We Played the Game: Memories of Baseball's Greatest Era

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Summary: If you grew up in the 50's and followed baseball closely....
Review: .... then you will love this book. It's an oral history of the game as told by the non-superstars. Unlike similar books, this one is huge, and the stories are long, fun and will make you nostalgic for your youth. You'll see stories by guys like Ed Bouchee, Billy DeWitt, Don Mossi.... names you'll recognize from the days when baseball cards cost a nickel a pack, provided you with a thin slice of bubble gum, and a bunch of cards to trade with your friends or stick in the spokes of your bike wheels.

I'm only part way through and I love this book!

Rating:
Summary: a must read
Review: a must read if you are a real baseball fan, even if you only heard about most of these players from your father ...

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Summary: Cure for the winter blues
Review: This is the perfect baseball book for all seasons, but especially now with the World Series over, and spring training still months away. It also seems appropriate to me that this book is set during one of the "Golden Ages" of baseball between 1947 and 1964, a time when the only stats that mattered reflected exploits on the field, rather than tallies of bank accounts off the diamond, as we have heard so much about in the past few seasons.

So sit back, curl up in front of the fire, and dip in and out of this massive volume, which is edited and organized in a way that allows just such delights. Packed with stories about the game's greats, and not-so-greats, it offers wonderful insights into how the men who delighted in playing a boy's game actually felt, thought and acted, as told in their own words. There are baseball heroics here aplenty, but also some bitter truths and some all-too human behavior that just serves to make these men all the more real, and fascinating.

Editor and author Danny Peary obviously loves the game, and isn't tainted with the sort of "celebrity awe" that characterizes so much of today's sports' coverage, and its cynical flip-side. Of course, he does pay homage to the greats of this era, but he also rekindles a thousand memories for those of us old enough to remember some of the less celebrated, but nonetheless extraordinary characters who once inhabited the game. Hopefully, younger readers will also delight in meeting these men as well, who had wondrous names such as Vic Power, Minnie Minoso and Pumpsie Green. Need I say more?