Through the Knothole of Extra Innings

Rating:
Summary: Mixture of writing styles makes this book shine
Review: Combining the styles of baseball reportage, surrealistic exploration, and memoir, this delightful short book also seems to be experimenting with a multigenre approach to the subject of old-time baseball. Diary entries, interviews, newspaper articles, poems, personal accounts, and lots of photographs grace the 95 pages.
Two players that stand out are the larger-than-life Babe Ruth, and the lesser-known pitcher, Eddie Plank. Plank comes across as a soldier-philosopher who was an enigma to opposing players. One section offers a side of the Sultan of Swat that one might have imagined, but hadn't seen in print before, with nuggets like these: "My favorite food and drink is women and beer,"(64) "I'd tell 'em (young ball players) to use corn starch in their jocks," (63-63) and "I consider myself to be the most absurdly fortunate guy to have slid into the 20th century safe." (67)
My favorite section is the memoir chapter entitled "Although you now serve Negroes, I'll still have rice and beans," which begins as a profile of the seven-time Gold Glove star Vic Power, and turns into not only a paean to this classy player, but a reminder of what the love of baseball means to a boy.
The only drawback to this entertaining book is the poor proofreading job done by the editor.

Rating:
Summary: Play as Life; Myth as Metaphore: Now as Forever...
Review: Love is the name of the history of the game inspiring this book which is actually about this present moment. Baseball as myth and metaphore for the timlessness of reality; the NOW as Home Plate, the quality of reality as an impermnanent, dream-like state, the synchronicity of time and space with the crack of the bat which is the chosen sound in this case of one hand clapping. Personalities, real as imagined, appear and disappear and re-appear within the poetic context of an etheral diamond forever sparkeling in the eye of the beholder as they hold it up to the light of a knot hole shinning like a golden thread through the fabric of the reader's imagination...