10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great baseball essays in search of an editor, April 3, 2003
This review is from: Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball (Hardcover)
Stephen Jay Gould was a marvelous paleontologist, but also an ardent follower of baseball. He even appeared in Ken Burns' "Baseball" documentary. As a boy, his favorite team was the NY Yankees, and he was once beaten up by some fans of their opponents, those lovable bums, the Brooklyn Dodgers. His heroes were Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, and he writes about them as elegantly as DiMaggio himself prancing gazelle-like across the outfield, scooping up flyballs.
This book collects three dozen of Gould's baseball essays. He writes about things like the umpire Babe Pinelli, who called the final strike of the perfect game that Don Larsen pitched in the 1956 World Series. The final pitch was technically outside the strike zone, but only by a few inches. But, considering the context (both a World Series and a perfect game on the line), Pinelli thought that the batter - Dale Mitchell - should have at least made contact, perhaps to tap it foul, because questionable pitches can go either way. Afterward, Mitchell groused that the ball was not a strike, and Gould perceptively concludes that Mitchell was right, but Pinelli was righter.
Also included in this collection is Gould's famous essay about why no one hits .400 (batting average) anymore. What he argues is, curiously, there are no more .400 hitters because players in general are all much better.
As an avid baseball fan and Yankees lover, I enjoyed this book a lot. Any book that re-lives the memory of the ball going through Bill Buckner's legs in the 1986 Mets-Red Sox World Series, thus giving new credence to the Curse of the Bambino, has my gratitude.
The problem, though, is that Gould was not around to oversee the final assembly and publication of this book. Gould had thought of collecting his baseball essays for years; in 1992 Stephen King in fact suggested such a project to Gould. An editor's note tells us that Gould himself left the manuscript "neatly organized, and in good hands," at his office before he passed in May 2002. Maybe Gould was too close to the end to pay close enough attention, maybe the editors were too reverent in handling the late, great man's final work. But this book feels like an unedited mass, cobbled together from scattered writings, with enough repetitions and factual lacunae that the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
While some of Gould's articles mention newer heroes like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, too many of the essays were written in the 1980's. Gould's essays in natural history tended to discuss history, wherein the events were already done. However, his baseball essays were often written while events were still unfolding. Herein lies the problem with editing. His essay about hitters batting .400 was written in 1986 in mid-season, and he concludes with the gutsy prediction that Wade Boggs would hit .400 that year. No editorial blandishment actually tells us if Boggs did or not actually achieve this remarkable feat (he in fact fell a little short, at .357). In another essay, discussing mind v. body, Gould writes about Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who suddenly found himself unable to make a simple toss from second to first. Gould predicted that Knoblauch would return to form. Nothing tells us what actually happened (though a caption provides the tiniest of hints). The truth is that he never did; after this essay was written but before the book published, Knoblauch was shifted to the outfield, where he did pretty well (only 2 errors in 108 games with the Yanks in 2001), and he later played for the KC Royals, but he never returned to his glory days as an elite second baseman. In additional to these omissions, no editor dared add or subtract from Gould's text to correct his statements which have, in due course, become incorrect. In another essay from 1986, Gould wrote that no player since Mickey Mantle in 1957 had an on-base percentage of better than .500 (which means you get on base more often than you make an out). No editor stepped up to the plate to remind the reader that in fact the mighty Barry Bonds has now done it twice - in 2001 (with an astounding .515) and in 2002 with an even more incredible .582. All these errors of omission are minor, but in baseball, details are everything, and they could easily have been corrected. If anyone cared.
In short, the book is a lot of fun to read, if slightly repetitious (essay after essay reminds us how statistics prove that DiMaggio's streak of hitting in 56 consecutive games wasn't just a fluke, but an achievement for the ages). But it is a collection of marvelous baseball essays by a great lover of the game, sadly diminished by slovenly editing.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Five Star Essays about Baseball and Life, November 20, 2003
This review is from: Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball (Hardcover)
This book should provide plenty of enjoyment for every baseball fan and all the devotees of the late essayist Stephen Jay Gould. While I will touch on the flaws later (because in some ways the totality of this posthumously published collection of Gould's essays is less than the sum of the parts), this is a wonderful book to sample at your leisure. Many of the pieces manage to be thought provoking and incredibly nostalgic at the same time. One of my favorites in this regard was an incredibly brief piece (The Babe's Final Strike) originally published in the NY Times in 1984 regarding the strikeout of Dale Mitchell by Don Larsen to complete the only perfect game in World Series history. It revived both my memory of watching those final moments on our small black and white TV on October 8, 1956 after arriving home from high school late in the game and also recalled the controversy that raged over the strike three call by Babe Pinelli that both guaranteed Don Larsen a place in the record books and also ensured that particular film clip of Yogi Berra jumping into Larsen's arms the status of perpetual inclusion in world series highlight collections.
