Batters up! Here are the heavy hitters of baseball writing and reporting, the raconteurs and the players of America’s favorite game, all in one big, entertaining volume that no fan can do without.
The featured luminaries include Zane Grey, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyan, W.P. Kinsella, Red Smith, Tim McCarver, Pete Rose, and George Will, and they all weigh in with wit and an obvious love of the sport. Many offer a fascinating glimpse into baseball’s history, such as Walt Whitman, who reports on a rugged game played even before the Civil War. Russell Baker provides lessons on the art of firing, “learned at the knee of Mr. Steinbrenner.” An excerpt from Jim Bouton’s groundbreaking classic Ball Four examines the sport’s unrelenting power over him: “You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” With these stories and essays, baseball buffs will relive important moments, such as Candy Cummings’ perfecting the first curve ball, baseball’s drawing the color line in 1887, and Bob Carroll’s uncovering Nate Colbert’s hidden RBI record in 1972.
The wonderfully substantial one-volume reissue of the two all-star volumes that made up the
Armchair books of baseball is cause to fire up electronic scoreboards throughout the land. The line-up of writers is monumental: Roger Angell, John Updike, Robert Fitzgerald, Gay Talese, James A. Michener, Wilfred Sheed, Russell Baker, Irwin Shaw, and that's just scratching the surface of Volume I. The sequel calls up Walt Whitman, E.L. Doctorow, Willie Morris, Grantland Rice, Fred Lieb, John Lardner, Garrison Keillor, Damon Runyon, Philip Roth, and--the Babe Ruth of them all, from Stratford in the old Elizabethan League--Bill Shakespere. Shakespeare? Sure. What sport do you think he was commenting on with lines like "I will run no base," "Now let's have a catch," "What foul play had we?" and "And so I shall catch the fly"?
In any volume of this size and scope, there are, of course, a few selections worth skipping over, but what's remarkable is just how many are worth savoring: Talese on Joe DiMaggio, Pat Jordan on his own minor league career, Angell on one of the greatest college games ever played, Stephen J. Gould on the extinction of the .400 hitter, and a short story from former bush-league outfielder Zane "Riders of the Purple Sage" Grey--yes, that Zane Grey. Like foul lines diverging in the distance, you'll wish the The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball went on forever. --Jeff Silverman
