Diamonds in the Rough
Brinkman, Thomas E. Jr.
THE CRACK OF THE BAT DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH The Untold History of Baseball Joel Zoss and John Bowman Macmillan, $29.95,480 pp. Thomas E. Brinkman, Jr. Not too long ago, baseball's off-season...
...PLAY BALL...
...As a matter of fact, while $350 million was spent on major league tickets last year, $1.1 billion was spent on new and used baseball cards during the same time...
...Worldwide, ninety countries have sanctioned baseball leagues...
...And, while gunboat diplomacy spawned many of these leagues, most notably in Japan, Cuba, and Nicaragua, the 1992 Summer Olympics will designate baseball as its twenty-fifth medal sport...
...Literature, art, music, film, and theater have all contributed and remarked upon America's passion for its favorite game...
...Doubleday had nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with it...
...But I am a fan who thoroughly enjoyed this walk through my favorite sport...
...While salaries and labor negotiations, drug usage, and racism may offend us today, you will come to learn that these problems and more have been with the sport since its inception...
...Despite, or because of the perpetration of this false claim, baseball pervades every aspect of American culture...
...Diamonds even challenges the accepted notion of who invented the game...
...But more intriguing than that will be the exposure of baseball's adopted birthright...
...Nowadays, however, the off-season seems more like penance...
...Beyond the known suffering of enduring other less enjoyable offerings such as football, basketball, hockey, etc., we now must go through $3 million salary disputes and labor negotiations...
...Add the effect baseball has upon television, advertising, and collectibles, and the influence is amazing...
...Baseball is the national pastime, but it was derived from an English schoolgirl's game called rounders...
...Joel Zoss and John Bowman's recent addition to the encyclopedic area of that literature, Diamonds in the Rough, is an attempt to show how thoroughly baseball has permeated our culture, mostly through myths, and how inaccurate these myths can be...
...PLAY BALL...
...I did find two editorial errors in the volume and this might call into question other stated facts...
...While the authors exhaust every topic that baseball has touched tremendously or marginally, their style is extremely readable...
...Not too long ago, baseball's off-season resembled Lent: a time when the faithful endured a fast from their favorite pastime in anticipation of the rebirth of "spring training...
...Luckily, baseball has always had a deep history of literature-statistical, anecdotal, biographical, and encyclopedic-for the fan to fall back upon in his or her hour of need...
...Like a great hurler who mixes up his pitches, the authors shift their subchapters deftly between statistics, biography, and anecdotes to give the reader nearly everything he or she asks for...
...a fan who each winter cannot wait until the suffering occasioned by life without baseball ends...
...It was not Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown...
Vol. 117 • May 1990 • No. 10
