shropshire another chance if he wants to do another book, which I think might be titled "Lucchesi and Lenny- A Love Story." In the meantime, I'll be checking out my 1975 Topps set and trying to figure out which Ranger tried to play matchmaker for him.

I bought this product as a gift, and the service you give is unbeatable. Quick, easy and never a problem.

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Ruth Petrik

very fun and quick read. almost as good as season's in hell. can't wait for his next book!