Waiting for Teddy Williams

Rating:
Summary: Funny, Quirky, Delicious Wonderful Baseball Story
Review: "Waiting for Teddy Williams" follows the story of Ethan "E.A." Allen who grows up in Kingdom Common, Vermont, the unofficial capitol of the Red Sox Nation, a town with a baseball bat factory, a town where every radio is tuned to every Sox game.

E.A. is homeschooled by his single mother, stripper, hooker, escort, wannabe country singer Gypsy Lee Allen, who teaches him much more than the average boy would learn in school. Her lessons also include batting practice. E.A. has two dreams, one to be a Red Sox hero and two, he wants to find his father, who his mother refers to as Mr. Gone and Long Forgotten.

Then one day during the summer when he is eight years old, a drifter named Teddy Williams shows up on his family's property and E.A., young man of the house, goes out to shoo the fellow off. But before the drifter leaves, he teaches E.A. a few things about baseball and about life.

The drifter will return throughout this humorous story full of quirky characters, always teaching E.A. and yes, the drifter is his dad. And yes, E.A. finally makes it to the majors, playing for the Sox. And yes this is a story about much more than just baseball, but if you are a reader who loves the game, then you're guaranteed to love this book. But you don't have to be a card-carrying baseball fanatic to be captured and captivated by this story. I know, because Mr. Mosher drew me right in and I've never played the game.

Rating:
Summary: Most eloquent baseball novel since 'Shoeless Joe'
Review: A long, long time ago - when we still argued whether Babe Ruth or Roger Maris held the single-season home-run record - a little book circulated like a whisper among true fans of baseball and its prose.

By 1982, Roger Angell, Paul Gallico and Tom Boswell had already been dangled like stars in the twilight heavens of baseball literature, but this new little novel told us some-thing about baseball they hadn't. It slid head-first into the incalculable depth of memory and dreams about a sport defined too often by esoteric calculations. In short, "Shoeless Joe" by W.P. Kinsella captured the pure, lump-in-the-throat intimacy of fathers playing catch with sons.

In a very short time, it came pouring out, all the poetry, metaphor and sensuality of base-ball. It was like a literary tarp being dragged across the field of American letters by pa-tient, undaunted groundskeepers whose only job was to keep baseball fiction forever green and unmuddied. The life-imitates-baseball genre provided reading material for little-boy right-fielders who'd grown into love-handled ESPN addicts, as well as the scripts for several Kevin Costner movies.

But nobody captured Kinsella's original and literally fantastic brand of magical realism, where the ghosts of legendary players could play in an Iowa cornfield, or a 2,000-inning Cubs game of mythic proportions could go unrecorded by history.

Until now.

Howard Frank Mosher, one of the most versatile and funny American storytellers since Mark Twain, grew up playing Little League and town ball. On summer nights when the Red Sox played the Yankees, his father and uncle would drive him to a nearby mountaintop, where the play-by-play radio signal was clearer.

So it's probably as natural as outfield grass at Fenway Park that Mosher has written his ninth book about baseball. But as Mosher himself admits, "Waiting for Teddy Williams" is about baseball in the way that "A River Runs Through It" is about fly-fishing.

"Waiting" is more clear-eyed than Kinsella's gauzy and poetic "Shoeless Joe," but equally poignant. Both pluck the chords that resonate with lovers of old-time baseball, who see larger-than-life ballplayers like Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams through the fun-house mirror of memory. That is, larger than larger-than-life.

But for all its echoes of Kinsella, Mosher's blend of quirky characters, contemporary mythology, and mischievous prose is utterly original and entertaining. One needn't be a die-hard baseball fan to enjoy this story, but if you know the difference between a "knuckler" and a "slider" - and the smell of new-mown outfield grass or the taste of sandlot dust - you'll probably read this book then tuck it safely on a shelf beside baseball classics such as "The Boys of Summer" and "The Pride of the Yankees." It's that good.

In "Waiting for Teddy Williams," Mosher has stolen home as a consummate humorist - proving his uproariously funny 2003 Lewis-and-Clark satire, "The True Account," wasn't just a checked-swing triple.

OK, enough baseball puns. But "Waiting" is not just a funny book. It's about faith, fam-ily, common happiness, persistence and the trick of dreaming out loud. As every long-suffering Red Sox fan knows: Ya gotta believe.


