Why We Love Baseball - Book Report #6

My most recent read. 11/30/23 dwm

   A friend of mine gave me a book for my birthday.  It was something they thought I'd like based on the number of times I talked about the subject or wore shirts showing off my allegiance as a life-long fan of the Milwaukee Brewers.

 It was just published this year, and amazingly, includes a story from 2023!  I don't think I've ever read a hard-cover book with such recent material.

 It's written by Joe Posnanski, who I came to appreciate as a long-time subscriber to Sports Illustrated. 

 My first impression about Why We Love Baseball - A History in 50 Moments is that most of the moments happened during my lifetime.  Posnanski's style is breezy and relatable, a quick read that takes you to whatever moment you're reading about or makes you think of your moment watching the game.

 The writer grew up loving the Cleveland Indians (now the Guardians) which was in a long-run of mediocre play just like the team I grew up loving, the Milwaukee Brewers.

  As a tribute to a baseball rule created in 1935 that required the All-Star game to include at least one player from every team (which meant kids like us got to see 'our' player at the summer classic), he included each team's favorite moment as decided in a fan vote.

Brewer fans selected the moment Robin Yount hit his 3,000th hit.  I agree.  Robin joined Milwaukee when he was just 19 years old.  He played his entire career as a Brewer, won two Most Valuable Player awards, got them to the 1982 World Series, and is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.  While I've not met him personally, Yount has and continues to be an ambassador and fan-favorite of the True Blue Brew Crew.

You can read this book over a couple of sittings or drop in and drop out, doing a chapter or two at a time.  He includes deep dives to learn if some of baseball's legendary stories are true or just legends.  

In his chapter, Five Duels, he starts with Bugs Bunny v The Gas-House Gang (1946  short Baseball Bugs).  It's not the only time he references a baseball game in a movie, or in this case, a cartoon.  I vividly remember seeing the cartoon (no, not in 1946) while watching Bugs Bunny cartoons as a kid.  That rabbit could do anything!

If you love baseball, you'll love this book.  If you ever went to a game, you'll find stories that make you smile.  If you're a hard-core, passionate fan, you will relate to the chapters told through the voices of fans who experienced them.

To give you an idea of how the book reads, here's an excerpt from the first page:

I think now of a baseball story.

Gaylord Perry was a Hall of Fame pitcher best known for the expansive and marvelous array of illegal pitches he threw. He threw spitballs and greaseballs, emery balls, and shine balls, Vaseline balls and puffballs, hair-tonic balls and fishing-line-oil balls.  Perry threw all these pitches and also pretended to throw all of them, and he fooled batters and umpires in equal measure for more than 20 years. 

This, though, is a story about Gaylord Perry's hitting.

In 1962, Perry took batting practice before his second career big-league start. This was in Pittsburgh. Standing behind Perry in the cage was his San Francisco Giants' manager Alvin Dark, along with a colorful sportswriter and saloonkeeper named Harry Jupiter. Dark was looking at something else when Perry hit a long fly ball. Jupiter was impressed.

"Hey, Al," Jupiter said, "looks like this one might be a hitter!"

Dark looked up and shook his head. "Perry?" he asked loudly, "Nah. This one's got no power. We'll have a man on the moon before he hits a home run."

Sure enough, for the first seven years of his career - the first 547 times he came to the plate - Perry did not hit a single home run. Then on a warm Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, Perry started against the Dodgers. The date was July 20, 1969.  At 1:17 pm Pacific time - 17 minutes after the Giants - Dodgers game started and while Perry was giving up three runs to the Dodgers in the opening inning - Apollo 11's Eagle lunar module landed on the moon, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard.

In the third inning, Gaylord Perry stepped to the plate against the Dodgers' Claude Osteen. On the first pitch, Perry hit a long fly ball to center field, and it sailed over the fence, his first home run. He hit it exactly 34 minutes after mankind had put a man on the moon.

Buy the book, download the audio version, check it out of the library, I'm confident you'll enjoy reading, Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski.  

When you do I bet yoo will start counting the days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training. Play ball!