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Rating: 
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: Based on Prof. Gould's previous books and his appearances in, among others, the Ken Burns Baseball series, I was supremely disappointed by this book, although perhaps for reasons other than those expressed by other reviewers.Anyone who has read Prof. Gould's other books should know that he is an acquired taste, whether his subject is baseball, paleontology, evolution, or what have you. Many of his books have passages or whole sections that are simply unreadable but the remainder manages to buoy them up. However, because Prof. Gould was in the process of dying as he finished some of the later dated essays and the rest are culled from his history of writing on the sport, it only stands to reason that there is going to be a lot of repetition (he traces his family's history of Yankee fandom so many times I lost count) and his better chapters are the shorter, more distinct ones than the lengthy scientific breakdowns like why no one hits .400 any more. I could have done without the last section of baseball book and movie reviews - they were okay but they didn't do anything for me, perhaps because Prof. Gould was simply reacting to the work of others rather than producing his own contemplations. It is a true shame that Prof. Gould's last work should leave so much to be desired, but there are lots of other volumes of his out there if one wants to revisit them.
Rating: 
Summary: A triumph
Review: I just read this book and think it's a terrific monument to a great scientist. He will truly be missed, but this book also shows a side of Gould that some of us have never seen before -- the human side. Reading about the perpetual heartache he suffered rooting for the Red Sox (despite the fact that he was a Yankees fan) brings him down off his pedestal and into the bleachers with the rest of us bums. And the depth of intelligence and nuance he brings to the subject of baseball is marvelous to behold. It's a shame that he wasn't alive to see this book published, as it seems the idea was very close to his heart. By the way, the jacket art -- by Vanity Fair cartoonist Arnold Roth -- is quite frankly one of the best I've ever seen. Check out the guide in the back of the book pointing out the various players depicted. Buckner on the back flap is priceless. I did want to quibble (gently) with the reviewer below who complains that editorial "updates" about things Gould had mentioned were not included. Whatever his problems with the work done on the book, it looks as though he's somewhat mistaken about that one point; the information about McGwire hitting 70 home runs is in a caption in that chapter, and a coda of sorts to Chuck Knoblauch's season is in a caption, too. (It talks about his dismal performance in the World Series that followed.) So it appears that the editor chose to include whatever information seemed necessary in the book's captions -- and if you're not a reader of captions, I guess those facts are easy to miss. Anyway, personally I didn't find that any more editorial explication than that was needed. I thought it struck a very nice balance, myself.
Rating: 
Summary: Baseball Stories from a Lifelong Fan
Review: Stephen Jay Gould grew up in New York City as a Yankees' fan during the late forties and into the fifties, a great time to learn to love the game of baseball. For those of us fortunate to grow up during this era many of Gould's stories are familiar yet entertaining from his point of view. Dusty Rhodes' heroics during the '54 Fall Classic and Don Larsen pitching his way to perfection in '56 are two examples. The only drawback to the book from my point of view is the emphasis on why he feels noone will ever hit .400 anymore. I am not a fan of statistics and charts, and a special section is devoted to figures which I realize entertain many baseball fans, but not this one. I prefer stories, and Stephen Jay Gould has provided a number of them for baseball fans to cuddle up with. It's a shame that his life was cut short in May of 2002 from cancer, but he did provide us with this book in addition to his comments on Ken Burns's video history of baseball a few years ago.
Rating:
Summary: Baseball Stories from a Lifelong Fan
Review: Stephen Jay Gould grew up in New York City as a Yankees' fan during the late forties and into the fifties, a great time to learn to love the game of baseball. For those of us fortunate to grow up during this era many of Gould's stories are familiar yet entertaining from his point of view. Dusty Rhodes' heroics during the '54 Fall Classic and Don Larsen pitching his way to perfection in '56 are two examples. The only drawback to the book from my point of view is the emphasis on why he feels noone will ever hit .400 anymore. I am not a fan of statistics and charts, and a special section is devoted to figures which I realize entertain many baseball fans, but not this one. I prefer stories, and Stephen Jay Gould has provided a number of them for baseball fans to cuddle up with. It's a shame that his life was cut short in May of 2002 from cancer, but he did provide us with this book in addition to his comments on Ken Burns's video history of baseball a few years ago.
Rating:
Summary: Great baseball essays in search of an editor
Review: Stephen Jay Gould was a marvelous paleontologist, but also an ardent follower of baseball. He even appeared in Ken Burns' "Baseball" documentary. As a boy, his favorite team was the NY Yankees, and he was once beaten up by some fans of their opponents, those lovable bums, the Brooklyn Dodgers. His heroes were Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, and he writes about them as elegantly as DiMaggio himself prancing gazelle-like across the outfield, scooping up flyballs.
