Customer Reviews

Mickey Mantle Day in Amsterdam

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All right, every red-blooded American male baby-boomer dreamed sometime of having Mickey Mantle come and spend the day at his house and impress the other kids in the neighborhood. It takes an author with the incredible skill of Jim LaBate to transform that fantasy into one of the most charming books of the era. Each character is so cleverly crafted, and the dialogue so genuine, that you almost feel he is writing about real people. No single neighborhood could possibly boast of so many genuine eccentrics! (Could it?)

Mickey Mantle Day in Amsterdam is another gem from the pen of Jim LaBate, author of the tender Lets Go Gaels. Once again, the author draws on his love of sports and the fond recollections of his childhood to evoke a bygone era, the pre-video era of wholesome heroes and hot summer afternoons when kids everywhere swarmed the baseball diamonds, gear in hand, and every patch of grass was its own field of dreams.

The generous heart of this story beats loudest and strongest in the young narrators exuberant admiration and respect for the singularly great Mickey Mantle and in the vicarious joy the reader experiences as twelve-year-old Jumbos ordinary world is transformed by an unexpected overnight visit from the extraordinary Yankee slugger.

This is not a story of hero worship for LaBates Mantle is life-sized and as common as a next-door neighbor as he plays ball with Jumbo and his gang of friends. Instead, what is ennobled is the broad hearted zeal of youth and its passionate embrace of a game that once defined everything that was great about small-town America. And therein lies the magic and the pleasure of this timeless tale. It captures the beauty and joy of a young boys heart without pretence or precocity so that, after reading it, I felt as if these boys, and the Mick himself, might have even been a part of my own childhood.

But there is a bittersweet cloud behind the joy of LaBates silver-lined fable. Two weeks ago I made a pilgrimage back to my hometown and visited what had been my field of dreams, a broad green expanse with four full ball diamonds, one in each corner, and four full outfields converging and blending together in the middle into one calm sea of grass. It was a beautiful summer day, about two in the afternoon, when I pulled into the lot beside where the dugouts and the water bubbler used to be. On any given summer day when I was twelve, back in 1963, we might have had to rise early to be certain we could get an open field for our daily pick-up ballgames, choosing new sides throughout the day just to make it more interesting. The fields still looked healthy and well-maintained. I got out of my car, walked to home plate and gazed across the fields. There was not a soul in sight.