Game Time
By Roger Angell
Harcourt Inc., 2003, $25
Roger Angell’s baseball essays appear in The New Yorker, three or four a season. His books are made up largely of reprinted pieces from the magazine,
Lacking imminent deadlines, he can sift through his notes for exactly the right quote, such as Johnny Bench’s assessment of when his old teammate Pete Rose should be declared eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame: “As soon as he’s innocent.”
Angell’s great essay, “The Web of the Game,” is reprinted here, his narrative of conversing with Smokey Joe Wood, 92, about the 1912 season as they sat in the stands and watched future major league pitchers Ron Darling of Yale and Frank Viola of St. John’s hook up in an extra-inning scoreless duel in the 1981 NCAA College playoffs. The piece ends, “[Darling’s] heartbreaking 0-1 loss in May 1981 and Walter Johnson’s 0-1 loss [to Wood] at Fenway Park in September 1912 are now woven together into the fabric of baseball. Pitch by pitch, inning by inning, Ron Darling had made that happen. He stitched us together.”
“The Web of the Game” and most of the other 28 essays in “Game Time” have appeared before. Editor Steve Kettman appears to have sifted through Angell’s entire output to fill “Game Time,” which ranks as the best of Angell’s books to date.
Why is the Foul Pole Fair?
By Vince Staten
Simon & Schuster, 2003, $19.95
It’s not such a ridiculous question. In every other sport, the out-of-bounds line is out of bounds..
Anyhow, it’s the type of question that a kid might ask if taken to a baseball game.
Using a trip to a game with his (grown) son as background, Staten wastes no time getting started. Purchasing the tickets allows him to expound on the history of tickets, and waiting in a seemingly interminable line to pick up the tickets enables him to divulge some pertinent aspects of queuing theory.
He discusses the size and spacing of stadium seats, strategy for catching foul balls, the propriety of ticket scalping, the directional orientation of ballparks, the distances to outfield fences, the training needed by umpires, the best ways to hawk beer to the fans, the functions of scoreboards, the considerable cost of ballpark concessions, the makeup of the tarpaulins used during rain delays, the most-wanted types of souvenirs, the layout of press boxes, the technology of radar guns, the effectiveness of giveaway promotions such as Bat Day, the size of parking lots, the reasons people become sports fans and the reasons seats are painted as they are.
Staten writes about gloves, uniforms, caps, pitching rubbers (are they really made of rubber?), baseline distances, bats, chest protectors, catchers’ masks, even baseballs.
There’s even a chapter about how fans get home from the game.
DiMaggio: Setting the Record Straight
By Morris Engelberg
and Marv Schneider
MBI, 2003, $24.95
When Richard Ben Cramer published his biography “Joe DiMaggio: A Hero’s Life” a couple of years ago, Morris Engelberg threatened to sue Cramer for hinting that Engelberg’s motivation for serving as the notoriously penurious DiMaggio’s lawyer and agent free of charge was to make money on DiMaggio memorabilia after Joe D.’s death.
That’s exactly what happened, intended or not.
More bothersome to many was Cramer’s sarcastic tone, as he depicted DiMaggio, hero to millions, as a penny-pinching, standoffish, grudge-holding friend of Mafia kingpins who had managed to become alienated from almost all his relatives, friends and acquaintances.
Sarcastic tone or not, Cramer’s portrait of DiMaggio was dead-on. Evidently Engelberg thought better of suing, but instead retained Schneider to ghost-write a DiMaggio biography of his own. The book incorporates Engelberg’s attitude of hero worship and a generally respectful tone toward its subject.
But Engelberg can’t deny DiMaggio’s miserliness, his passion for money, his alienation from most of his brothers and sisters, his friendships with the men DiMaggio called “wiseguys,” his love-is-blind regard for Marilyn Monroe or the many times when only Engelberg could talk him out of spiteful and ill-considered actions.
DiMaggio was a great baseball player who did much to aid the cause of Italian Americans, a man who was always punctual and lived up to his obligations despite pain, and a genuine American hero. He was also abrasive, greedy and hard to deal with, and his acquaintanceships were either distant, cool or questionable. No amount of biographical spin can disguise those facts.
Clark Cox may be reached at ccox@thepilot.com.
