Three baseball must-reads
By Dave
July 19th, 2008 | Leave a comment
Alan Schwarz, sportswriter for The New York Times, has three must-read books about baseball. On NPR radio, he rhapsodizes about some of the great characters of the game, including an especially colorful owner, in the autobiography Veeck — as in Wreck:
” (Bill) Veeck rollicks through his days of running the Cleveland Indians, the old St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox, all the while introducing us to characters such as Satchel Paige, Hank Greenberg and, of course, his famous walk-drawing leadoff man, Eddie Gaedel. Veeck dedicated his life to the notion that the fan is king.
“Who can’t love a guy who writes, ‘Nothing annoys me more than to be told [not] to do something … because it is lacking in dignity’?”
The other two must reads are The Long Season by Jim Brosnan and October 1964 by David Halberstam. They aren’t schmaltzy pinings for the “good old days” when baseball was pure and innocent because, well, it wasn’t. October 1964 pays attention to the racial tension during that world series in the height of the civil rights movement pitting the integrated St. Louis Cardinals vs. the all-white New York Yankees.
To listen, CLICK HERE.
April 30th, 2009 at 11:50 am
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