Rating:
Summary: "Baseball...of all human endeavors has no room for cynicism"
Review: A novel to warm the hearts of baseball lovers everywhere, and especially in the Red Sox Nation, this is the story of dreams and what it takes to make them come true. Grittier and less romantic than Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella (and its film, Field of Dreams), this novel tells the story of Ethan Allen, known as E. A., the son of single mother Gypsy Lee. Eight years old when the novel opens, E. A. lives in Kingdom Common, a rural Vermont town which may be the most baseball-loving town in America.

E. A. is needier than many other local children because no one will tell him who his father is. His mother, Gypsy Lee, who left college after her freshman year, now works as a one-woman escort service and part-time singer/songwriter, living with her crotchety mother, who took to her wheelchair and refused ever to walk again after the Red Sox's 1978 pennant loss when Bucky Dent hit a home run for the Yankees. When E. A. needs someone to talk to, he goes not to the local minister, who is one of Gypsy Lee's kinkier clients, but to the statue of the Colonel in the square, where he pours out his heart--and gets answers.

When a stranger, thought to be a drifter, appears and gives him some baseball pointers, E. A. listens and soon comes to depend on the stranger's knowledge. In time, the drifter is identified as Edward "Teddy" Williams, who, over the next ten years, helps E. A. develop, not just as a baseball player, but as a human being, learning lessons for the real world at the same time that he is honing his skills in pitching, fielding, and hitting. Not surprisingly, a scout for the Red Sox eventually sees E. A., and he, by then seventeen, has the opportunity to help the team in the final push to a World Series.

Mosher tells a charming story of oddball characters who behave outrageously, united only in their love of the Red Sox and baseball. Though the characters are not fully rounded, they are winsome and often very funny. Gypsy Lee, Gran, and several other characters are over-the-top and "unrealistic," but in their love of the Red Sox they become "human" and believable, and the baseball scenes are full of excitement. Light, fun, and filled with lessons of life which can be learned from the game, this is a coming-of-age novel sure to gladden the hearts of baseball fans. Mary Whipple

Rating:
Summary: Sweet, funny, original
Review: Fabulous, absolutely fabulous. And that, as the adage goes, is not only baseball, that is also great fiction, whether you care for baseball, don't care for baseball, or have the misfortune of being a Yankees fan.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: Howard Frank Mosher is a great writer but he struck out with this book. In a previous novel, A Stranger in the Kingdom, he captured the essence of the New England love affair with the Red Sox in just a few pages when father and son drove to a mountain top in the 1950's to listen to the Sox game on the car radio. I was hoping for more with Waiting for Teddy Williams; I got less.

Ironically, harking back to the 50's is one of the problems with this book. I felt like I was reading a Matt Christopher book from my childhood. I honestly thought for the first several pages of the book that the setting was 1960's Vermont. Red Sox games could only be listened to and not watched because there was no cable television in town (how about satellite?). Kids drank bottles of Hires root beer and, I kid you not, people traveled to and fro by hopping on freight trains. Mosher's baseball knowledge must have peaked in the 50's as well because all the great players he mentioned, with the exception of some Red Sox, were from that era.

There are a lot of baseball lessons pitched to the reader in this unoriginal story about a small town boy with major league dreams. Unfortunately, the "baseballese" he throws our way is often questionable and sometimes flat out wrong: a batter can attempt to reach first base on a third strike if the catcher doesn't catch the pitch even if there are runners on base - so long as there are two outs. A trivial point, however, Mosher makes a special point to tell the reader that a batter can't run to first so I'm making a special point to say that indeed he can.

Mosher, as usual, gets the Vermont town folk down pat. It's the main characters who are flawed. They're unrealistic, unbelievable and unlikable. Ethan's father is an alcoholic who one day decides to stop drinking with no effort whatsoever. Ethan's mother is a Julia Roberts "Pretty Woman" type and a genius to boot yet is unable to use her brains or body to work her way out of poverty. Ethan Allen is no Huck Finn. Huck is a clever, adventurous kid with a conscience. Ethan is a one-dimensional, baseball obsessed follower who apparently doesn't know right from wrong as he goes along with sales of protected wildlife and bootlegged liquor (OK, no harm done) but also participates in the destruction of property worth tens of thousands of dollars. Somehow, at age seven he has the maturity of a seventeen year old but at age seventeen has the maturity of a seven year old. I don't think so.

