Category Archives: Book reviews

Book Review: Bash Brothers

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As faithful readers of this space will know, I interviewed Jose Canseco in April 2008 on his promotional tour for his book, Vindicated. While researching Canseco in the days leading up to our meeting, I came across a notice for a forthcoming book on the former Oakland Athletics slugger and his teammate, Mark McGwire. The book was titled Bash Brothers, with the subhead, A Legacy Subpoenaed.

After contacting the publisher, Potomac Books, I interviewed the author, Dale Tafoya. However, my story wound up focusing on the signing, and I felt like Tafoya’s quotes would take away from the narrative, so I decided not to mention him. Tafoya accused me of using him for information, which would have been more ludicrous if he’d known me; in a sense, I’ve been researching Canseco since I was six. Most of what we discussed was stuff I already knew.

I subsequently received a review copy of Bash Brothers and was unsure what to do with it. My editor at the East Bay Express declined a review, since he’d just published my Canseco story. I contacted an acquaintance at the San Francisco Chronicle, they passed as well and the book thus sat unread. Eventually, it fell behind my bookcase, along with my unread review copy of Vindicated.

I always felt guilty about this and at times wanted to read the book but since that would have necessitated moving my bookcase, which would have necessitated getting all my books off of it first, I did not. However, I moved apartments this summer and finally recovered Bash Brothers. After finishing reading The Boys of Summer this fall, it was time to review Tafoya’s work.

I read Bash Brothers and all in all, it wasn’t bad. In fact, I rather liked certain parts, including the chapter that talked about an old Reggie Jackson spending a final season in Oakland to tutor Canseco and McGwire. Tafoya also commendably did four years of research putting together the book. He takes two pages at the end to list 112 people he interviewed, including former A’s players Dave Parker, Bob Welch, Dave Henderson and Dennis Eckersley and one-time baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, who wrote the foreword for the book.

Missing from this group, though, are McGwire and Canseco. In fact, the book gives no mention to whether they were even contacted (Canseco was happy to talk with me; he arrived at his signing an hour early for our interview.) The book never produces a smoking gun, either, for McGwire or Canseco having used steroids, only quoting excerpts from Canseco’s bestseller, Juiced, offering vague quotes from McGwire’s former strength coach, Curt Wenzlaff, and saying McGwire had a younger brother who got into bodybuilding and probably did steroids.

Sports Illustrated writer Selena Roberts got Alex Rodriguez to admit to using steroids by alleging this in a book; two San Francisco Chronicle reporters obtained grand jury testimony that confirmed Barry Bonds juiced as well. Somehow, it doesn’t feel that Tafoya went deep enough in his research, though he has a great bit from former outfielder Ben Grieve, retired and angry at all the juicers who prospered while he stayed clean and struggled.

Tafoya himself came in something of an unknown, with the book flap saying he studied journalism at a community college. The front of the book lists a slew of other titles from the publisher that I’ve never heard of. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I would love to have a baseball book with my name on it, even if few read it.

Tafoya’s writing itself is nothing special. “The game of baseball was out of its element, it seemed,” Tafoya writes of the Congressional hearings Canseco and McGwire appeared at in March 2005. “As compelling as each opening statement appeared, more riveting moments seemed ahead. Feeling like scattered chunks of bread surrounded by a swarm of starving seagulls, Canseco and McGwire threatened to evoke the Fifth Amendment when cornered with a self-incriminating inquiry.” The book is filled with writing of this sort that always seems just a little off, stilted, reaching.

Even the title is awkward. How exactly does one subpoena a legacy? Then again, I may have been a bit biased coming off The Boys of Summer. Very few sports books are that poetic or well-written. I’m not any worse for having read Bash Brothers. I found it interesting enough, though I probably wouldn’t recommend it to a non-sports fan. I say this as someone who insisted my mom read The Boys of Summer.

Now all I need to do is read Vindicated.

Classic book review: The Boys of Summer

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After more than a year, I finally finished The Boys of Summer this afternoon.  Written by Roger Kahn and first published in 1971, the book is part oral history about the Brooklyn Dodgers and part recollection by the author of covering the team as a young reporter in the early 1950s.  I’ve read many baseball books.  This numbers among the very best.

To be sure, it is not quite perfect.  The latter two-thirds of the book, where Kahn interviews thirteen former Dodgers is plodding at times, a he-said-this, then-he-did-that style of writing that would lull were the subject matter not so historically compelling.  The book is also unabashedly sentimental, by Kahn, a Brooklyn native and lifelong Dodger fan.  At times, it feels overwritten.

Taken on the whole, however, the work is astonishing.  Overwrought though the emotional appeal may sometimes be, it is powerful again and again throughout the book.  Kahn captures a quadriplegic Roy Campanella in tears remembering past glories, the funeral for Jackie Robinson’s oldest son, killed in an automobile accident at 24, and in an epilogue written years later, Pee Wee Reese wheelchair-bound, cancer-ridden and close to death.  Perhaps the most moving passage captures the death of Kahn’s father:

I drove down dark streets at reckless speed.  The sidewalk was a rotten place to die.  Pebbled cement scrapes a twitching face.  A man deserves privacy at the end, and anesthesia.  Surely my father had earned that for a gentle life.

