Author: fartheroffthewall

“Baseball Rebels: The Players, People and
Social Movements That Shook up The Game and Changed America”

The authors:
Peter Dreier
Robert Elias

The publishing info:
University of Nebraska Press
408 pages
$36.95
Released April 1, 2022

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“Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles
Over Workers’ Rights and American Empire”

The authors:
Robert Elias
Peter Dreier

The publishing info:
Rowman & Littlefield
376 pages
$38
Released April 13, 2022

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The reviews in 90 feet or less

Behold the rebellious brashness of Pete Rose, still hard at work to rehabilitate his misunderstood narrative.

Baseball’s all-time hits leader, who enjoys hitting up Cooperstown now and then to show his support (and sell autographs) during Baseball Hall of Fame’s induction weekend, is open to the possibility anyone gives him that he could, in fact, be a man ahead of his time.

Sure, he found non-existent loopholes in some archaic rules while managing his Cincinnati Reds when it came to placing wagers on his own team — but, listen, it was for a reason we couldn’t understand until now.

Recently given a place to talk by USA Today columnist Bob Nightengale about the state of today’s game – particularly its acceptance of gambling partners – Rose will now say: “I just came up at the wrong time. I was 30 years too early.”

Colorado’s Charlie Blackmon just landed the first active player endorsement deal with a bookmaker. If only Rose could get in on that action.

“Baseball has come to realize there’s a lot of money in the gambling industry,” Rose said, “and they can benefit by getting their fair share.”

Wanna bet he sees an angle where he can cash in from public outcry that hypocrisy knows no shame?

The other shame, as Rose may someday come to rant about: In two new books about the all-time rebellious people in baseball history, he only has cursory mentions in each. Two academics who’ve tried to raise the level of awareness over the 150-plus years of freedom fighters who have taken up arms against a game that refused to break their will has no room for someone like Pete Rose.

“Is This Heaven? The Magic of the Field of Dreams”

The author:
Brett H. Mandel

The publishing info:
Globe Pequot/
Lyons Press/
Rowman & Littlefield
188 pages
$17.95
Released Nov. 9, 2020

The links:
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The review in 90 feet or less

On Aug. 11 of this season, The MLB Field of Dreams Game is ready for its sequel. The Chicago Cubs meet the Cincinnati Reds amidst the cornstalks of the baseball diamond carved in Dyersville, Iowa.

Nostalgia, that powerful income producer, is pushing forward from the success of the Chicago White Sox-New York Yankees initial game complete with a Hollywood walk-off homer on that 8,000-seat specially created field last August – delayed a year because of the COVID pandemic. A lot of dirt had to be moved to get that second field built walking distance from the original movie set.

Wrote Tom Verducci in Sports Illustrated: “The setting was so perfect, the game so entertaining and the demand for tickets so great that the Field of Dreams game should become a tentpole game for the sport. Like Opening Day, the All-Star Game, Home Run Derby and the Hall of Fame inductions, the Field of Dreams game should give baseball another destination date on the calendar amid the sea of games over six long months.”

Indications are there’ll be an effort to have one of these events each year, so it’s best to know your history about this hallowed ground in America’s heartland, where redemption meets reconciliation and a a dirt-and-grass foundation for which this legend will grow for generations to come.

While this book was originally came out in hardback in 2002, translated to Japanese in 2003, then updated in paperback to come out in connection with this MLB game initiative in 2020, it’s one we’ve seemed to have lost in the shuffle of “new baseball books” as the stacks kept shifting, and revisions kept getting in the way.

It’s time for a short rewrite – recycling, as it may be also looked upon — that connects elements to how we want to appreciate baseball in the context of the 52^nd edition of Earth Day. After recalling how for the 50th and 51st anniversary, we kind of dug a hole for ourselves in the backyard and crawled into it.

“The Saga of Sudden Sam: The Rise, Fall
and Redemption of Sam McDowell”

The author:
Sam McDowell
with Martin Gitlin

The publishing info:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
171 pages
$26.95
Released March 9, 2022

The links:
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The review in 90 feet or less

Coming up on his 80^th birthday, Sam McDowell still knows how to keep a fan on the edge of his seat.

