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 As a fan of seeing new baseball stadiums, and as a frequent visitor to baseball parks big and small, I was naturally interested and excited when I received Patrick L. Shabram’s new book, Professional Ballparks of the West Coast.
Shabram, who also penned a Guide to California’s Professional Ballparks, expands his scope to include revisions to his original work and coverage of stadiums in Washington and Oregon, along with a “bonus” guide to Nat Bailey Stadium in Vancouver, B.C., home to the Vancouver Canadians.
The book features a total of 35 stadiums, ranging from Vancouver, B.C., to San Diego, CA, home of Petco Park and the San Diego Padres, and covering independent league teams, minor leagues and the Major Leagues.
Shabram takes a similar approach in providing his “fan’s eye” review of each stadium - chronicling the quality of the food, fans and in-game entertainment while providing each stadium’s address, directions, ticket and parking prices. He provides a quick pluses and minuses synopsis of each stadium, as well as some helpful tips to help the reader get the most out of their visit to each ballpark.
Living on the West Coast myself, I’ve had the experience of going to several of the stadiums that Shabram covers in his book - 15 of the 34 as of my latest travels, so I was interested to see how my thoughts compared with his. There were many common thoughts, but also several that I didn’t necessarily agree with — such as the score of the game at Safeco Field in Seattle being hard to locate. As someone who has attended hundreds of games at Safeco Field, it’s hard for me to see it through the eyes of a first-timer, although the idea of not looking at the main centerfield scoreboard, or either of the two auxiliary scoreboards near home plate as a natural thing to do did seem a bit strange to me.
But this is exactly what makes this book both very interesting and somewhat irrelevant at the same time. Individual experiences can vary tremendously at the same ballpark, even at the same game. Sometimes you go on an off-night, and sometimes you go on the best night of the year. Sometimes you get told about some great secret that lies within the ballpark and feel like you’re a local, and sometimes you see it on a very surface level as someone stopping by for a quick visit. And as I have found when I’m a visitor, you often don’t have the connection with a ballpark that the locals do, which Shabram reminds the reader of throughout the game. The feeling of ‘it may be a dump, but it’s our dump’ is one that many of the fans Shabram talked to echo throughout the book.
The issue of practicality for a book like this was one that stuck with me as I read through its 144 pages. The book has some historical notes to it - such as that the original scoreboard and lights from Seattle’s Sicks Stadium, home to the Seattle Pilots for just one season, ended up in Vancouver’s Nat Bailey Stadium - but not enough to really be called a history book. While the reviews and notes from Shabram’s visits to each of the stadiums are completely valid and useful, they certainly shouldn’t be taken as the only source of information for your visit to a stadium, especially when you can get online and see dozens of reviews from many different types of fans. If anything, the notes on each stadium seemed to be a bit thin for me to really fall in love with the book as a true guide.
When I think of a guidebook, I want as much useful, relevant information as possible, so that I will enjoy my visit as thoroughly as I can. Whether the stadium is rich in history because it held great games there, or whether it offers truly unique food or experiences, that is what I crave from a guidebook. That may be asking a lot for one person to provide - but it is what I need to see before laying down my money for a guidebook.
Unfortunately, there were some factual and grammatical errors that stood out to me - the most memorable of which being directions to Yakima’s County Stadium, which directed visitors to take Interstate 5 either east or west, depending on their starting point. Unfortunately, I-5 runs north and south, and is on the western side of the Cascade Mountains, some 140 or so miles from Yakima. Needless to say, I would recommend both an editor and fact-checker for future versions of this book, as well as for you to verify the directions yourself prior to heading out on your journey. Likewise, things change with stadiums, such as teams, affiliations, ticket prices and parking options, so a visit to the team’s website would likely be needed for the most up-to-date and accurate information.
