Squeeze Play: A Novel [Paperback]

Jane Leavy (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Leavy's hilarious debut about a female sportswriter's tribulations covering an expansion baseball team's first year is a strong early candidate for MVP of the 1990 sports novel season. A. B. (Ariadne Bloom) Berkowitz's troubles begin with a fundamental crisis ("alone with a locker room full of naked men I did not know") and get rapidly worse. The team, the Washington Senators, is horrible, and while its corrupt televangelist owner soon forbids the players to talk to A.B., they continue to attempt to gross her out at every opportunity. Her editor demands headlines, no matter at whose cost, her boyfriend finds solace in the arms of a young copy aide, and her best source on the team--an aging All-Star catcher--is becoming romantically interested. As raunchy as stories by Dan Jenkins and Peter Gent, as authentic as exposes by Jim Bouton and Jim Brosnin, this tale by a former sportswriter for the Washington Post will delight readers willing to accept a healthy dose of vulgarity with their humor, especially those who know and love the rhythms and complexities of the national pastime.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

This autobiographical first novel by Leavy, a former sportswriter for the Washington Post , is in the form of a baseball diary kept by A.B. Berkowitz, the female reporter covering the newly reborn Washington Senators, a team owned by a TV evangelist. The team breaks all previous records for ineptitude, but when A.B. persists in pointing this out, the team refuses to talk to her. She covers them nonetheless, breaking an occasional story, though torn between professsional obligations and dislike of violating the private confidences of players. There is a lot of foul locker room language and bawdiness, which may trouble some readers, but this is a funny, tender, true-to-life story of baseball, journalism, and war between the sexes. Recommended for your baseball lovers.
- Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ., Davenport, Ia.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (August 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060567740
• ISBN-13: 978-0060567743
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #862,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestseller Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy and the comic novel Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called "the best novel ever written about baseball." She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to1988, first in the sports section, then writing for the style section. She covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the paper. She wrote features for the style section about sports, politics, and pop culture, including, most memorably, a profile of Mugsy Bogues, the 5'3" guard for the Washington Wizards, which was longer than he is tall.


Before joining the The Washington Post, she was a staff writer at womenSports and Self magazines. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, The Village Voice, and The New York Daily News. Leavy's work has been anthologized in many collections, including Best Sportswriting, Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference, Child of Mine: Essays on Becoming a Mother, Nike Is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports, Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Sportswriting by Women, and Making Words Dance: Reflections on Red Smith, Journalism and Writing.


She grew up on Long Island where she pitched briefly and poorly for the Blue Jays of the Roslyn Long Island Little League. On her parents' first date, her father, a water boy for the 1927 New York football Giants, took her mother to a Brooklyn College football game. She retaliated by taking him to Loehmann's after the final whistle. It was a template for their 63-year union. As a child, Jane Leavy worshipped Mickey Mantle from the second-floor ballroom in the Concourse Plaza Hotel where her grandmother's synagogue held services on the High Holidays.


Jane Leavy attended Barnard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she wrote her master's essay (later published in The Village Voice) on Red Smith, the late sports columnist for The New York Times, who was her other childhood hero.


She has two adult children, Nick and Emma Isakoff, and she lives in Washington, DC, and Truro, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Baseball Novel...And More!, December 19, 2003

By 

W. C HALL (Newport, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Squeeze Play: A Novel (Paperback)

Most baseball fans with an interest in the game's history will remember that for the first 70 years of the twentieth century, the nation's capitol was represented by two American League clubs known as the Washington Senators. (Their moments of glory were few. The famous cry was: "Washington. First in War, First in Peace and Last in the American League.) But what about the third Senators franchise, born in 1989? You don't remember them? That's because, sadly, they only existed in the imagination of Jane Leavy and between the covers of this book.

"Squeeze Play" is a wild, bawdy, funny, true-to-life account of life in a big league clubhouse and in the sports department of a daily newspaper. Leavy, a former sportswriter and more recently the biographer of Sandy Koufax, draws on her own experiences, a passionate love of the game and a wild imagination to create one of the most entertaining baseball novels I've ever read.

I suppose I should add a cautionary note: "Squeeze Play" is not for the prudish. Sex and crude behavior are often on display (just as they are in the real world.) The book is told in the form of a diary of the Senators' first season, as chronicled by Leavy's alter-ego, A.B. Berkowitz. Berkowitz, who grew up worshipping Yankee Joey Proud (a fictional re-creation of Mickey Mantle) is about to find out if her love of the game will withstand close daily exposure to it...in particular, as practiced by this group of has-beens and never-weres. The team starts out the season challenging the record for most losses to begin a campaign and comes to the wire shadowing the 1962 Mets for the title of worst team of the modern era.

But this book is about a lot more than wins and losses on the field. Leavy has a lot to say about life, love, friendship, moral values and all the things that really matter....and she does it with an abundance of wit, style and humor.--William C. Hall

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unbe-bleeping-lievable!, September 12, 2003

By 

K. Wilcox (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Squeeze Play: A Novel (Paperback)

This book was awesome, simply awesome. As a female baseball fan, it was great to get a glimpse of these fictionalized baseball players through a fellow woman's perspective. It's one of those books that I couldn't put down, didn't want to finish, but had to finish because it was so GOOD. It has a little bit of everything - love, sex, sarcasm, slapstick, raunch, baseball, hilarity, thoughtfulness...

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars For lovers of raunch only, January 12, 2011

By 

Joel Sherman - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Squeeze Play: A Novel (Kindle Edition)

I have now read 4-5 books by women sports reporters. Some have been fiction, some non fiction. I've enjoyed them all, except for this book. The author starts the book by giving a description of all the male genitalia she has seen. The book never reaches a higher plane. There is no plot except in the loosest sense, a season in the life of a women reporter. This is supposed to be a humorous book, but the humor is so raunchy and juvenile, it's worse than watching endless repeats of Animal House. The fiction is also demeaning to ball players. You would think the reporters spend all their free time in the club house watching the guys shower. The players spend all their time sitting around nude, scratching themselves and playing crude tricks on each other and the reporter.
The book is a strange mixture of fiction and non fiction. The main characters are all fictitious but the author recalls many apparently true incidents from her childhood. She mixes this in with interviews with actual ball players such as Sammy Esposito and it's hard to figure out what's real and what's fiction. The second half of the book is a little better. At least there are some short plots that aren't all about the players' vulgarity. This book will not add to the esteem anyone holds athletes or reporters in. Buy it if you like raunch; avoid it if you like sports.