I stuck with this book through the end hoping Mosher would come up with a late inning miracle. Unfortunately, the conclusion is straight out of a Disney flick, complete with a lame gimmick used at a crucial point of the game that brought to mind the "Mighty Ducks" knuckle puck. I finished the book thinking of the Yankees, not the Red Sox. After a string of several great books, Howard Frank Mosher, like the New York Yankees, is big time loser in 2004.


Rating:
Summary: Six Inning Starter
Review: Mosher's novel feels like a starting pitcher who kind of runs out of gas in about the sixth inning. The first hundred pages are pure bliss - funny, moving, incisive - just about everything that the reader could ask for. E A is a modern day Huck Finn, living by his wits and his free-spirited mother's guidance and that of his namesake, a statue of Ethan Allen that stands in the middle of town, a cast iron Yoda, if you will. The townspeople, of course, eye him carefully, not knowing what to make of his behavior. Ya gotta love him (and his mother).
Sadly, the book bogs down after its wonderful start and moves into sentimentality. Dad shows up, as well as other gurus, to teach him the ways of the baseball field. By about page 125, you can tell which way the story is heading. This all culminates in The Big Game, a unimaginative cliche that every baseball novel, good, bad or otherwise, insists on having.
I really waited this to be special, a complete game shutout, but instead I was left with the feeling that the starting pitcher didn't have the strength to finish what he had started.

Rating:
Summary: One old man's love letter to the Red Sox
Review: The dust jacket describes Howard Frank Mosher as a "long-suffering Red Sox fan." It's this fact that is the key to the motivation for this book: namely, that Mosher couldn't be sure he'd actually ever see the Sox win a World Series, so he decided to create every Sox fan's dream.

The story is fairly simple. It revolves around E.A., an eight-year-old boy who is obsessed with two things: the Red Sox and identifying who his father is. He lives in a quirky town, Freedom Common, Vermont, that is populated with often strange, and at times a little unnecessarily silly, characters. My favorite being E.A.'s mother, Gypsy Lee, who spends her time home schooling her son and "entertaining" the local men to make ends meet. One day a drifter wanders into town named Teddy who takes E.A. under his wing. In teaching E.A. the many secrets of baseball, batting, fielding, and, ultimately, pitching, Teddy teaches E.A. much more. Through these lessons E.A. becomes a strong amateur player who lucks out in the greatest way when the desperate Red Sox manager just happens to stumble across him.

The story is not one of great depth or complexity, but there is beauty in its simplicity. Of course, Red Sox fans will love this book unconditionally, but it shouldn't be avoided simply because of the team involved. Most any baseball fan would find something to love in Mosher's moving tribute that isn't just about the Red Sox, but baseball as a whole.

Rating:
Summary: An Ode to Baseball, Dreams and Hard Work
Review: This book is, in many ways naively idealistic - so what? Ideals are good.

It is, on the surface, the story of a boy who dreams of growing up to be a big-leaguer and makes it. To add far more poignancy, he is a Red Sox fan way up north in Vermont on the Canadian border. Bastard son of a country singer who runs an "escort service" on the side, he frequestly talks to the staute on the village green of his forebear, Ethan Allen. A drifter comes in to town and begins to give him tips on baseball. Eventually he learns the drifter is his father. The revelation is not sappy, nor is their on-going relationship.

More than the baseball are the idealistic messages of dreaming is okay, but if you dream, you must work like heck to make the dreams comes true.

There is also humor throughout. The boy's mother is a priceless mine of one-line Red Sox related insults. The mother is the dream mother for a boy growing up - a playmate as well as his home school teacher. Her methods of earning money are as entertaining as her mother's one-liners. The locals are all portrayed with a loving humorous brush by an author who obviously relishes small towns and their unique denizens.

As a sidenote, the baseball instruction is very good and true. There is one minor rule error, but other than that, the author truly knows the nuances of the game.

This book will be loved by anyone who loves baseball. It will be at least well-liked by anyone who enjoys small town stories with a considerable amount of humor. One warning is that through the first quarter or so, this seemed to be a teen's book. As it goes on, it becomes much more. That having been said, this is also agreat book for teens on up. It can be shared by parents and children.