Ossining Review of Books

PLAY BALL: FIVE GREAT BASEBALL BOOKS

by Bob Minzesheimer

Minzesheimer is vice president of the library's board of trustees. His original ambition was to play second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Baseball may no longer be the national pastime the way it once was. But it remains the writer's game, attracting writers, from Philip Roth to Stephen King, in ways other sports don't. Here's my lineup of reading, old and new, for the new season:

  1. The Great American Novel, by Philip Roth.
    It's not Roth's best novel, but it's his funniest. A ribald, satirical fantasy of baseball mythology that purports to be the secret history of the third major league that was banned because of subversive political influences. Runner-ups in baseball fiction: The Natural by Bernard Malamud and Bang the Drum Slowly, by Mark Harris, (both novels were better than their movie versions). Local note: Harris once worked as a reporter for the late, lamented White Plains Reporter-Dispatch. Also recommended: "Pafko at the Wall" from the first 60 pages of Don DeLillo's Underworld, which opens at the classic 1951 playoff between the Dodgers and Giants.
  2. Anything written by Roger Angell, the graceful essayist of The New Yorker. My favorite collection is Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader. I prefer Angell to the "other Roger" -- Roger Kahn, a former Croton resident, who wrote a great memoir, Boys of Summer, about the Brooklyn Dodgers, but has gotten carried away philosophizing about the deeper meanings of baseball.
  3. A False Spring by Pat Jordan. A poignant account of a disastrous career in the minor leagues. It's my favorite book written by a player. Jordan's athletic dreams crashed, but he found a career as a writer.
  4. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life by Robert Creamer. Published in 1974, Babe, about the great Babe Ruth, was the first of a new generation of candid sports biographies that went beyond traditional sports writing and sorted out fact and fiction. (Creamer, a veteran Sports Illustrated writer and editor, lives in Tuckahoe). The book notes that Ruth thought that reading wasn't good for a ballplayer: "Not good for his eyes," said the Babe. Also recommended: Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy. And coming next month, a new biography: The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, by Leigh Montville, a stylish sportswriter.
  5. And finally, for Red Sox fans (and Yankee haters): "Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season," by Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King). Inside baseball, very inside, from the season-long e-mails between two obsessive fans, horror writers whose baseball dreams finally came true. Also for fans of the Red Sox (and good writing): "The Teammates" by David Halberstam.

One final note: John Cheever, Ossining (and America's) great novelist (who was born in New England), once said, "All literary men are Red Sox fans. To be a Yankee fan in literary society is to endanger your life." To which Don DeLillo said: "He wasn't born in the Bronx."