Customer Reviews

Slider

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

For a baseball fan, this book is awful, almost painful. It's pretty clear the author doesn't really understand baseball. The book is full of obvious errors. For example (from page 69):

"Scott Maloney, pumped up for the battle, came straight out and whacked a double off Fisher's second fastball, straight into the left-center gap. Ray Sweeney came up and took the first pitch, an inside fastball he banged right between the first and second baseman. This put runners and first and second."

Okay, a double followed by a single puts runners at first and second? A single on a pitch the batter "took"? Not only is the author clueless, but apparently no one bothered to employ an editor.

Not all of the baseball-related errors are this awful, but most of the baseball narrative has minor flaws, inconsistencies, and just doesn't sound right. I gave up after about a hundred pages, but according to other reviews the book gets worse as it goes along.

DON'T BOTHER WITH THIS BOOK!!

I was at my local library the other day and, since spring training had just started, I thought a baseball book woould be just the thing. But this is a bad book -- clichéd from beginning to end.

First of all, the reader doesn't get any real sense of place. The baseball league on the cape is just a stage set. It must be wonderful to play on the cape, by the beach, in the sunshine and salt air, in the balmy summer breezes, babes all over the place. You wouldn't know it to read this book. It has only the sketchiest sense of place.

The characters are cardboard through and through. The main character's baseball crisis is right out of a cartoon strip and not particularly believable. He shows no self awareness. So what if his coach is a jerk. So what if the coach says he's late when he's not. He's the coach. Don't contradict him. What an idiot. If coach wants to call your pitches, then throw what he calls. Get over it. The coach wants him to learn a slurve? Learn it. Wouldn't it be great to have another pitch. Ho doesn't have to abandon his slider.

The main character keeps calling his slider his "bread and butter" pitch during the conflict with his coach. I saw no evidence of that until the end of the book. He continually worried about it during his first season on the cape. If you can't throw your bread and butter pitch when you need it with 100% confidence in it, then maybe it's not your bread and butter pitch. The main character is the only character in the book who is fleshed out at all, and his loss of confidence is simply one among many plot devices and none of them is made to make much sense as anything else.

The laudatory quotes on the back were misleading. I saw them and thought I had a book worth reading. I should have looked closer -- from baseball players. Have you ever seen them interviewed? Until they retire and go on TV, nothing but clichés, just like this book. Book reviews? Only if they're by Moe Berg.

There are many smaller problems, too. Just as one example: the author takes the 'Wolves bus on a tour of Manhattan before the big game. There's a big crowd cheering for them at the "stop sign" at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. Stop sign? Put a stop sign there and midtown Manhattan will be gridlocked in fifteen minutes. Try stop light.

As another example: the Bombers owner shuts down the team after they lose. Who shuts down a major league team during the season? In fact, who shuts down a major league team, ever? Nobody's done that for over a hundred years. You sell the team. A team with a great stadium in Brooklyn ought to fetch a very nice price. Or you finally get good, knowledgeable baseball people working for you. You work to build teams. You work on a good minor league system. If you've overpaid for talent you suck it up or get rid of them and don't re-sign them. You sign some kids. If you're going to lose you might as well do it cheaply. You finish badly and you get good draft choices. You make some smart trades. You build from the ground up. What owner doesn't know this. Especially a self-made billionaire. Give us a break.

Maybe some of this is supposed to be funny. If so, Robinson missed any humor by a mile. He missed writing a good book by more than that.

It's difficult to believe anyone could write this badly. To fail to hold the reader's interest in a sports book, particuliarly a baseball book, is almost impossible. Sports have a built-in dramatic shape. Plus you are usually singing to the choir. Robinson, however, has through maudlin sentimentality, grandiose hyperpole and ponderous repetition, drained the life out of this story.
The descriptions of baseball's skills and techniques are so sadly inaccurate only someone who has has never thrown a ball or swung a bat could have written them.

Patrick Robinson is obviously a Brit writing about the American Pastime. There are many basic flaws in his description of the game's play-by-play. From a batter sharply pulling an outside fastball to a runner only advancing from second to third on a double, the fundamentals of baseball are repeatedly broken. Many times, his descriptions of the game's action will confuse you.

Of course, that confusion is nothing compared to the disbelief the last third of this novel instills in you. The outlandish, drawn out, fantasy ending to this story may cause a violent reaction from your gut...

When I read the author bio, I asked myself what a submarine expert would be doing writing a baseball novel. The Seawolves were obviously a fanatsy. In just about every game they one in the ninth inning and came back from a ten-run deficit. The language also detracted from the book and make you feel like these people were being paid to swear at each other. The author obviously knew nothing about baseball and made everyone in the story magically rich to solve all the problems. It was rather condusing considering they covered two season's worth of rosters plus many additional players on other teams. I had to backtrack so I would know who everyone was. Otherwise, if you want to read a baseball book and have nothing else to read, this book is perfect for you.

My "bad book" antennae were alerted on page 1 of this tome when I noticed a rather pathetic typo (Mississippi is misspelled), and nothing on the succeeding 400 pages allowed them to relax, even though I went into "skim for big events" mode about halfway in.

This is a bad novel, with all the authenticity of hair in a can, and as flat as the troublesome slider thrown by the nominal hero of the story. The baseball action is described in aimless, excessive, and error-prone detail, almost every plot line is preposterous and full of holes, and the dialogue reads like something out of a Chip Hilton story. Examples beyond what has been offered in other reviews:

- Hard luck mother of catcher despairs of his ever getting started with a law career if he wastes a couple of precious years trying to play baseball. Yep, those law firms hate to hire former athletes...