One of the best pieces in the book is actually the introduction by David Halberstam, a good friend of Gould's, a fellow intellectual, and an ardent baseball fan himself. It is literally the perfect bookend for the last selection in the book, a wonderful reprint of a long piece in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS which manages to incorporate a meaningful summary review of ten diverse baseball biographies into a discussion of the elemental attraction of baseball, the parallel changes in the sport and our culture while mixing grandiose generalizations with little known facts. In between these two marvelous selections are pieces as diverse as a lengthy tribute to THE AMAZING DUMMY (about both the often overlooked exploits of Dummy Hoy and also the role of nicknames in baseball) and FREUD AT THE BALLPARK, a very brief piece about how the author finally came to terms years later with the loss of the 1955 subway series by his beloved Yankees to the hated Brooklyn Dodgers.
The book is composed of four sections. The first is REFLECTIONS AND EXPERIENCE, which is comprised of thought pieces about various aspects and events of the game. The second is HEROES LARGE, SMALL, AND FALLEN, which includes pieces on Mickey Mantle, Dusty Rhodes, Mel Allen, Jim Thorpe, Joe Dimaggio and "Shoeless Joe" Jackson in addition to the selection on Dummy Hoy; of course all these selections are about much more than the individuals profiled and their impact on the game. The third section is titled NATURE, HISTORY, AND STATISTICS AS MEANING. It examines some of the myths of baseball and such questions as "why no one hits .400 any more" and whether Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak really was an achievement in a class by itself. The last section is simply entitled CRITICISM. It is a collection of some of the best topical book reviews which Gould wrote, which are always a taking off point for an elegant discussion of some aspect of the game.
Despite the fact that I consider the great majority of the essays in this collection to deserve five star ratings, there are several factors about the book which kept me from rating it five stars. First, with the exception of Halberstam's foreword and Gould's introduction, these are set pieces all of which have appeared elsewhere and thus suffer from repetition of some of the author's favorite musings and ideas. (I suspect that given his death the editors were less ruthless than he would have been about correcting this flaw.) Second, some of the pieces are slightly dated and the reader is left to wonder how Gould would have responded to recent events impacting the sport (e.g. the undoubted effect of questionable substances on the obliteration of power hitting records in such areas as home runs and slugging average). Last, in a collection of this length and this diversity, it is almost inevitable that a few of the selections will suffer in comparison to the best of the group. Even if this reaction is only due to my preferences and prejudices as an individual reader, it still is a factor that influenced my overall reaction to the book. While there are several pieces that I found very memorable and/or educational (some of which I have in fact reread), others seemed only of average quality compared to the work of other good sportswriters. So I heartily recommend the book with the caveat that most readers will probably want to take time to savor some of the pieces while quickly browsing others. But practically everyone will reflect that we are all undoubtedly the richer for the unique insights furnished us by Gould as he managed to combine the knowledge gained from his lifelong career as a paleontologist with his passion for the game of baseball.
Tucker Andersen
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A loving farewell...., March 23, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball (Hardcover)
Stephen Jay Gould was a teacher and entertaining friend to me through his wonderful writings for more than 20 years. His passing last year saddend me, but this last love letter to the game he loved makes me appreciate him more than ever. His tremendous gift for being simultaneously a guy in the stands with a hot dog and coke, yet still the analytical investigator (garnered, I suppose from his experience as a Yankee fan and Red Sox ticket holder) created superb insights into the game of baseball on a human and scientific level.
As always, he seeks to gently teach his reader by taking them along on his journey. This is a book to read over and over, and to keep for those who share his affection for our Pastime.
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