My Life as a Fan

Recounts the author's experiences as a young baseball fan during the 1940s and 50s

Sheed ( Boys of Winter ) brings baseball back to life as everyone would like to remember it in this paean to both the national pastime and to his adopted country. Nine-year-old Sheed and his parents arrived in America in July 1941 to escape the London blitz. It was a year filled with names and places that made a kind of grotesque double play: from Hitler to Pee Wee Reese to Pearl Harbor. That summer began a love affair between Sheed and baseball: visits to Shibe Park in Philadelphia to see old Connie Mack; a summer to watch Ted Williams bat .406 and Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games; and a fall to watch the Yankees defeat the Dodgers as Mickey Owen chased that famous third strike. The summer of '41 was followed by the war years with baseball staffed by 4Fs, visits to New York ballparks long gone and Sheed being struck down by polio. Recovery came with Jackie Robinson and the 1947 World Series. Sheed marks his years by baseball: 1951, England, and Bobby Thompson hits a home run to beat his Dodgers; 1954, Australia, and Willie Mays's catch; 1955 brings Brooklyn its only championship; 1957, O'Malley takes the Dodgers to Los Angeles; 1963, the Los Angeles Dodgers--with plenty of Brooklyn still in them--take the Yanks; and 1969, when the Mets make it all worthwhile. With prose as smooth as a 4-6-3 double play, Sheed, the old Brooklyn stalwart, remembers " . . . Walter O'Malley, against whom this book is dedicated. . . ." and a simpler time when the author, America and baseball were younger, more innocent and, perhaps, happier.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The prolific Sheed (Baseball and Lesser Sports, 1991, and many others) on his childhood love of baseball, pitched with typical Sheedian wit and warmth. As a kid, Sheed had the baseball bug bad. This makes him no different from any American sandlot Johnny--except that Sheed was a British boy, tossed across the Atlantic at the age of nine in the initial throes of WW II. Moreover, any sports interest at all was a decided oddity in his ``egghead'' family. So when, in 1941, he discovered America's pastime, it became something of an obsession, a fetishistic frenzy of statistics and idolatries. His baseball heart grew larger as he aged: At first caught by the miserable Philadelphia Athletics, it expanded to take in the St. Louis Cardinals' Gas House Gang (Dizzy and Daffy Dean, et al.) and then the wacky, benighted Brooklyn Dodgers, rooting for which Sheed likens to taking ``the losing side in the Thirty Years War'' (a cross that Sheed carried until the ``diabolical'' Walter O'Malley heisted the Dodgers to California in 1958). Sheed enthuses about Leo Duroucher (``the name of his game was Uproar''); the ``miracle'' of Ted Williams; the fat bat of Jimmy Foxx. Quirky truths tumble out: that ``the teams that break your heart are the ones that play in funny stadiums'' (Cubs, Red Sox); that the advent of the slider was the ``Great Divide'' between the ancient and modern eras, a Rubicon that Williams and Musial crossed with ease but that ruined DiMaggio; that, truth be told, a 12-year-old understands baseball to its depths, and adult insight adds nothing to the mix. A true fan, with eyes wandering now and then to football (but ``football was work, like plowing snow; baseball was play'') and other sports, yet ever faithful to ``the perfect game, the one they play in heaven.'' -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The English-born Sheed has a well-deserved reputation as a wry novelist and essayist of the highest caliber. Here, he studies the stranglehold the world of sport can exert upon a fan. Although touching briefly on football and cricket, Sheed focuses primarily on baseball, in particular, the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s and 1950s. Tempered by a playful, acerbic wit, Sheed's insightful prose rises above the wistful, reflective style typical of such personal baseball memoirs. The only shortcoming is that the frequently chronicled Dodgers of that period offer an overly familiar framework for the author's delightful observations. Still, this is not equal to Sheed's brilliant, original, extended essay on Connie Mack in Daniel Okrent and Harris Lewine's The Ultimate Baseball Book (Houghton, 1991. rev. ed.). Recommended for large sports collections.
- John Maxymuk, Rutgers Univ. Lib., Camden, N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.