- A pitcher from a college baseball powerhouse goes from summer league MVP to being essentially cut from his team, AND NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT IT. Did Einstein predict the presence of media black holes, too?

- A pitcher (from Stanford, no less) continues to pitch through pain; apparently the lure of the Ted Kennedy Trophy (I'm not making this up) is far greater than the $2 MM+ signing bonus he'll get for being a first round draft pick.

Ugh. Even the "local color" of the summer league scene, which was the reason I picked up the book in the first place, is trotted out with a sort of Truman Show kind of gloss, and goes nowhere. No runs, no hits, and too many errors.

Patrick Robinson's "Slider" is like a cool glass of lemonade on a warm summer's night. It satisfies. If you are looking for a baseball book, look someplace else. This is a summer story about a Louisiana farm boy who pitches summer ball in the Cape Marlin League. It is a story about his Farmer's Almanac dad struggling to make ends meet from the sugar cane harvest while waiting and praying for the drilling crews on the western end of the farm to find a natural gas strike. It is a story about his teammate, the catcher from Chicago, and his music teacher mother who detests that baseball is drawing her son away from law school and an escape from poverty.

The book is chock full of late inning heroics by collegians trying to get noticed by the major league scouts who camp out in the summer on Cape Marlin (Cape Cod) claiming to work for a living charting players and clocking the speed of pitches. The innings and games move quickly through the book, never lingering too long to be dissected by baseball purists.

I like Robinson's work. He doesn't overpower you with a fastball, but his "Slider" is good enough stuff to keep you reading and enjoying until the end.

I'm somewhat taken aback by the negativity of some of the reviews that other readers have posted regarding this book. Yes, there are inconsistencies but this isn't Bill James and the Baseball Abstract. At its heart it's kind of a romantic novel that uses baseball as its backdrop in writing about setting goals and reaching them.

Focusing on the baseball content of this book and then criticizing it for it's lack of accuracy, would be about as stupid as watching Get Smart to do research on the CIA.

Instead, I would suggest that readers focus on some of the relationships between the characters in this book. The interplay between star pitcher Jack Farber with his father and catcher make for great reading. The same is true for the descriptions of the Northeast and some of the some small cities the Cape League plays their games.

Where the book does tend to fall apart is at the end. The writer attempts to make a negative statement about the attitudes of professional athletes by concocting an unrealistic ending that is far too predictable.

Still, I enjoyed reading the book and would recommend it to most people. In fact, I would even it recommend it to most baseball fans with the exception of those geeks that spend way too much time with box scores rather than with real life.

Finally, another recommendation for a fun baseball book would be Summerland by Michael Chabon.

Patrick Robinson is known for his Submarine books, including 'The Shark Mutiny' and 'HMS Unseen' and I presumed that 'Slider' would be another of these. However I was rather surprised to discover it's actually a novel about baseball. Being English I know almost nothing about Baseball except that it evolved from our game Rounders and that it's hugely popular in America. I decided to read the book and see if there was enough of a story in the pages to overcome the fact that I'm not a Baseball fan.

The answer was yes, with some reservations. Firstly I found that it wasn't always easy to work out what was going on. For someone who hasn't grown up in a Baseball environment there are a lot of things about the game that are difficult to get a handle on. There were vast amounts of names of former baseball players in this story which of course meant nothing to me. The cast of characters is necessarily very wide but there is also continual reference to the Baseball 'greats' of former years - I imagine baseball fans would know these but the average reader possibly not. It was often hard to keep track of who was who whilst following the story. I also found Patrick Robinson's penchant for making political and tub-thumpingly nationalistic comments throughout his writing as annoying as ever.

The story follows Jack Faber who is accepted to Seapuit baseball camp for 10 weeks of the summer, along with Tony Garcia, as they hope to attract the scouts for the main teams whilst they play there. Jack's father has brought him up with his love of the game and is hugely supportive of his son; Tony's mother Natalie wants Tony to get a law degree and sees baseball as a dangerous distraction from his studies and one that might cost the family dearly financially. I found myself rather siding with Tony's mum originally - the whole concept of a baseball scholarship to a university is alien to Brits (our scholarships are only ever academic) and the importance placed on the game by all the people around them seemed rather overmuch. However, comparing this with football in the UK, I could see the similarities and how it could become so all-encompassing.

The novel is in three sections, the first being the initial summer camp at Seapuit, the second section being the return to Seapuit (after Jack has lost his pitching abilities) and the third section a pure fantasy on behalf of the author where the Seawolves (the Seapuit team) play against one of the major teams. The second half of the book also had another fantasy element where Jack's father becomes suddenly rich and the worries of the first half of the book, when they had no money, are all over. This felt rather like cheating to me, story-wise, as the amount of money Ben Faber received was so enormous.

There's a thread throughout the novel of Ben and Natalie's romance, a plot element about Jack losing his ability to pitch, but most of the actual story is describing different games that the Seawolves play, often in intricate detail. The dialogue between the Coach and his team and the young men themselves often felt very stilted and unrealistic to me and the characters themselves seemed rather cardboard cut-out to me. However, despite all this, and despite the huge amount of baseball in this book, I did enjoy reading it. I felt the ending was far too unrealistic and pure wish-fulfilment for the author but it was a reasonable read, even for someone who knows nothing about baseball (although who now knows a great deal more!) Whether this book lives up to the hype on its cover, "you won't read a better novel about baseball. Ever." is debatable, whether its portrayal of the game is accurate and realistic has been challenged, but it's still a reasonable read.

Originally published for Curled Up With A Good Book, www.curledup.com. © Helen Hancox 2007

The book arrived quickly and was as described by the seller. It was in good condition.