The Entitled - Hardcover

Deford, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1402208960 ISBN 13: 9781402208966

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark, 2007

Synopsis

Howie Traveler, manager of the Cleveland Indians, and his Cuban-American star player, Jay Alcazar, have little interaction off the field until Traveler witnesses an encounter between Alcazar and a woman that ends in a rape charge.

About this title

About the Author

Frank Deford is a six-time National Sportswriter of the Year, senior writer for Sports Illustrated, commentator on NPR's Morning Edition, correspondent for HBO's RealSports with Bryant Gumbel and the author of 14 books. He has been elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters and has been awarded both an Emmy and a Peabody. Deford resides in Connecticut with his wife, Carol.

Reviews

Reviewed by Terry Pluto

I wish it were longer, and that's something that I've rarely said about the baseball games I've covered in 30 years as a sportswriter. But it's how I felt while reading "The Entitled," the new baseball novel by Frank Deford.

The title covers the surface story. It's about a superstar named Jay Alcazar, a Cuban power hitter who makes a hard sport look ridiculously easy. Being entitled is part of the package: The money is huge, the women always available, the fans forever adoring -- or so it seems for Alcazar. So far, the book sounds like one big cliche.

But what makes this novel as much fun to read as watching Gold Glover Omar Vizquel play shortstop is that the story is primarily told from the viewpoint of the candid and colorful Howie Traveler, Alcazar's manager with the Cleveland Indians.

Deford won me over early in the book when he wrote that Traveler is amazed at "how ignorant modern players were about geography. Of course, it also amazed him how ignorant many modern players were about the game of baseball, and they played baseball for a living . . . ." Then there is this: "He never really understood pitchers. They were different from hitters in that pitchers didn't seem to Howie to be whole people. They were just one thing, an arm, attached to the corpus. Pitchers were sort of like ordinary girls who got by because they had big boobs." Now that's the kind of authentic stuff you might hear between spits of tobacco and the cracking of sunflower seeds when you sit around the dugout with aging baseball men.

Traveler had all the brains and savvy to be a star, but not the talent. As Deford writes, "Traveler was, basically, a displaced person. Baseball had cost him any sense of home. After his career was over . . . he'd have to go somewhere to live year-round, but for the life of him, he couldn't imagine where that might be."

Baseball is home to so many men like this. They played until they were told they couldn't play anymore -- usually in a place like Buffalo or El Paso. Then they started a coaching career in the minors, hoping to reach the majors as a first base coach and maybe, just maybe, get a chance one day to manage one of the 30 major league teams. Their lives consist of spring training in Arizona or Florida, summer in the city of whatever team employs them and fall in the Florida Instructional League. They have maybe two months away from the game, unless they want to go to Latin America and coach winter ball -- as many do. In the process, they marry, divorce and often become strangers to their children. They may have a few affairs, but no real relationships. As time passes, they get to the park earlier and earlier -- maybe 10 a.m. for night games -- because they have nowhere else to go. As Deford writes, "The better Howie got at managing a baseball team, the more he shied away from trying to manage his family, because that was harder and because that wasn't fun or satisfying the way baseball could be."

An acclaimed sportswriter and author ("Everybody's All-American," "Alex: The Life of a Child"), Deford is a masterly writer, and the book kept me up part of two nights.

The plot revolves around an allegation that Alcazar raped a woman after she willingly went up to his hotel room. Traveler saw something that may or may not have been incriminating, but it certainly would cause more problems for his star -- and, therefore, him. The police ask Traveler what he knows, but if he tells the truth, he could very well lose his player, his job and perhaps any chance of ever working in baseball again. Then what would he do with his life? And what if what he saw meant nothing, and everything Alcazar told the police is true?

The weakest part of the novel is Deford's attempt to resolve this moral dilemma, which takes away from a terrific buildup. This failure of the plot to live up to its vivid characters makes "The Entitled" sort of like a great 1-1 game called after 12 innings because of a curfew. The ending may be unsatisfactory, but you loved the experience anyway.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Sportswriter, screenwriter and author Deford (Alex: The Life of a Child; Everybody's All-American) scores another hit with this novel of athletes behaving badly. After a career spent knocking around in the minor leagues as a player and manager, Howie Traveler has finally made it to the majors as manager of the Cleveland Indians. The team, however, is struggling, and Howie's job is in jeopardy when the team's star player, Jay Alcazar, is accused of rape. Though Howie's playing career stalled out in Triple A, his big league management career depends on how well he can handle Alcazar, heralded as "the best player in the game." Alcazar insists he's innocent—perhaps even believes it—but Howie suspects otherwise, having witnessed a troubling scene involving accused and accuser the night of the alleged rape. Now, Howie has to choose between his conscience and his dream job. The resolution won't please everyone, but Deford tackles timely and provocative issues without flinching. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Howie Traveler is the manager of the Cleveland Indians, and Jay Alcazar is his star player. Never quite good enough as a player, Traveler spent two decades in the minors as a coach and manager, building his resume oh so slowly. Alcazar, on the other hand, is the son of a wealthy Cuban immigrant. Even if he hadn't become a baseball star, he would have enjoyed myriad opportunities. The pair share a mundane player-manager relationship until one night Traveler inadvertently spies Alcazar in a physical dispute with a woman trying to escape the star's hotel room. When the woman comes forward with a rape charge, Traveler must balance his career against doing the right thing. In a parallel plot, Alcazar tries to unravel the mystery surrounding his real parents and his birth in Castro's Cuba. Veteran sportswriter and best-selling author Deford creates two fascinating characters in Traveler and Alcazar, but the pivotal rape crisis seems contrived and is resolved very oddly. Deford has done much better, but expect interest based on his reputation. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1402208960
• ISBN 13: 9781402208966
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 318