Shabram also runs a website - California Professional Ballparks - which has some of the same information you’ll find in the book, but could evolve into a much more dynamic and up-to-date resource for fans visiting the stadiums with more user-generated feedback and updates on recent visits to each of the stadiums. Sadly, I have yet to come across a site that provides an all-encompassing guide to ballparks, leaving fans to piecemeal details and tips from travel sites and smaller sites that only provide reviews of a limited number of stadiums. Maybe an idea for an entrepreneurial individual with some website development knowledge…
A good effort by Shabram, unfortunately marred by some editing errors, and in this digital age of wikis and forums, one that in printed form might be slightly outdated despite its useful information.
 One hasn’t been thrown in decades, the other is so rare in the modern game that I’d challenge you to name more than two current pitchers that throw it. But both have a cult following — and both are an integral part of baseball’s history. And both have been captured in a new book - The Spitball Knuckleball Book by Tom E. Mahl.
Mahl dives into baseball’s history, going back to the late 1800s to trace the roots of these two “freak pitches” and their cousins - the shadow ball, the emery ball, the Vaseline ball, and so on. He profiles those that through it, those that passed it on, and those that made - or at least extended - a career because of it.
One of the first things that I look for in a book such as this is how good of a job it does tying baseball’s history into baseball’s present - and Mahl succeeds at this objective. Mahl makes it glaringly obvious what drove the spitball out of existence - money. More specifically, the money that was being brought in by fans to see players like Babe Ruth and others hit home runs. Quite simply, when the balls were flying out of the yard, people showed up, and far be it from the owners to stand in the way of that by giving pitchers the ability to make the ball that much harder to hit. Certainly an interesting connection to the way we’ve seen the game embraced in recent years.
The layout of the book’s six chapters turned out to be a bit of a spitball from my perspective - in the first chapter, Mahl starts out coming right at the reader with a great bit of topography as to the baseball landscape and the forces that affected the use and legality of the spitball, butthen took a nose dive into the dirt in chapter two by veering into biographies of players that threw the spitter - particularly, the 23 pitchers who were allowed to continue throwing the spitball after it had been deemed illegal prior to the 1920 season.
 Tom E. Mahl (photo courtesy Tom E. Mahl) While this will definitely be a highlight to those readers with an interest in player biographies, it was the part that generally left me uninterested. This isn’t to diminish the contributions or careers of individual players, but I prefer books like these to fly at a bit higher of an altitude and provide a bit more of an overview of the topic while tying together changes from one era to the next, which Mahl does quite well.
Chapters three, four and five continue the player biographies, looking at groups of pitchers that through the spitter even though it was illegal, those who picked up the knucklecurve, otherwise known as the ‘dry spitter,’ and the knuckleballers, those pitchers who adopted what is referred to in French as le papillon - the butterfly.
Chapter six brings the book to a close with an explanation as to how these pitches work and how they are thrown, a chapter that I found quite interesting and wished would have had twice the information that it does. For someone interested in the mechanics of the game and understanding how things work, Mahl could have written a whole book on this topic and I’ve likely have still wanted more. A chapter such as this is like being able to sit in the dugout or stand on the mound with some of the game’s great pitchers and being able to pick their brain and watch them and dissect their deliveries over and over again.
Mahl brings in an impressive collection of pictures of not just the players, but some up-close pictures of the grips they used on numerous versions of these pitches and blends them in throughout the book, with the strongest showing coming in the final chapter. For anyone with an interest in pitching, these pictures are darn near worth the price of admission.
No stranger to the author’s chair, this is Mahl’s first book on baseball after contributing to the Most Wanted series with Espionage’s Most Wanted, as well as his first book, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States. With a doctorate in diplomatic history from Kent State, Mahl is also no stranger to academic pursuits - and his book is incredibly well researched without straying into the territory of being an overly academic read.
The book is quite sizable - just under two feet across when opened up, and as a hardcover, it packs a considerable amount of weight. While the content certainly merits such a format, it does become a bit heavy after extended periods of reading, and you’d likely benefit from recruiting a table to put the book on as opposed to trying to hold it in your lap.
Overall, The Spitball Knuckleball Book by Tom E. Mahl is a welcomed addition into the library of baseball books that exist, and will certainly make both a wonderful read for fans with an interest in the game’s history, as well a wonderful resource for those who want to dig deeper into the subject of spitballs and knuckleballs.
