Customer Reviews

Storied Stadiums: Baseball's History Through Its Ballparks

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Being somewhat of a baseball ballpark fan, I eagerly awaited the publication of this book. To admit to my disappointment in it is even more frustrating. There are too many factual errors that even a fan like myself could not miss.

Some of the errors include:

The wrong location for Washington Park in Brooklyn (page 22).

Saint Louis described as the westernmost city in baseball until 1958 (page 57; don't tell any of the fans of the Kansas City A's).

The 1919 White Sox at white cubed Comiskey (page 60; The ballpark was not white-washed until several more DECADES had passed).

The 1902 AL Browns left Baltimore for St. Louis (Wrong, they left Milwaukee, page 131)

Some of the errors in the appendix include:

Roosevelt Stadium was in New Jersey, not Brooklyn (page 570; The address given was for the Dodgers corporate office).

And this chestnut from page 568- League Park (Cleveland) opened on April 29, 1901 with a 5-4 victory over Indianapolis!

I actually have started to tape little post-it markers on the pages with the errors. With all the errors that I have spotted, I am uncertain as to the correctness of all the information.

"Storied Stadiums" is the most poorly written book I've read in quite some time. To illustrate, here's one example among many:

"Note merely how offspring spurred the pastime's throb. Brooklyn baseball began a century before proving that even in the fifty-second World Series-Game Seven, October 4, 1955, Brooklyn 2, Yankees 0, after losing seven straight Series, five to New York-a franchise could run into luck" (page 20).

One must work extremely hard to deconstruct the author's circuitous (and sometimes inexplicable) line of thought and the device of using various song titles to introduce each section seems rather silly.

Considering the author's qualifications, I would have expected a more polished and professional style. Quite disappointing on the whole.

Curt, I loved Voices of the Game and Storytellers, but you lost your way on this one. How about this sentence: "Classic parks forged a Mayberry of puppies and emerald turf and picket fences and small-town marms -- frozen in amber, but fixed and sure."
WHAT? Claptrap....pure and simple....and that was only page 3.
My real favorite was "If Bogart means Key Largo, baseball can mean year." HUH? At least match the verb syntax, Curt. Fantastic research, but you need to relearn writing for the reader. For God's sake, tell your editor(s) to find a new line of work.

I only wish I had read the reviews before buying this book. Very rarely will I put a book back on the shelf without finishing it, but this book is one of those rare exceptions. It seems to me that the author has forgotten one of the most important rules in writing, "write to express, not impress." He takes so much time being clever and amusing that the true stories of these glorious stadiums are lost in unreadable rhetoric.

I recently purchased this book and found it to be incredibly disappointing - Baseball history through a James Joyce-ian stream of consciousness writing style that is hard to understand and harder to digest. All chapters are written in a " running dialogue" style, which causes the reader to be feel left out of the conversation. Dozens (perhaps hundreds) of unrelated and confusing comments about political issues, celebrities, etc., which badly detract from the baseball core. Additionally, MANY
inaccuracies (both statistical and factual) and typos throughout the text .....3-4 in the section about Shea Stadium from 1964-1975 alone (nothing gets past this Mets' fan!). DO NOT GO HERE if you are looking for faithful commentaries and interesting insights on historic stadiums or reliable documentation on baseball history...this book falls WAY, WAY short in both areas. I would give it 0 stars, but the ratings mandate me to give it one. Spend your money instead on " To Every Thing a Season: Shibe Park - 1909-1976", a VASTLY SUPERIOR and thoughtful book, even if you do not live in/near Philadelphia (I am transplanted from North Jersey to South Jersey, but could not put the Shibe Park book down!).

This book utterly failed to meet any of the expectations I had for it. The biggest and most obvious problem is that Smith adopted a writing style that is painful to read. It's like Ring Lardner or Red Smith after taking a foul ball to the head. It tries way, WAY too hard, and comes off as gimmicky.

Smith also likes to use quotes for no particular purpose related to baseball history. A quote by Jackie Gleason about how he drank to get bagged leads into a note that fans went out to celebrate when the Philly Atlantics snapped the Reds 79 game winning streak. The quote is longer than the actual baseball-related text!

I almost never put down a book before finishing. This was one of those times, 63 of the most painful pages I've read in some time into the book. Avoid at all costs.

An amphicar was that vehicle from the early 60's that was a combination of car and boat. It didn't last long, cause it was neither a very good car nor a very good boat.

The author did the same thing here, he tried to combine a baseball history book, and a book about baseball stadiums. I don't think it worked. He skimmed details about baseball history, and he skimmed details about basbeall stadiums. If you like the detail like I do, there are better books available that deal with each subject individually.

Also, his writing style can best be described as "staccato", or kind of choppy. It was difficult to read.

Again, if you like detail instead of overview, this book is not for you.

Written in a staccato style that resembles gibberish, this book takes what should be a great topic into Alice in Wonderland. Its reminiscent of watching Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football trying to interject intellectualism into something that should be fun. Smith is not trying to take us back to old ballfields, but to impress us with how "erudite" he is. The sad thing is that he obviously did not learn from this fiasco. His new book "Voices of Summer" on baseball announcers is just as bad.

Don't waste your money. As many of the other reviewers have noted, the book is ponderous, and downright unreadable. I honestly don't know how he managed to get this published. Perhaps he had photos of someone that he used for blackmail. Honestly, you could pick just about any paragraph from the book and excerpt it as an example of his choppy, staccato, disgorging of facts, anecdotes, and bad puns. The author obviously thinks very highly of his own wit, and can't let a paragraph pass without trying to slip in some sort of pun, or play on words. Horrible. Absolutely, horrible.

When a former speech writer to President George H. W. Bush writes a baseball book, and when the
fundamental message of that book is subversively conservative (glorifying the return to traditional
ballparks), nothing would make me happier than to be able to recommend it unreservedly. Sadly, I do
have reservations. There's much useful information in the book and it is illustrated beautifully, with
prints from Bill Goff's great art gallery, but Smith's storytelling style, which one assumes was intended
to come across as casual and conversational, is so slangy and unstructured that it sometimes fails to
make sense and, worse, feels like he's condescending to the audience.

Smith does not deserve all the blame for this, a decent editor could have saved him in the spots where
his prose becomes too tangled. But just read this sentence :

The New York Times' William Safire once likened Richard Nixon to a layer cake: To know him,
you must imbibe each layer.

I couldn't find the quote, and I suppose it's possible that the word maven and fellow former
presidential speech writer put it just that way, but this is at best an unusual use of the word imbibe,
which generally refers to drinking not eating, and at worst is just plain bad English. Even if Safire
said it, Smith should not have used it. You sure as heck don't imbibe a layer cake and let's assume that
not even Safire imbibed Richard Nixon.

In the end, there's enough fresh material here about ballparks, and I like the overarching theme
enough, that I'd give the book a qualified recommendation. But be warned that some of the verbal
thickets can be tough going.

GRADE : C