This book collects three dozen of Gould's baseball essays. He writes about things like the umpire Babe Pinelli, who called the final strike of the perfect game that Don Larsen pitched in the 1956 World Series. The final pitch was technically outside the strike zone, but only by a few inches. But, considering the context (both a World Series and a perfect game on the line), Pinelli thought that the batter - Dale Mitchell - should have at least made contact, perhaps to tap it foul, because questionable pitches can go either way. Afterward, Mitchell groused that the ball was not a strike, and Gould perceptively concludes that Mitchell was right, but Pinelli was righter.
Also included in this collection is Gould's famous essay about why no one hits .400 (batting average) anymore. What he argues is, curiously, there are no more .400 hitters because players in general are all much better.
As an avid baseball fan and Yankees lover, I enjoyed this book a lot. Any book that re-lives the memory of the ball going through Bill Buckner's legs in the 1986 Mets-Red Sox World Series, thus giving new credence to the Curse of the Bambino, has my gratitude.
The problem, though, is that Gould was not around to oversee the final assembly and publication of this book. Gould had thought of collecting his baseball essays for years; in 1992 Stephen King in fact suggested such a project to Gould. An editor's note tells us that Gould himself left the manuscript "neatly organized, and in good hands," at his office before he passed in May 2002. Maybe Gould was too close to the end to pay close enough attention, maybe the editors were too reverent in handling the late, great man's final work. But this book feels like an unedited mass, cobbled together from scattered writings, with enough repetitions and factual lacunae that the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
While some of Gould's articles mention newer heroes like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, too many of the essays were written in the 1980's. Gould's essays in natural history tended to discuss history, wherein the events were already done. However, his baseball essays were often written while events were still unfolding. Herein lies the problem with editing. His essay about hitters batting .400 was written in 1986 in mid-season, and he concludes with the gutsy prediction that Wade Boggs would hit .400 that year. No editorial blandishment actually tells us if Boggs did or not actually achieve this remarkable feat (he in fact fell a little short, at .357). In another essay, discussing mind v. body, Gould writes about Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who suddenly found himself unable to make a simple toss from second to first. Gould predicted that Knoblauch would return to form. Nothing tells us what actually happened (though a caption provides the tiniest of hints). The truth is that he never did; after this essay was written but before the book published, Knoblauch was shifted to the outfield, where he did pretty well (only 2 errors in 108 games with the Yanks in 2001), and he later played for the KC Royals, but he never returned to his glory days as an elite second baseman. In additional to these omissions, no editor dared add or subtract from Gould's text to correct his statements which have, in due course, become incorrect. In another essay from 1986, Gould wrote that no player since Mickey Mantle in 1957 had an on-base percentage of better than .500 (which means you get on base more often than you make an out). No editor stepped up to the plate to remind the reader that in fact the mighty Barry Bonds has now done it twice - in 2001 (with an astounding .515) and in 2002 with an even more incredible .582. All these errors of omission are minor, but in baseball, details are everything, and they could easily have been corrected. If anyone cared.
In short, the book is a lot of fun to read, if slightly repetitious (essay after essay reminds us how statistics prove that DiMaggio's streak of hitting in 56 consecutive games wasn't just a fluke, but an achievement for the ages). But it is a collection of marvelous baseball essays by a great lover of the game, sadly diminished by slovenly editing.
Rating:
Summary: Let the players do the talking
Review: This book is a compilation of baseball-related articles that Professor Gould wrote over the years for the NEW YORK TIMES, AMERICAN HERITAGE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL and THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. <BR
Many of these articles are "set-pieces." By that I mean Gould repeats parts of one article in another. For instance, as a child, Gould played stickball in the streets of New York City. This crops up over an over again. He also uses stickball as an explanation as to why so many intellectuals (Bart Giamati, George Will, David Halberstam to name a few) are/were so addicted to baseball. He disavows the notion that baseball imitates life or vice versa. His explanation is that many of these men played baseball as kids and are partial to the game.
Gould examines such issues as why there are no longer any .400 hitters. Gould's explanation is that the standard deviation between the best players and the poorest has lessened since the .400 hitters were in evidence. Later on he discusses sports biographies, using such professiorial words as "hagiographical" and "quotidian" to describe the two kinds. The first concentrates on the player's exploits on the field; whereas, the other would emphasize social commentary and the player's personal life. The quotidian sort of bio took center stage with Jim Boutin's BALL FOUR and has been imitated ever since.
Although he's spent most of his life in Boston, Gould has also been a Yankee fan since he was a kid, and as such, his favorite player has always been Joe Dimaggio. Gould considers Joltin' Joe's fifty-six game hitting streak the greatest achievement in the history of baseball, despite the fact that Joe did it twice actually, once as a player in the Pacific Coast league. Gould also doesn't mention Robin Ventura's similar accomplishment as a college player, nor does he consider the fact that, unlike Barry Bonds in 2002, the pitchers may have been directed to pitch to Joe. Dimaggio walked only seventy-six times that year.