 Almost every baseball fan should be familiar with Cooperstown, NY and the Baseball Hall of Fame, at a surface level if nothing less - that it’s the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and for many years was hailed as the birthplace of baseball, a story that has proven to be fictional in recent years.
Longtime sportswriter Bert Sugar, known for his contributions to the worlds of baseball and boxing, has penned Bert Sugar’s Baseball Hall of Fame, a beautiful new book that takes the reader inside the Baseball Hall of Fame and provides a top-level view of the history of the game as seen through the collections of the Hall.
The result is 272 pages of photos, player biographies, and overviews of major developments in the game of baseball on a decade-by-decade basis, which serves as a virtual stroll through the numerous rooms and exhibits in the Hall, and provides an introduction to the history of the game for fans.
While there is no substitution for an in-person visit to Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame, Sugar does a fairly good job of walking you through the facility and should ultimately leave you with a pretty strong desire to either make your first visit or a return visit. It may also be the impetus to inspire you to read more about a certain player or subject — Sugar touches on women’s professional baseball, the Negro Leagues, rules changes throughout the history of the game, and several other subjects which contain a wealth of information spanning farther and wider that Sugar is able to touch on.
The book is easy to read, although I do have to take issue with some of the page layouts. The first half of the book is a decade-by-decade look at major figures and events during that ten year period, although there are interruptions and sidebars that are often put right into the middle of a sentence and forces you to entertain two different thoughts and directions. While not a critical issue, it does add an unnecessary pothole on the path that Sugar tries to take the reader down.
Otherwise, a misspelling of Seattle Mariners’ play-by-play broadcaster (and Hall of Famer) Dave Niehaus‘ name - it was spelled Neihaus - was glaring to this Seattle native. Also, an interesting error in the final pages stood out — each Hall of Famer’s plaque is featured so that the reader can get an up-close look at each one, with the exception of Babe Ruth’s, whose is zoomed in so much to the point that you can only see the upper quarter of it. Lastly, a few Hall of Famers - Alejandro Pompez and Cum Posey, who are next to each other in alphabetical order - were listed as being inducted in 1906 - a full 33 years before the Hall even opened. Both were inducted in 2006.
With the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum celebrating it’s 70th birthday on July 12, 2009, this is a timely book that should be a welcome to addition to almost any bookshelf. It’s a great book to thumb through and look at great pictures of the game’s artifacts, and should easily make you want to make your initial - or repeat - pilgrimage to Cooperstown sooner than later.
 A while back, Kevin Goldstein of BaseballProspectus.com told me that on average, one future Hall of Famer debuts every year in Major League Baseball. Just one - and who knows who or when it will be or what team that young player will first suit up for.
The prospect of discovering that next great player is often cited by scouts as what keeps them going after thousands of miles on the road, watching games in cities big and small, hoping that in one of them they’ll find that player who will eventually end up on a plaque in Cooperstown.
That dream of finding that diamond in the rough, or being a player that is found on your family’s farm is one that has become part of baseball lore - it’s almost as integrated into the game as the 7th inning stretch and booing the umpire.
It is this dream that that Frank Nappi uses as the framework for The Legend of Mickey Tussler, the fictional story of a 17-year-old with a cannon for an arm but mental challenges that in late 1940s parlance leave him labeled as “a retard.”
The story, while somewhat familiar in the broad sense, is made special by Mickey’s condition, which I learned only after reading the book and going back to the press notes is revealed as autism and Asperger’s syndrome.
 Frank Nappi While traveling to view a potential prospect in the early part of 1948, Arthur Murphy, manager of the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, finds himself distracted by memories of his mom’s pot roast while on a rural road in Indiana, distracting him from the animal that has strolled onto the road. While the ensuing crash sends careening into a ditch, it also reroutes the fortunes of his ball club.
