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Baseball: America's Mirror
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17648 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1990 |
2,947 Words |
| Author
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J.W.P. Traphagan
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CASEY ON THE LOOSE
Frank Deford
New York: Viking Books, 1989.
106 pp., $15.95
SUMMER OF '49
David Halberstam
New York: William Morrow and Company, 1989.
304 pp., $21.95
"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."
- Jacques Barzun
I lack the nostalgic childhood memories of sitting at the ballpark that stir moist-eyed musings by generations before mine. Oh, there were several lovely afternoons spent at Boston's Fenway Park watching the Red Sox, but the majority of my memories come from television. The heroes of my youth - Tony Conigliaro, Reggie Smith, and, of course, Carl Yasztremski - were not mythic. They were guys, just like me, that I could grow up and be like. I knew their personalities and had seen the stubbled detail of their faces as they awaited each pitch, with me sitting just beside home plate. And I saw their egos and eccentricities - who from Boston in the early seventies will ever forget pot-smoking pitcher Bill “Space Man" Lee - as they glided and stumbled through a continual waltz of interviews. Although I lack the same nostalgic feelings cherished by my parents, who grew up in the age of DiMaggio and Williams, I have fond memories of the baseball-in-a-box that seems in some ways so far removed from the baseball they knew.
Reading about other eras in baseball elicits a mild mix of jealousy and comfort in me. My baseball was not as pure as their baseball, but it was baseball nonetheless - a game that never seems to completely lose its innocence. When I opened the books I write of here, I knew my daydreams would longingly rerun the innings of my youth. To my surprise, though, I began to feel nostalgic about the baseball of my parents' and great grandparents' early years as well.
Summer of '49
David Halberstam's Summer of '49 balances itself at the end of an era in both baseball and American life. Americans were leaving the cities; the neighborhoods that cradled teams like the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees were disbanding. In a few years, it would be easier to watch a televised gave from the comforts of home than to travel into the city. Halberstam writes that as postwar Americans tried to establish a sense of stability to their lives, "That very sense of continuity, the belief that life would once again be the same, was erroneous. The country was already changing, the pace of life accelerating."
In describing the 1949 American League pennant race between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, Halberstam reincarnates a world that seemed to revolve around the players and their teams. Baseball breathed the tragedies and comedies of American life; the ballpark was out Globe Theater. Radiomen like Mel Allen and Curt Gowdy dramatized the silent soliloquy of batter and pitcher or the raucous cheers that accompanied a grand
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