Garret Mathews has a favorite baseball memory. When he was a boy, he lived next to Gail Harris, a big leaguer with the New York Giants and Detroit Tigers. Harris once told him that on the last game of the year he had 19 runs and wanted to hit his 20th. The opposing team's catcher, Earl Batty, was a friend. "Earl knew I'd probably never hit that many again... so he agreed to give me a chance." The next pitch was a fastball, and Harris drove it over the right field fence. Mathews remembers, "I was in heaven. He had given me something more precious than balls and bats. He had shared a piece of baseball lore."
Mathews asked 64 people, including LeRoy Neiman, Don Larson, Dick Vitale, and W.P. Kinsella, to share their own pieces of baseball lore. The result is Baseball Days, a nostalgic look at the national pastime. The pieces range from the sad (Bill Bradley remembering how his team had to stay in a dive hotel during a Little League playoff because the better places wouldn't accept the team's black players), to the poignant (Robert Goulet remembering his dad pulling him out of a game to go to his piano lessons), to the funny (sportswriter Hale Brown's "I took up baseball at the age of eight and gave it up after 2 minutes, the length of time it took me to take the field at shortstop and get hit in the nose with an errant ground ball. I ended up with no hits, no runs, one chance, and one error."). A sweet tribute to America's game. --M. Stein
Book Description
Remember breaking in that first glove? Hitting your first homer over the fence? Breaking your first window and running faster than you ever had run around the bases? In Baseball Days: Recollections of America's Favorite Pastime, Garret Mathews takes you back to the old sandlot with his own recollections of baseball-playing youth and those of dozens of household names. Sharing their baseball memories is an array of celebrities including Charles Schultz, Robert Goulet, Julian Bond, Marlin Fitzwater, Eli Wallach, Dick Vitale, Michael Dukakis, Tom Watson, and Mike Ditka. Recollections from those who made it to the big leagues-Brooks Robinson, Tom Trebelhorn, Jerry Reuss, Roger Craig, and Don Larsen-are also included. Anyone who remembers choosing up sides and swinging for the fences will enjoy this nostalgic look at growing up playing America's favorite pastime.
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