The historical contribution is also undeniable.  Even if the writing were abominable, and it’s not, I would be interested to read about the codas for men like Robinson, Campanella and Gil Hodges.  Kahn’s level of detail is also meticulous.  One of my college writing professors said a good writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.  Kahn’s book is layered with dialogue and asides, material I struggle to capture.  It’s much easier to tell than to show.  Kahn does the latter, admirably.

There are a lot of baseball books and many fade into obscurity after a short time.  Kahn’s work endures, a rare sports entry in the canon of Western literature.

__________________

Before I end here, I wanted to add two points, not significant enough to figure into a review but worth noting nonetheless.

Early on, Kahn reveals a small tell, probably unremarkable to most readers but glaring to a past sportswriter like myself.  Kahn writes on page four, “Beyond undertaking a newspaper assignment, I believed I was joining a team.  At twenty four, I was becoming a Dodger.”  Going through journalism school, I learned objectivity.  I covered many teams, from prep to pros and I was never a member of them, saved for the few school teams I actually competed for.

Late sportswriter Jimmy Cannon put it better when interviewed for a book on sportswriters, No Cheering in the Press Box. Cannon said:

Most of the guys traveling with ball clubs are more publicists than reporters. A guy might be traveling with the Cincinnati Reds, though it could be any team, and he refers to the ball club as ‘we.’  I’ve seen sportswriters with World Series rings, and they wear them as though they had something to do with the winning of the World Series.  Maybe they’re entitled to them.  Maybe their biased cheerfulness helped the club.  I wouldn’t know.  I would not wear a World Series ring.

Kahn, to his credit, does little to suggest objectivity, noting in the epilogue, “I was neutral all right.  Neutral for Brooklyn.”

A more stinging critique of Kahn’s style comes from a different breed of writer, Jim Bouton.  Where Kahn wrote dignity and grace and heroism, Bouton captured players as ordinary louts, pill poppers and womanizers in Ball Four, his playing diary about the 1969 season.  In I’m Glad You Didn’t Take it Personally, the follow-up to his bestseller, Bouton derided Kahn:

Not long ago Roger Kahn, a writer who did not like Ball Four, wrote in Esquire about a player who was losing his skills and knew it. ‘It is something to cry about, being an athlete who does not die young,’ Kahn wrote.   And all I could think was, bullshit.  Only a man who never played the game could have written that line.  It’s fake, like the men who cry when they can no longer play baseball are fakes.

While I doubt Kahn didn’t legitimately believe what he was writing, Bouton may have a slight point about the value of experience.  Regardless, I appreciate both of their perspectives.

My top five baseball books

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Anyone who reads this space consistently will find that I make a lot of references to baseball books in my writing. Most of these are in fact books that I own. I’m proud to say I have a pretty decent personal baseball library that I’ve been accumulating since childhood. For whatever reason, baseball is a sport that lends itself to wonderful, poetic writing (along with boxing and horse racing I’ve heard) and today, I offer five essentials, the five baseball books I’d want to bring to a desert island were I ever stranded there:

1. The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn

This is actually the latest book that I’m reading, and I’m only about 100 pages in, though already it’s wonderful. Kahn offers an autobiographical look at the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s, drawn from his days as a young beat writer for that team. Lots of former players are interviewed, including Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider.

2. Summer of ’49, by David Halberstam

This takes somewhat of a similar approach to Boys of Summer, with lots of interviews of former players, though this time, it’s the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees of the 1949 pennant race who are chronicled. A Harvard graduate and former Vietnam correspondent, Halberstam offered a book full of depth and insight. He ends with a nice quote from Ted Williams, though on an interesting side note, Joe DiMaggio refused to participate in the book.

3. The Glory of their Times, by Lawrence Ritter

Possibly the very best baseball book out there. The book is an oral history of the early days of baseball, comprised of interviews with about 20 ballplayers whose careers spanned the beginning to middle of the 20th century. One of those books that also provided a public service, it’s no surprise that the original tapes Ritter made interviewing the players are now in the Hall of Fame. In fact, a number of the players profiled here later were inducted into the Hall, possibly because the book brought awareness to their careers. Ritter later wrote another great book, The Lost Ballparks, about demolished fields.

4. Ball Four, by Jim Bouton

This one broke ground when it came out. A diary of the 1969 season by Bouton, an acerbic relief pitcher, the book exposed players as drunks, amphetamine users and philanderers. Though comparatively tame today, the book violated the unwritten code of clubhouse privacy and shook baseball. The San Diego Padres burned a copy of the book before a game, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had a meeting with Bouton in an attempt to coerce a retraction, and Pete Rose taunted “Fuck you Shakespeare” from his dugout. Incidentally, the book is also funny, intelligent and just vulgar enough to be charming.

5. Baseball, by Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward

This was released in conjunction with Burns’ epic 1994 documentary of the same name and is basically a written account of what aired on PBS. Filled with pictures, oral histories, essays and anecdotes, this is probably the finest chronicle of baseball history among the several that I own. I hope Burns offers an updated version at some point.

I could recommend a whole slew of other titles, though I’ll keep this short today.