Customer Reviews

Squeeze Play: A Novel

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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

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...

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.

This book is obseen just to be so and for no other reson. I wasnt even able to finnish it. One of the worst books I have see.

I borrowed this book hoping to find some plausible explanation for one of the most glaring double standards in our country of equality. Jane Leavy does not miss the opportunity to revel in the ludicrous right of women to march in to men's locker rooms after a game. Jane Chastain, sports writer, said it best -

'I was never in favor of women going into men's locker rooms. You still will not find any men demanding access to the females' dressing rooms. They have not allowed male reporters in there. And yet on the other side, in the male locker room, everyone is afraid to say no. I think it shows that men have more respect for women than sometimes women do for men... It makes me embarrassed for my sex, quite frankly.'

Jane Leavys book is full of examples of perverted behavior by female sportswriters, reminiscent of Patti Sheas `Trip to Perversion' into the Dodgers locker room in 2002. Patti, overawed by the ridiculous fact that only women are allowed to hang out in the locker room of the opposite sex unrestricted, took full advantage to write of her degrading behaviour towards the athletes and demonstrate just how serious female sportswriters can be. One more in a host of examples as to why female reporters want to get in there after the game.

Female athletes have always been given a 30 minute closed locker room period for showering and changing or a separate press room. How ingenious. However, male athletes are not afforded the same level of respect and privacy, with any man who complains instantly struck down by a lawsuit for discrimination. Just compare NBA with WNBA media locker room policies, and its crystal clear. The policy has always been driven by the media and Leavy's book, based on her own perverted career, does little to explain, justify, defend or even question this double standard. Any attempt to give the men equality is met with shrieks of protest from, you guessed it, people like Jane Leavy.

Nick McAuley and Bob Hanna have written articles asking questions as to how women use equality to get into the mens locker room then turn around and ignore the double standard applied to female locker rooms. The question has continued to fall on deaf ears. The female reporters have only their own interests at heart. Respecting the player's privacy, or questioning why we even have a men's locker room if women are allowed to walk in, has never been an issue.

If you're looking for the answer in Squeeze Play, gents, look elsewhere. Jane Leavy is just another example of the feminist double standard and to what level of `professionalism' women like her, Patti, Kelly Anderson and Stephanie Salter can sink too.

Male reporters allowed unrestricted access to female athletes?!! Are you sick? That would be perverted, of course.