The farmhouse which Murphy seeks use of a phone from is the home of the Tussler family - Clarence, the uneducated father who sees no use for anything that doesn’t involve food or farmwork; Molly, the woman who married later than her friends, lives in a world she doesn’t love and dreams of something else; and Mickey, the 17-year-old only whose mental struggles makes him the scorn of his father, who sees him as almost as useless as the animals Mickey is assigned to feed.
But to Murphy, who hears the thuds of Mickey throwing crab apples into a bucket with speed and precision, the boy becomes a possible ticket to the playoffs, if his parents can be convinced to let him go off to play baseball.
His parents eventually agree, and Mickey heads north to join the minor league Milwaukee Brewers for the ‘48 season, where he is met with mixed reactions by the players on his team as well as ownership and opponents. His skills become readily apparent, as he becomes a spark for the club and they begin to play well beyond what most pegged them for.
However, Mickey quickly becomes a thorn in the side of one of his own teammates and the Brewers’ division rivals, who devise a way to get him out of their path - the former being a trip to the big leagues, the latter a pennant. Recruiting a shady woman and utilizing a popular bar, Mickey is set up for a situation that leaves him badly injured and keeps him out of a critical part of the season, and sends the Brewers into a tailspin that leaves the season to be determined in the last days of the schedule and sets up a conflict in the last chapter that tests Mickey’s ability to process his world.
Throughout the season, Mickey has to find ways to resolve all that happens around him, which is the crux of what makes the book unique in the context of baseball and provides the flavor that ultimately makes the book relatable or not. For those familiar with autism and how it affects those that have it or care for those that have autism, the story will likely have a more special meaning than for those that aren’t as familiar with the condition. While the book provides interesting insight into how a teenager with the disease functions, Mickey’s disease is only truly known if you had read the book jacket or can infer it based on your own knowledge; this is due to the fact that the story takes place before autism had been named, let alone was widely known about.
As Mickey journeys through his first season in professional baseball, Murphy becomes closer with Molly, the boy’s mother who has abandoned almost all hope of life outside the farm and away from her controlling husband, who repeatedly makes known his disdain for almost everything the world has to offer. While the relationship doesn’t develop beyond a soft kiss on the lips, it is clear that a relationship is budding between the two.
The book is left open-ended, while with a happy ending for the Braves, a somewhat amibigous one for Mickey as one of the book’s minor characters comes to his rescue and allows him to walk off into an as yet undetermined future. I’ve been told that there is a possibility that Mickey could return in future books, something that could make for interesting reading as Mickey’s development both on and off the field is explored, as well as Murph’s relationship with Molly. Nappi has certainly set up an interesting story that could be developed in further books.
While the idea of a farmboy who becomes a big league prospect isn’t the most exciting premise I have heard of, the addition of Mickey’s battle with autism does provide another dimension that makes the book more engaging. Nappi manages to keep the story progressing throughout its 292 pages, and certainly leaves the door open for future tales that could be used to further illustrate Mickey’s development. As much as I wanted to get inside Mickey’s head and understand how he saw the world, the opportunities were just too few and far between. Having not known autism first hand, my ability to empathize with either Mickey or those around him simply wasn’t aroused.
While The Legend of Mickey Tussler is a very good story that I’m sure will resonate with those readers who have experience with special needs children and teens, and potentially be a motivational work for some of its readers, it just missed clearing the fence for me. I wanted more out of Mickey’s character, which is arguably the hardest to provide a real feel for given his autism. It’s hard to fault Nappi for this, as he clearly has the ability to provide context to his characters - Molly quickly became alive in the second half of the book, and the background of Murphy brings his personality to life throughout the book. Tackling autism is a challenge for which the author has my commendation.
I hope that Nappi has the opportunity and desire to further develop and tell the story of Mickey Tussler, as it would be one that I would not only be curious to read, but one that I would likely be quick to recommend to other readers.
 It’s long been said that baseball is a metaphor for life — and in some cases, that life is a metaphor for baseball. Anyone who’s played the game, or been around the game, can see how the lessons learned on the diamond can be applied to situations off the field.
Phil Christopher, a preacher, and Glenn Dromgoole, a journalist and author - both from Abilene, Texas - compile a number of these lessons in Parables from the Diamond - Meditations for Men on Baseball & Life.