The opening lines of the opening chapter of his one-and-only autobiography is about … spoiler alert … a suicide attempt. A loaded .38 revolver to his head. Trigger pulled. A dead shell in the chamber didn’t fire. He writes:

The retrospection began. I remember thinking that I could not even do this right.”

It’s the winter of 1963, and this 20-year-old kid from Pittsburgh who was supposed to be the next Sandy Koufax — a contemporary reference, but he’s also been measured up to Bob Feller, since we are talking Cleveland Indians (uh, Guardians) history — is trying to end the agony of expectations. He’s only been with this flailing franchise for three seasons, pasting together a 6-12 mark and an ERA around 5.00 through 40 appearances. His walk-to-strike out ratio is about 1-to-1.

Sounds like comparisons to Koufax at that age are pretty accurate.

But McDowell’s wife couldn’t take it anymore, all his emotional craziness and drinking that was coming with his struggle. She snatched up their young daughter and moved out. She had experience with relatives who had created a mess of their lives with booze and broads, and her husband’s flight pattern wasn’t comforting that this was going to end well.

In the end, as far as his pitching career went, McDowell would figure out how to become a 20-game winner seven seasons later, when he topped 300 innings pitched. The next season, the aura around that mystical 1968 time when so many pitchers dominated, he’d post a brilliant 1.81 ERA despite a 15-14 record. He’d make six American League All Star teams from 1965 through 1971, lead the league in strikeouts five times in six years stretch — as well as the league leader in wild pitches three times and in walks five times in that general window.

In the all-time Baseball Reference list of Starting Pitchers JAWS leaders, McDowell is at No. 144 (39.9). Ahead of Hall of Famers like Addie Joss, Satchel Paige, Jack Morris, Jack Chesbro, Lefty Gomez and Catfish Hunter.

But wearing out his time and finding himself traded to the San Francisco Giants in 1972 in exchange for future Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry, McDowell devolved into a long reliever with a reputation that would soon derail any sustainable time in the game, a period that would have allowed him to pad his career stats into those of all-time dominance categories.

Never appearing in a playoff game in his 15-year run that also included stops with the Yankees and, at last, his hometown Pirates, he was done by age 32. His strikeout rate of 8.86 per nine innings at the time was third all-time behind Nolan Ryan and Koufax at his conclusion.

Have a toast to a memorable career? Maybe not.

“Whispers of the Gods:
Tales from Baseball’s Golden Age,
Told by the Men Who Played It”

The author:
Peter Golenbock

The publishing info:
Rowman & Littlefield
216 pages
$24.95
Released March 15, 2022

The links:
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The review in 90 feet or less

Nostalgia tends to make us both remember and forget.

What we do recall, regardless of how accurate it may be, creates a fantastic illusion of making us young again. When we go back to look it up what we just said, searching for details we’ve possibly misremembered, we slump into feeling older.

So we try to get that nostalgic fuel ignited all over.

Misty water-colored memories are what makes baseball, more than any other sport, perhaps more than any other activity from birth to death, always tempting the fan’s nerve to tap into it – from playing catch with dad, your first pair of metal cleats, a Little League trophy, putting on the high school uni for the first time, coaching your son’s team …

Fandom is a reason why a story last month in the Toronto Globe and Mail as the lockout was still stuck in a rut seemed to hit a nerve because of the headline: “Baseball fans are mostly to blame for the MLB lockout.”

The reason is because, no matter how overlooked they are, fans keep the game alive, pushing aside any messiness that caused them to be irritated by lockouts, money matters and ownership greed, back to buying tickets, trinkets and taquitos in plastic helmets at the ballpark so they get back on track toward feeling a little better about their lives.

Laying out his premise, Cathal Kelly proclaimed: “Along with the owners and players, (MLB commissioner Rob) Manfred does understand one thing about the fans – that they are suckers. It is not just that games have become interminable, that money and numbers are coring the soul from baseball, that the worse a team is the more it costs to see it, or that MLB schedules the World Series as though its target audience is ‘avid bar-hoppers just getting home from the club.’  … people keep coming back. The 2020 pandemic season fully clued the owners in to how feckless their customers are … What do you do with an audience that undemanding? You start working them over a lot harder.”

