Book Review: WILD AND OUTSIDE
ROOKIE EFFORT
Several years ago I really enjoyed WORD FREAK by Stefan Fatsis. In the mood for a baseball book, I ordered Fatsis's WILD AND OUTSIDE: How a Renegade Minor League Revived the Spirit of Baseball in America's Heartland, (c)1995. WILD AND OUTSIDE was Fatsis's first book, solidly reported but tremendously dull.
The opening paragraph teased me that the Northern League, an independent pro league with teams in out of the way towns with serviceable stadiums and some baseball history like Winnipeg and Duluth, was taking shape in 1994 at just the time when the infamous strike cut short the 1994 MLB season. Hm, that sounds interesting. The final sentence says "No one, after all, owns the game more than the fans." Sentimental, nice. In between, scant mention of either promising premise.
I should have read the Acknowledgements first. Fatsis thanks journalists who introduced him to baseball people and thanks the owners of the Northern League teams. He followed the owners around with a tape recorder and notebook and the books reads that way. It's all about the business of baseball, and not in an insightful or thought-provoking way as Costas presented it in FAIR BALL; rather, with the joyless bottom-line focus of a new club owner who is trying to still love the game but is mostly concerned with gate receipts, concession sales, getting the local press off his back, and fielding a winning team.
What made WORD FREAK, an insider's look at the strange world of competitive Scrabble, so great was how Fatsis became part of the story. The hook was his foray into the varied neuroses of the players and the allure of the game itself, to which the author himself succumbed over the course of his reporting. Here he's an outsider, a reporter more concerned with fact-checking than with human interest. He's just trying to get the story, and forgetting to tell one.
Worse, he's an outsider writing to outsiders. No baseball fan needs to be told that "K" is scorekeeper notation for strikeout or that "to DL a guy" means to put him on the disabled list. Assume some knowledge on the reader's part or it isn't a baseball book.
The bottom line for me is that I don't *want* to understand the business side of minor league baseball. What I love about minor league baseball is that the business side is so far removed from the experience of the fan in the seats. Around here it's a short drive to the Reading Phillies, Harrisburg Senators or Lancaster Barnstormers. The baseball may not be as good as in Philly, but the overall experience is much more festive than a night at Citizens Bank Park, where the fan wants to care like he used to but just can't. The Reading Phillies pack the house most every night to hear some local girl sing the National Anthem, watch the ostrich-man fling hot dogs into the seats, and watch kids perform various feats of nonsense between innings. I don't want to know the owner is in the press box grinning because it looks like the rain is going to pass to the north and give him another 12 outs of concession sales, or fretting because the team bus broke down--I just want to enjoy the fun. Seeing the game through the owners' eyes was pretty depressing. As a fan, I don't want to know how tough a business baseball is. I just want to enjoy a night at the ballpark.
I am going to need to read something else before the season starts. Any suggestions?
1 comment:
Here's a couple of baseball ideas
Leonard Koppet's MAN IN THE DUGOUT. It's an interesting study of the best managers of all-time and how the managers in the 1980s were influenced by the oldtimers.
Harry Stein wrote a great novel about the Blacksox called HOOPLA. A few years ago, Stein wrote a book about how current events turned him into a Republican. I think the baseball novel is the better book.
Robert W. Creamer's biography on Babe Ruth "BABE" is the best baseball bio that I know of.
Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory of Their Times : The Story of Baseball Told By the Men Who Played It" was written in the 1960s and is composed of interviews with the old old timers from the early 1900s to 1930s. I got the audio version of the book from the library that was even better because you hear the actual voices.
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