Gould's writing comes alive when lets the players do the talking. I enjoyed Gould's article on Dummy Hoy, the deaf mute who played in the majors from 1888-1902. Hoy played center field, a commanding position on the field, and was one of the best fielders in the league. I also liked Gould's description of Casey Stengel's decimation of a TV reporter after losing the '57 World Series. Casey used the "f" word and scratched his behind, thereby destroying the reporter's audio and video. In another review, Gould shows Leo Durocher telling his racist players to "wipe their a---s" with their petition against Jackie Robinson.
Rating:
Summary: Five Star Essays about Baseball and Life
Review: This book should provide plenty of enjoyment for every baseball fan and all the devotees of the late essayist Stephen Jay Gould. While I will touch on the flaws later (because in some ways the totality of this posthumously published collection of Gould's essays is less than the sum of the parts), this is a wonderful book to sample at your leisure. Many of the pieces manage to be thought provoking and incredibly nostalgic at the same time. One of my favorites in this regard was an incredibly brief piece (The Babe's Final Strike) originally published in the NY Times in 1984 regarding the strikeout of Dale Mitchell by Don Larsen to complete the only perfect game in World Series history. It revived both my memory of watching those final moments on our small black and white TV on October 8, 1956 after arriving home from high school late in the game and also recalled the controversy that raged over the strike three call by Babe Pinelli that both guaranteed Don Larsen a place in the record books and also ensured that particular film clip of Yogi Berra jumping into Larsen's arms the status of perpetual inclusion in world series highlight collections. One of the best pieces in the book is actually the introduction by David Halberstam, a good friend of Gould's, a fellow intellectual, and an ardent baseball fan himself. It is literally the perfect bookend for the last selection in the book, a wonderful reprint of a long piece in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS which manages to incorporate a meaningful summary review of ten diverse baseball biographies into a discussion of the elemental attraction of baseball, the parallel changes in the sport and our culture while mixing grandiose generalizations with little known facts. In between these two marvelous selections are pieces as diverse as a lengthy tribute to THE AMAZING DUMMY (about both the often overlooked exploits of Dummy Hoy and also the role of nicknames in baseball) and FREUD AT THE BALLPARK, a very brief piece about how the author finally came to terms years later with the loss of the 1955 subway series by his beloved Yankees to the hated Brooklyn Dodgers. The book is composed of four sections. The first is REFLECTIONS AND EXPERIENCE, which is comprised of thought pieces about various aspects and events of the game. The second is HEROES LARGE, SMALL, AND FALLEN, which includes pieces on Mickey Mantle, Dusty Rhodes, Mel Allen, Jim Thorpe, Joe Dimaggio and "Shoeless Joe" Jackson in addition to the selection on Dummy Hoy; of course all these selections are about much more than the individuals profiled and their impact on the game. The third section is titled NATURE, HISTORY, AND STATISTICS AS MEANING. It examines some of the myths of baseball and such questions as "why no one hits .400 any more" and whether Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak really was an achievement in a class by itself. The last section is simply entitled CRITICISM. It is a collection of some of the best topical book reviews which Gould wrote, which are always a taking off point for an elegant discussion of some aspect of the game. Despite the fact that I consider the great majority of the essays in this collection to deserve five star ratings, there are several factors about the book which kept me from rating it five stars. First, with the exception of Halberstam's foreword and Gould's introduction, these are set pieces all of which have appeared elsewhere and thus suffer from repetition of some of the author's favorite musings and ideas. (I suspect that given his death the editors were less ruthless than he would have been about correcting this flaw.) Second, some of the pieces are slightly dated and the reader is left to wonder how Gould would have responded to recent events impacting the sport (e.g. the undoubted effect of questionable substances on the obliteration of power hitting records in such areas as home runs and slugging average). Last, in a collection of this length and this diversity, it is almost inevitable that a few of the selections will suffer in comparison to the best of the group. Even if this reaction is only due to my preferences and prejudices as an individual reader, it still is a factor that influenced my overall reaction to the book. While there are several pieces that I found very memorable and/or educational (some of which I have in fact reread), others seemed only of average quality compared to the work of other good sportswriters. So I heartily recommend the book with the caveat that most readers will probably want to take time to savor some of the pieces while quickly browsing others. But practically everyone will reflect that we are all undoubtedly the richer for the unique insights furnished us by Gould as he managed to combine the knowledge gained from his lifelong career as a paleontologist with his passion for the game of baseball. Tucker Andersen
Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: This is a fan's book, in every sense of the term. Thanks to his writings about baseball in such unlikely places as the New York Review of Books, and his appearance in Ken Burns' documentary about the sport, Stephen Jay Gould's position as one of the premiere intellectuals who also happens to love baseball will forever be secure; this collection of works will keep that legacy alive for a new generation. Because these writings are generated from Gould's own love of the sport, the focus tends heavily toward the two teams he spent most of his life watching--the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. And that's fine, because no other two teams have encompassed the heights of triumph and tragedy this sport has to offer. For the non-scientist, Gould may get a bit technical at times, such as his explanation of why the .400 hitter is as extinct as the dinosaurs, but even this journalism major managed to wade through it all. A passionate lovesong to the sport from a fan who left his seat too soon.
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