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Whitey's Boys: A Celebration of the '82 Cards World Championship

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I make no apologies; I am a diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan and have been since the 1960s when Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and a bevy of great ballplayers captured three pennants and two World Championships. And let me add that I loved watching and cheering that later edition of Cardinals in the 1980s when Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee, Darrell Porter, and others won three pennants and a World Championship. Needless to say I am delighted with the success of the Tony LaRussa-led Cards of the current era; I only wish it were 2006 every year. It was for people like me that Rob Rains and Alvin Reid wrote "Whitey's Boys: A Celebration of the '82 Cards World Championship."

"Whitey's Boys" is a loving tribute to that 1982 World Championship team published on the twentieth anniversary of that event. Rob Rains has nearly cornered the market on popular historical works on the Cardinals and in this one he and first time book author Alvin Reid collect stories and craft individual chapters on 17 members of that core team. The greats are present--Ozzie Smith, William McGee, Bruce Sutter, Keith Hernandez, Joaquin Andujar--and a lot of those that were largely role players besides. Each has an individual chapter describing their experiences during the championship season as well as their life after. There is not a little philosophy in these chapters as the individuals profiled reflect on their place in the universe and baseball, which may after all be one and the same.

A "Foreword" by White Herzog, the irascible "White Rat" that ran the Cardinals during one of the team's best eras, lays out his take on the team and what it accomplished.

Overall, don't look for complex sabermetric analysis, sophisticated historical investigation, or gripping narrative in "Whitey's Boys." It is, as the title promises, a celebration of the 1982 Cardinals. That is all that Rains and Reid deliver. I wish it had been more, but this is just enough for now. I await other writers and historians to deliver on that greater possibility.

THIS IS A BOOK COVERING THE INDIVIDUAL PLAYERS WHO HELPED WIN THE 1982 WORLD SERIES. IT HAS SOME NICE INTERVIEWS WITH WHITEY AND THE GANG. A MUST FOR ALL CARDINAL FANS.