5.0 out of 5 stars
Heres a deal, April 4, 2002
This review is from: Sports Illustrated: Baseball (Hardcover)
Sometimes a deal comes along you can't pass up.
Just over a year ago, I was browsing around on Amazon.com, checking out one of their bargain book deals.
God, some of the things people write books about. Let's see, cookbooks, how to wire teeth, how to jump-start your car with a pencil. Ah, here we are. Sports.
One of these so-called "bargain books" was "Sports Illustrated Baseball: Four decades of Sports Illustrated's finest writing on America's Favorite Pastime." Yeah, long title, I know, but if you can find this book anywhere, it's well worth the search, not to mention the [money], plus [money] for shipping or whatever it was I paid for it.
In hindsight, I may have paid 50 clams for this book, given its humor, intensity and raw truth offered by some of the best sports writers in the business.
Mark Mulvoy, SI's managing editor, prefaces the collection with an introduction of his own, asking, "Why does baseball inspire such wonderful writing? Red Smith had a very simple answer to that question. `Today's game,' he once wrote, `is always different from yesterday's game.'"
The articles are as different as one game to the next, and read more like stories, vignettes grouped into chapters titled Spring, Summer, Fall, Players, Management, Milestones, They Also Serve and The Game.
The oldest piece in the book was originally penned in the August 23, 1954 edition of SI. No single era's tales are less fascinating than another's, but the evolution of the tale is quite intriguing.
The authors range from Peter Gammons to George Plimpton to Frank Deford. This collection is filled with jewels of varying length and subject matter. Rick Reilly's "An American Classic" allows us to catch a glimpse of a Texas teen phenom and his life off the baseball field, while, at the same time, he's chasing a national prep record for consecutive wins.
"Yogi," by Roy Blount, Jr., takes us inside one of the game's sharpest minds and offers a hilarious dichotomy of Yogi Berra's quotes and sayings of the world's famous Hindu Yogis:
"The time is now and now is the time." - Yogi Bhajan
"You mean right now?" - Yogi Berra when someone asked him what time it was.
But perhaps the most engaging and awe-inspiring tale is Steve Rushin's "A Series to Savor," chronicling the 1991 World Series. Atlanta versus Minnesota. A seven game series. Rushin writes, "There were five one-run duels, four of them won on the game's final play, three extended to extra innings."
In the piece, we get an inside look at the series that reduced grown men to tears, ill health and rashes and caused them to feel and act like young boys on the sandlot.
We need stories like this to recall when Atlanta began their remarkable run in the 1990s, with their otherworldly pitching staff, which still has not let up today.
We need stories like this to remember how extraordinary players like Kirby Puckett were, taken from the game far too soon because of glaucoma. This 5-foot-8 piece of granite practically made a living by bringing potential home runs to centerfield back to the playing field, and his play in the 1991 Fall Classic alone may justify his place in Cooperstown.
Bookending Mulvoy's intro wonderfully is novelist William Soroyan's reflection on the game: baseball's innate ability to keep the viewer in his seat.
In Soroyan's words, "From the first pitch to the last out, the caring continues. With a score of 6-0, two outs, two strikes, nobody on, only an average batter at bat, it is still possible, and sometimes necessary, to believe something can happen - for the simple reason that is has happened before, and very probably will happen again."
So, go ahead, storm your local bookstore, hit the websites `til they crash, demand your right to have this collection. Because with more labor problems looming ominously on the horizon after this year's World Series, books like this treasure may be all we, as baseball fan, have for a while.
Sean Murphy is the Sports Writer for the Oroville Mercury-Register...
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