Volume 40, Number 18 · November 4, 1993
Baseball: Joys and Lamentations
By Stephen Jay Gould
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW
My Life As A Fan
by Wilfrid Sheed
Simon and Schuster, 221 pp., $20.00
Fridays With Red: A Radio Friendship
by Bob Edwards
Simon and Schuster, 240 pp., $21.00
The Era, 1947–1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World
by Roger Kahn
Ticknor and Fields, 372 pp., $22.95
The Gospel According to Casey: Casey Stengel's Inimitable, Instructional, Historical Baseball Book
by Ira Berkow, by Jim Kaplan
St.Martin's, 172 pp., $12.95 (paper)
O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto
edited by Tom Peyer, edited by Hart Seely
Ecco Press, 107 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Change is neutral as a general phenomenon, and can only be assessed case by case. We sit in our unsatisfactory present, surrounded by two mythologies that exalt their respective and conflicting ends—better futures by the fancy of progress, and rosier pasts by the fable of golden good old days. Sports fans are particularly subject to the dangers of nostalgia and a falsely glorified past. Young children deify Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, or even Reggie Jackson (who flourished at the dawn of my middle age)—none of whom they have ever seen in play. But nostalgia is surely silliest in older fans who should be able to grant some strength to the former contestant in a battle between eyewitness testimony and clouds of later memory. (I should mention that 'older' has a definite meaning in this particular ballpark. Rooting is generational, and you enter the category of older when you first take your child to a game.) We simply have to be tough in the face of such temptation to moon about better pasts. I confess that I am about to submit to this enticement in choosing to focus this year's review of baseball literature on five books exalting the prime joy of my own youth—New York baseball in the late 1940s and 1950s. I must therefore begin with an apologia.
Review, 6517 words
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