The Great Distraction is back on TV, in the ballparks, highlighted in the media, avoiding all the consternation behind how it got there. We didn’t care for it as a distraction during the 2020-‘21-‘22 COVID pandemic, which is still a thing in our book, because of how it seemed to be a way to forget all the unnecessary death and mental health-related issues that were sending us in a spiral.

We were melancholy for how it, and life, used to be much easier to get our head and health around.

Part of what kept our sanity were books, like the golden nuggets mined from Golenbock’s files, that remind us of a different time.

The premise for “Whispers” by the prolific author of more than 60 books — the 1984 “Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers” was a 464-page Casey Award winner for its efforts, and it was Golenbock who also helped Bobby Valentine with his autobiography just reviewed – was that he had a collection of recorded interviews for a variety of projects he had done.

“Valentine’s Way: My Adventurous Life and Times”

The author:
Bobby Valentine
With Peter Golenbock

The publishing info:
Permuted Press
376 pages
$30
Released November, 30, 2021

The links:
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The review in 90 feet or less

That white-haired, googly eyed meatball with the Howdy-Doody smile waltzing around on the Angels’ TV pre- and post-game shows these days?

Oh, it’s just Bobby Valentine. Keeping the audience awake. Being Bobby V.

About to turn 72 next month, Valentine reconnected to the franchise that basically allow his right leg to become disconnected and ruin much of his playing career potential has a somewhat odd feeling.

Or maybe it’s a calculated move on his part.

Maybe we missed it, but at some point already this season, he may have already told the story about the time in May of ’73, playing out of position in center field for the Angels, cutting across the outfield to chase down a long fly ball hit by Oakland’s Dick Green …

If you look at the Retrosheet.org box score and game description, it is handled this way:

ATHLETICS 2ND: Jackson tripled to right; Johnson struck out; Bando was called out on strikes; Fosse walked; Green homered [Jackson scored, Fosse scored]; BERRY REPLACED VALENTINE (PLAYING CF); North grounded out (third to first); Bobby Valentine left with unknown injury; 3 R, 2 H, 0 E, 0 LOB.  Athletics 3, Angels 0.

Hang in, it’s here in full detail of this autobio, starting on page 75, after he’s already poured out his angst about being traded away from Tommy Lasorda and the Dodgers in the winter of 1972, across the way to Orange County, in that package with Frank Robinson, Bill Singer and Bill Grabarkewitz so the Dodgers could have Andy Messersmith (and Valentine could finally get away from mean ol’ Walt Alston). The No. 5 overall pick in the June ’68 draft, one spot behind the Yankees’ Thurman Munson, ahead of Dodgers picks Bill Buckner (2nd round), Tom Paciorek (5th round), Joe Ferguson (8th round) and Doyle Alexander (9th round), later adding Steve Garvey and Ron Cey in the secondary phase, had such up-side and charisma, sideburns and all.

Now he’s doing Angels manager Bobby Winkles a favor, giving Ken Berry and Mickey Rivers a day off, two days after Nolan Ryan had thrown a no-hitter in Kansas City and benefited from Valentine’s play in center field.

As Valentine, who just turned 23 days earlier, describes tracking down Green’s fly ball, he’s moving from shallow right-center to deep left-center. Anaheim Stadium for some reason didn’t have a real wall to mark the playing field boundary.

I leapt to climb the fence to catch the ball. A green plastic tarp was stretched across the chain-linked fence at the Big A, and though I have never watched video of what happened, apparently my spike lodged into the canvas. Instead of my foot sliding down the canvas and my body taking the force of the collision, my leg and foot took the force of the collision and halfway between my leg and my foot, my tibia and fibula snapped. It felt as if the upper and lower parts of my leg were not connected. Vada Pinson, who was playing left field, came over to see if I was okay. ‘I broke my leg,’ I said. ‘Shoot me.’

From there, it’s a detailed explanation and something of an indictment about how the leg didn’t heal correctly. The Angels’ orthopedic surgeon at the time, Dr. Donald Ball (his family name is why the street near the stadium is called Ball Road) thought he could mend the tibia without surgery. Valentine said he turned down an offer from Dr. Robert Kerlan (no longer with the Angels) to handle the case.