Customer Reviews

Misfits! Baseball's Worst Ever Team

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If they give PhDs in the history of America's sport, Tom Hetrick should get one. MISFITS! Baseball's Worst Team Ever is the most thoroughly researched and well-chronicled book about baseball I've ever read. Hetrick is deft in several ways that make this book work - weaving anecdotes, press clippings and an unwavering chronology into a story so poignant in its haplessness that it becomes heroic. They become heroes, those Cleveland Spiders of a hundred and three seasons ago! There are several reasons why this book works: First, I enjoyed Hetrick's diversity of names and descriptions for the constituent parts of the game. How many different ways can you say, "struck out," or "pitched," or "caught a fly ball," in a narrative that demands it hundreds of times? An example, said of a struggling Spider pitcher: he was "offering up fat peaches to smash around the ballyard." Pure poetry. Secondly, the droll excerpts from rags of the day - in many cases the Cleveland Plain Dealer - whose clips still sting a century later, yet resonate in a strangely humorous way. "The home team worked hard to find a way not to win," is typical of the sports writing of the day, and it's hilarious. But thirdly, and mostly, Hetrick has made something to celebrate out of this great disaster of a sports club. What must have been unremittingly ugly in its day - this unlikely accretion of hooligans and miscreants and its 20-134 record - means that in another place, at another time, you and I, Joe Sixpacks, could play pro ball. Read this book, and welcome to The Show. Thank you, Dr. Hetrick, for exhuming the Spiders.

Misfits is one delicious Bratwurst of a book, heaped high with rich characterizations and topped with juicy anecdotes. It's a cure for those whose favorite team is having a slump...because no one's ever had a slump like the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. Author Hetrick's enthusiasm for the subject is only surpassed by his exhaustive research. He walks the reader through the Cleveland Spiders' hilariously awful season (chapter titles follow the team month by painful month, for example, "May, And Still They Lose"). Hetrick has scoured the papers and journals of that era and includes numerous quotes about the team. My favorite comes from the May 13th, 1899 issue of The Sporting News, "The players are doing the best they can and only ask that the spectators use no fire arms."