The format of each lesson is the same - a quote from a ballplayer, manager, or someone in the game, followed by commentary, observations and questions, which in turn is followed “the 3-2 pitch,” a direct question that challenges you to not just look at your life.
It only took me a few hours to get through the entire book, which in retrospect, was probably not the best way to read it. This is a book that really is best read over the course of several days or weeks. It is meant to be - and it is - a book that can challenge you on a daily basis. From being proud of the uniform you put on to dealing with disappointment, the authors provide 50 different topics and challenges and meditations.
While co-written by a preacher, the book does have a spiritual side to it without being overly religious. It does present the typical western and Christian idea of God - but it didn’t strike me as enough of an issue to make it an obstacle that any reasonable person should find interference from. As long as you identify yourself as a spiritual being, you should get a good amount out of this book.
The only thing I would critique about the book is that it’s directed towards men. There is nothing in the book that made me think it wouldn’t make sense for both men and women - dropping “for men” out of the subtitle would be just fine by me.
This is a remarkably simple book - which is a positive in my book. Life isn’t always simple, but the messages and principles of leading a good life generally are - and the authors do a very good job in distilling complicated issues down to simple parables and questions. Simple is difficult of course - there isn’t a lot of wiggle room when it comes to simple directions.
At just 96 pages, this is an easy read that would be fitting on your bedside table as something you could read right when you wake up, or right before bed. It’s an easy book to pick up and find something inside it to challenge you as you go throughout the day. With a list price of just $9.95, it’s an affordable purchase that you should provide you many good reads.
As the discussions raged about Joe Torre and Tom Verducci’s The Yankee Years, which came out earlier this year - and I reviewed here - only a few people made reference to this book, which the two put out in April of 1997.
The contrasts between the two books are striking - as are the impressions left in my mind after digging around for a copy of Chasing the Dream and reading it.
First and foremost, the cover should grab your attention — especially when compared with the cover of The Yankee Years. In this book, Torre is given the prominent placement as the author, while Verducci is credited in a much smaller font, and assigned the term “with,” which generally signifies someone who’s there to help clean up the writing and bring some literary skills to the work. In The Yankee Years, it’s Joe Torre and Tom Verducci each receiving equal credit on the cover.
As should be common knowledge by now, The Yankee Years is written in the third person - neither Torre nor Verducci write in the first person, which has led most people, including myself, to assume that the book is really Verducci’s work with Torre providing access and insight, as well as a first-hand source.
Chasing the Dream, however, is written in the first person, from Torre’s perspective with his insights, opinions and feelings given center stage. It is, as stated on the cover, an autobiography, written after Torre won his first World Series with the Yankees in 1996.
Torre had been chasing a trip to the World Series since he was a young boy - he watched his older brother Frank played in two World Series, 1957 and 1958, both with the Milwaukee Braves. Frank was on the winning side in the first and the losing side in the second, with the Yankees being the opponent both trips.
Despite a successful playing career, including the NL MVP nod in 1971, it wasn’t until his first season in the Bronx that the yonger Torre got to taste the postseason. Throughout his 18 years in the bigs, he never made it to October as a player, and his first three managerial stops - the New York Mets, Atlanta Braves and St. Louis Cardinals - resulted in only one trip to the playoffs. In 1982, his Braves were swept by the Cardinals in the first round.
But after being dubbed ‘Clueless Joe’ by the New York media, he took an assembled group of All-Stars and talented players not just into the postseason, but to the World Series, where they defeated the Atlanta Braves in six games, and Torre’s quest for a World Series title was complete. It was the first of four World Series rings he would win in five years, and began the journey that would bring us The Yankee Years some 13 years later.
To compare the two books would be unfair - coming off your first World Series win in 1996 is certainly a different state of mind to write a book in than coming to the end of a 12-year run where the relationships were clearly strained.
Whereas I went into The Yankee Years with a tremendous amount of anticipation as to what dirty little secrets would be revealed, I didn’t do that at all with Chasing the Dream. If anything, the only thing on my mind as I read it was trying to draw comparisons between the two books.
