Add these to your reading lineup
Books cover all the bases
Every spring, as baseball teams pack up and prepare for the start of another new season, publishers turn out a lineup full of books about the game as it used to be played, the game as it might be played in the future, and the game’s heroes and villains past and present.
With opening day barely a week away, here are some of this spring’s most promising books on the national pastime.
“Sad Riddance: The Milwaukee Braves’ 1965 Season Amid a Sport and a World in Turmoil.” By Chuck Hildebrand. Selfpublished. 611 pages. $24.95 (available on Amazon.com).
I don’t think there’s ever been another sports franchise that played a full season in a city that it knew it was leaving. But that’s what happened to the Braves in Milwaukee in 1965. Hildebrand takes a deep dive in one of Milwaukee sports most somber seasons, and tries to find an explanation for how a team that never had a losing season could have fallen out of love with a city — and vice versa — so quickly.
“Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish and Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s.” By Jason Turbow. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 386 pages. $26.
It’s hard to imagine a more entertaining baseball team than the 1970s Oakland A’s. The only team not called the Yankees to win three straight World Series (1972-’74), the A’s were filled with larger-than-life stars like Reggie Jackson, future Brewers Rollie Fingers and Sal Bando, and a slew of all-stars besides. On the field, they fought together; off the field, they fought each other. Constantly.
The team also had one of the most difficult, abusive team owners in sports: Charlie Finley, who regularly berated players and other owners in public, especially if he could promote himself in the process.
Turbow, author of “The Baseball Codes,” does an expert job showing how one of baseball’s greatest teams became great in spite of itself. But Turbow also shows that, as impossible as Finley was, he pushed the major leagues into the 20th century; without him, we wouldn’t have night World Series games.
On the other hand, we might not have the designated hitter, either.
“Leo Durocher: Baseball’s Prodigal Son.” By Paul Dickson. Bloomsbury. 304 pages. $28.
It’s hard to believe that no one has done a definitive biography of Leo Durocher before now. Here’s a guy who played with Babe Ruth and Dizzy Dean, and managed Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays.
After reading Dickson’s exhaustively researched book, it’s a little easier to figure out why it’s taken so long. For one thing, Durocher routinely rewrote his past, making it hard to find where the truth lies. But a bigger reason it might have taken this long: Durocher, as shown by Dickson, is a real louse.
The manager who led teams in Brooklyn and New York to the World Series, and helped turn around the moribund Chicago Cubs, was such a jerk that his players mutinied against him — twice. He badmouthed Ernie Banks. Ernie Banks.
Dickson, who wrote one of recent years’ best baseball biographies in “Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick,” doesn’t flinch in showing the dark side of the man known as Leo the Lip. But this complicated, richly detailed portrait also shows Durocher’s better angels, as few as they were.
“My Cubs: A Love Story.” By Scott Simon. Blue Rider Press. 160 pages. $23.
I know: You’re tired of hearing about The Curse, too — even now that the Chicago Cubs have finally ended their century-plus World Series drought. But this ode to the team by Simon, host of National Pub-
lic Radio’s “Weekend Edition,” is sentimental without being sappy, and makes as good a case as you’ll find for why baseball matters to the people who live and die by the teams they root for.
“The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse.” By Tom Verducci. Crown Archetype. 375 pages. $28.
For an unsentimental look at the Cubs’ 2016 World Series victory, Verducci’s richly reported look at the season and how the Cubs brain trust built the ballclub is an easy read, and a smart one. Verducci, senior baseball writer for Sports Illustrated and an analyst for Fox and the MLB Network, is clearly a fan of the house that Theo Epstein built, but he makes up for the focus on the Cubs’ general manager’s savvy by delivering solid and fresh portraits of the people, not the pieces, that Epstein assembled to make history on Chicago’s north side.
“Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character.” By Marty Appel. Doubleday. 410 pages. $27.95.
There already are several decent biographers of Stengel, a nutty ballplayer and minor-league manager who wound up guiding baseball’s longest dynasty as manager of the New York Yankees. You can add Appel’s to the list.
A number of the stories will be familiar to even casual fans of baseball history — Stengel’s on-field antics as a player, his doubletalk before Congress when he was ridiculously called to testify on baseball’s antitrust exemption, his fumbling attempt to manage the more-fumbling New York Mets in 1962.
But Appel, who’s become the Yankees’ de factor historian, fills out those stories with details from some unusual, never-before-published sources. The stories are largely still the same, but they’re still great stories.