What Baseball Means to Me : A Celebration of Our National Pastime [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

the National Baseball Hall of Fame (Author), Curt Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 2002

For some people baseball means a memory-of a certain dusty ball field on a certain summer day, or the first time they walked into a major league park and saw the perfect emerald playing field. For some, baseball means one heartbreaking or heroic moment. And for others, it means a father, a friend, or an old flame who shared a game for a day or for a lifetime. To create this marvelous book, more than 150 writers, athletes, celebrities, politicians, presidents, and pundits were asked what baseball means to them. The answers came back with richness, wonder, insight, and poetry. A fascinating portrait of baseball's beautiful nuances, What Baseball means to me marks the greatest collection of original essays ever written about the game. Accompanied by more than 200 classic baseball photographs, the voices in this book bring alive the game in all its venues-in the past and present, in wartime and hard times, in Cuba, in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium. We meet players in a different light: including Paul Molitor returning a baseball to a trusting boy named Dan Jansen, Derek Jeter as depicted by his dad, the Toledo Mud Hens as seen through the eyes of Christine Brennan, and Pedro Martinez talking about baseball as a way of life in his native Dominican Republic. Most of all, we meet ordinary Americans, like the kids Rudy Giuliani grew up with in Brooklyn, or the man in Philadelphia who transforms himself for every home game from mild-mannered Tom Burgoyne to the Phillie Phanatic. Funny, moving, and each one a diamond in the rough of the American consciousness, the essays in this book are the ultimate baseball conversation. Paying homage to the perfect sport, here is the perfect companion for all our personal baseball journeys.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

OK, so the premise is sentimental claptrap: get a lot of famous folk to answer the title question and leaven it with a profusion of vintage and modern photographs. It's really fun, though, even though the cast of characters tends toward the Republican (do we care what John Sununu thinks of baseball?), and there aren't enough women. But there are moments of unexpected sweetness: singer Patti LuPone's son's encounter with Negro Leagues great Buck O'Neil; Paul Molitor returning a ball to a small boy who grew up to be Olympian Dan Jansen. NPR's Bob Edwards delivering an impassioned screed for DC baseball; 100-year-old Madelyn Pilkington calling the game "a ribbon running through the years." Some entries are barely a sentence long, others go on for pages. The Philly Phanatic (Tom Burgoyne), the Tigers' equipment manager (Jim Schmakel), and Derek Jeter's dad have their say, along with Donna Shalala, the pianist George Winston, and Masato Yoshii. Even the inevitable repetition has a pleasant, late-inning lull to it. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Warner Books, Inc. New York (May 6, 2002)
• ISBN-10: 0446527491
• ASIN: B0002Z0HTM
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 9.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,029,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Baseball Means To Me, May 30, 2002

By 

Sally Rains (St. Louis, MO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Baseball Means to Me: A Celebration of Our National Pastime (Hardcover)

Curt Smith is right on the money with this wonderful book. It made me cry in parts because the passion that so many of the writers have for the game of baseball is that same passion that is in all of us for something we truly love. The choice of people was very timely. There were people I knew, and others I didn't know, but I enjoyed reading every one of their essays. This book would be a great Father's Day gift. It's one of those books that you see and think is beautifully done, but once you start reading, you can't put it down. A real treasure. I'll keep it on my coffee table for a long time.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An okay book but given the subject it should have been great, May 11, 2003

By 

Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: What Baseball Means to Me: A Celebration of Our National Pastime (Hardcover)

The best advice I can give you for reading "What Baseball Means to Me: A Celebration of Our National Pastime" from cover to cover is based on the same principle by which you should never leave a baseball game earlier. You might see something worth remembering. This is certainly the case with this book, which is edited by Curt Smith because the idea that this is a collection of "essays" is a definite misnomer. What happened was that 150 people, from former and current baseball plays like Phil Rizutto and Pedro Martinez, along with writers, politicians, presidents, and other types of celebrities were asked to provide responses to the statement "what baseball means to me." In the case of coach Mike Ditka and writer Elmore Leonard that means a slight paragraph, while David E. Birney and Dan LeBatard provide poems, and Doris Kearns Goodwin compares and contrasts her early love affair with the Brooklyn Dodgers and her current affection for the Boston Red Sox for several pages. These responses are accompanied by more than 200 photographs from the National Baseball Hall of Fame (whose seal of approval appears on the cover).

Ultimately it is supposed to be the stories told about the love of baseball that matters and not the identity of the person writing the response, but the book works against that goal. I get the sense that "What Baseball Means to Me" was compiled rather than edited. The responses are arranged alphabetically rather than thematically, so George Bush is followed by George W. Bush. This is not a coffee table book that you sit down and read cover to cover; a series of symbolic rain delays are probably helpful in getting through all the responses. I would have liked the book a lot more if there had been a more logical pattern of organization beyond the alphabet. Instead of being engrossed in this volume I was constantly distracted by entries that were not worthy of inclusion. When I got to Bob Costas and found a brief series of sentences separated by ellipses, I knew this book was in trouble. However, at the end of the alphabetical rainbow are Bob Uecker and Ted Williams, so hang in there.

Still, everybody who loves the game should find a couple of choice gems within these pages if they take the time to mine them out from the rest. My choice memory from the past was called forth by a photograph of Mel Stottlemyre sliding home to complete an insider-the-park grand slam home run at Yankee Stadium on July 21, 1965. That was the year I started watching baseball and had decided I was a Yankee fan (I liked New York as a state and the Yankees in the Civil War), and I remember watching that game on television and them showing the play over and over because the announcers could not get over the fact that this had just been done by a pitcher (Mel hit that big gap in deep left center, way beyond the monuments). So there are things here to touch upon your love of the game, but we still cannot help but feel disappointed that this book is not as great as it should have been.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful book about a wonderful subject, May 12, 2002

By 

Sarah Smith (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Baseball Means to Me: A Celebration of Our National Pastime (Hardcover)

This is one of the most beautiful books I've seen in a long time. The stories are not about being celebrities, but about baseball and how it gets hold of you and never lets go. Theirs are not stories of being famous, but of being Americans with a common love of The Game. If you love baseball or know someone who does, get this book.