Chasing the Dream certainly falls more in line with the traditional autobiography and memoir style, although Torre deserves a good amount of credit for taking it a bit deeper than I’ve seen in other works. Instead of the typical “I was a superstar my whole life” that is so common in similar books, Torre readily admits to being overweight throughout much of his childhood, so much so that he wasn’t drafted out of high school. He worked through it, and with some help from his older brother, found himself finally getting drafted into the world of professional baseball.
His story is certainly interesting - starting with a childhood marred by domestic violence in his Brooklyn home, all the way through a playing career that put him along side such greats as Bob Gibson, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Tim McCarver, and many more. His career spanned the entire 1960s and ran through 1977, when he took over as player-manager of the Mets. It was one of baseball’s grandest times, and Torre’s book takes you right into the middle of it with him as your narrator. While he’s the main character, it’s certainly doesn’t feel that the book is all about him.
Chasing the Dream gives you the opportunity to see the process that developed Torre into the person he was after the 1996 season, as well a good look into a slice of baseball during the ’60s and ’70s, as well as that 1996 Yankees team that began an amazing five year run of dominance in baseball.
While The Yankee Years was a look at not just the Yankees under Torre but baseball as a whole during that time, Chasing the Dream maintains a much narrower focus. There is no analysis of steroids, divisional play, or other teams’ attempts to shape themselves to find a competitive advantage. And even though Torre manages to criticize some players from the 1996 Yankees - Kenny Rogers and Ruben Sierra to name the two most notable - it certainly doesn’t compare with what gets doled out in The Yankee Years.
For being an autobiography, Chasing the Dream is pretty enjoyable, especially given that I didn’t go into it expecting nearly as much as I did out of The Yankee Years. It will certainly give you a much greater look into Torre’s own life, without marring it by invoking superlatives and self-praise.
The contrasts between the two books - enhanced by over 12 years of strained relationships - certainly become apparent when you step back into this earlier work of Torre’s. If nothing less, it leaves you wondering how much different The Yankee Years would have come out had it not been for the drastic change in writing style.
 After a monster year in 2008 that earned him a starting spot on the American League All-Star team and MVP consideration, the name Josh Hamilton should be familiar to most baseball fans.
By virtue of his on the field success, you’ve likely heard about his off the field battles with an addiction to cocaine and crack that almost took not just his playing career, but his life.
With the help of Tim Keown, Hamilton tells his story in Beyond Belief, an engaging look at how he overcame his demons to not just return to professional baseball, but to reach the Major Leagues and be back on his path to the Hall of Fame.
Like most autobiographies and memoirs, it’s hard for me to embrace players talking about themselves in such high terms, even though most of them are fairly well deserved. As a number-one draft pick in 1999, or more appropriately, as the ‘1-1′ pick - the first player taken in the first round, Hamilton is clearly rich with baseball talent. However, as I’ve mentioned in other such biographies, there’s a side of me that doesn’t brag or boast about myself, nor do I like to read about it from other people. After the first two chapters, I began to worry that this might be a book of the typical ‘toot your own horn’ variety and wouldn’t really offer much to the reader.
Luckily, I was proven wrong, as Hamilton shifts fairly quickly into the downward spiral his life took after being invited into the world of drugs and alcohol. As great as the baseball stories are, this is where the real meat of the book is — because as much as we cheer on the accomplishments of players on the field, I think it’s hard, if not impossible to relate to most of it. Few of us will ever know the experience of stepping on to a baseball field as a professional, let alone onto a Major League diamond. But how many of us have friends, family members or others in our lives who have battled or are battling some form of addiction?
In terms of being able to write a script for someone to insulate themselves from the temptations of drugs and alcohol, Hamilton’s seems like a pretty good one - top draft pick, a healthy signing bonus that would have seemingly made money a non-issue, and a team invested in getting him to the big leagues where he could perform and contribute.
