It all starts today on the West Coast, Dodgers vs. Giants at 2:05 p.m. The boys of summer are back. Before long, it may even feel comfortable after dark at Coors Field. To get you into the mood, Allen Barra, whose new book, “Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee,” is just hitting stores, has come up with a few new books on America’s pastime.
Nonfiction
As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires, by Bruce Weber, $25
“Where do you find such a man?” the late Branch Rickey is quoted in Bruce Weber’s hugely entertaining book on umpires, “As They See ‘Em,” “a man with the authority of a sea captain, the discretion of a judge, the strength of an athlete, the eye of a hunter, the courage of a soldier, the patience of a saint . . .”
Weber, a New York Times reporter, goes where even George Plimpton never dared to go: behind the plate. After interviewing dozens of umpires, players and managers about umpires, he took his own turn and worked games from the Little Leagues to the big leagues (in the Grapefruit League).
“The prevailing depiction of umpires in our culture is negative,” Weber writes. “As They See ‘Em” turns that perception around, and in the process makes you see baseball in a whole different way.
Nonfiction
Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training, by Charles Fountain, $24.95
There hasn’t been a first-rate book on spring training since David Falkner’s “The Short Season” in 1986. Charles Fountain, author of the superb biography of Grantland Rice (“Sportswriter”), updates the ritual of preseason baseball from a time when major hotels were wary of booking baseball teams to today’s billion-dollar-a-year business in which mayors fight to bring teams to their cities (and don’t hesitate to use public money to do it).
Fountain, a journalism teacher at Northeastern University, has written that rare baseball book that also serves as a cultural history. (He makes a convincing case for Al Lang, mayor of St. Petersburg, Fla., before World War I, as the progenitor of spring training as we know it.) “Under The March Sun” has so much atmosphere you can smell the cocoa butter as you read.
Nonfiction
Baseball and the Baby Boomer: A History, Commentary and Memoir by Talmage Boston $24.95
History and memoir usually make for an uneasy combination, but in “Baseball and the Baby Boomer,” Talmage Boston, a professional trial lawyer and amateur baseball writer, makes it work. That’s because Boston (author of the 2005 book “1939: Baseball’s Tipping Point”) does a superb job of striking a chord with baseball fans of the last several decades by pushing the right buttons — Carl Yastrzemski and the 1967 “Impossible Dream” pennant drive, the parallel lives of Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey, and the career of Roger Maris from the perspective of the steroid era.
His critical faculties are unerring except for occasional gushes over the pompous late baseball commissioner, Bart Giamatti. The matching of Mickey Mantle and Jim Piersall to represent “The Dark Side of Fathers and Sons Playing Catch” is a master stroke.
Nonfiction
Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball From Itself, by Michael Shapiro, $25
Michael Shapiro’s “Bottom of the Ninth” is based on a somewhat dubious premise, namely that half a century ago Major League Baseball was on the verge of a crisis and that somehow this was exemplified by the almost yearly success of the New York Yankees. (The Yankees, after all, won only two World Series between 1954 and 1960.) Fortunately, one doesn’t have to accept this theme to enjoy the book.
Shapiro (author of “The Last Good Season,” about the old Brooklyn Dodgers) is a terrific writer. His accounts of Branch Rickey’s struggle and eventual failure to create a third major league, the Continental, as well as the last season of baseball’s most successful manager, Casey Stengel (whose Yankees lost the 1960 Series on Bill Mazeroski’s home run in the seventh game) makes for compelling reading.
Nonfiction
Baseball Prospectus 2009, edited by Christina Kahrl and Steven Goldman, $21.95
If you’re the kind of baseball fan who has been resisting statistical analysis for years, this is where you’ll change your mind. The BP group, as readers of their website know, are the smartest kids on the block, and their annual is an essential companion to an understanding of the game.
Here they are on the chances for Colorado this season: “The Rockies ranked only ninth in the National League in home runs in 2008. With Matt Holliday gone but unreplaced, the Rockies are likely to be overpowered both in their own ballpark and on the road. . . . Still, with some mild good luck in the pitching line and a return to form by shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, the Rockies could enjoy a rebound season, one sufficient to keep them in the running in the weak NL West.”
Allen Barra’s latest book is “Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee,” out now from from W.W. Norton.