Life doesn’t stick to the script though, as injuries led to free time, free time led to the opportunity to mingle with people who didn’ t have his best interests in mind, all of which led to a road of addiction that nearly cost him a marriage, a family, his baseball career and potentially, life after the age of 24.
What’s refreshing about the book, and from what I’ve seen and heard about Hamilton, is his constant openness to discuss his addiction, his daily struggles as well as those dark stretches in his life where his addiction was all that mattered to him. He is quick to credit his relationship with God and Jesus Christ as the thing he turned to throughtout his recovery process. While the book is not prosletyzing by any means, Hamilton makes it clear in no uncertain terms that he feels saved by God and readily attributes his recovery to divine intervention.
Hamilton’s is an interesting story, and one that I’m sure has already touched many people and is bound to touch many more. Addiction is a battle that touches everyone of us at one level or another, and being able to see how one man battled his could be a major help for many people.
There is not much to really dislike about the book, other than what you’ll discern after reading it and examining you ability to relate to it. The only fact-related issue I found was a reference to Lou Piniella coming “out of retirement” to manage the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2003 - he wasn’t lured out of retirement, but rather the rights to negotiate with him came via a trade with the Seattle Mariners. A minor point in the grand story, but something that did catch my attention.
It’s certainly not a hard book to embrace or dive into - and one that kept the pages turning pretty easily for me. If Hamilton’s career continues on a high trajectory, this book will mean that much more to the baseball landscape, as his story will get more and more well known. For now, it’s an engaging memoir of a player who seemingly had it all, lost it, and is on the road to regaining it.
 A while back I was talking with Kevin Goldstein from BaseballProspectus.com, and he made the comment that on average, one eventual Hall of Famer debuts each baseball season.
That thought has stayed with me in the month or so since I heard it, and it was the thought that kept coming to my mind as Bruce Weber’s new book, As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires. Why has that thought stayed with me, you ask? Because quite simply this is the best baseball book I have read this year.
Weber takes the reader straight into the world of umpires, starting by enrolling us at the Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring in Kissimmee, Florida. It is there that we start to learn about how umpires have to watch a game - which as Weber so effectively reminds us, is nothing like the way we watch a game from the stands or even from the field. Weber introduces us to the people that try and become umpires - men and women from all walks of life and areas of the world. They’re all “chasing the dream,” a theme that becomes common through the early chapters.
From umpire school, Weber takes the reader to the minor leagues, major leagues, and to the game’s greatest show - the World Series. Along the way, he chronicles the nearly constant struggle umpires go through to obtain any kind of appreciation or recognition, from sub-par hotels to repeated criticism in the media. He tackles labor struggles, slights by organized baseball, QuesTec, instant replay, and many more other topics that affect the on- and off-field lives of umpires.
He brings in some of baseball’s most well-known stories that involve umpires - the George Brett pine tar incident, the 1985 World Series and Don Denkinger missing a crucial call at first base, and Roberto Alomar’s run in with John Hirschbeck that involved the former spitting on the latter.
With a mixture of history, personal interviews, economics, and philosophy, Weber turns the seemingly two-dimensional life of umpires into an explosive, three-dimensional masterpiece that any baseball fan would be better for reading.
What makes this even more special is that the nature of umpires is anonymous - it is a fraternity who lives without fans, without fanfare, and generally without recognition. Short of the few seconds the umpires get at the beginning of a game when they are introduced and the occasional mention by a broadcaster, the names of umpires are rarely in the minds of fans. Umpires generally don’t speak to the press, and they certainly don’t like to speak critically of one another. The general anonymity of umpires is both a gift and a curse, and Weber successfully works both sides of that coin in crafting this book.
To write about the life of umpires, you have to enter the life of umpires. There aren’t nearly enough newspaper articles or magazine profiles to put something like this together. This is a hands-on, in the trenches look that any author attempting to write a similar book would do well to take notes from.
This is a remarkable book that takes the reader into the world of umpires, one that few of us really know anything about. For anyone who has even the slightest interest in baseball, not only is As Thy See ‘Em a must-read, it’s something that should be permanently added to your baseball book shelf.
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