Today's audio selection: Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game

Written by George Vecsey, narrated by Alan Nebelthau (unabridged)

In a Fall 2006 feature I did for Bookreporter.com, I wrote:

Veteran columnist George Vecsey offers a quick recap of historical highlights of the national pastime in BASEBALL: A HISTORY OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE GAME. The slim volume — a mere 250-plus pages — barely touches on his subjects, but gives readers a starting point from which they can delve further.

With more than 40 years on the baseball beat, Vecsey is a voice of authority who never assumes his audience is as expert as he nor does he condescend, explaining the obvious. Among the topics he offers at watershed moments in the game are the questionable origins of the sport; how Babe Ruth rescued baseball in the wake of the 1919 “Black Sox” gambling scandal; and Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson and the Negro Leagues, among others. In his chapter “Radio Days,” Vecsey reports how technology — radio, followed by television and then the Internet — has transformed the way fans take in games. Other entries note the evolution of the sport through various changes to rules and equipment. Finally, he opines on relatively recent events that have damaged the lofty image of baseball as “America’s game,” including the cocaine scandals of the 1980s, collusion by owners to keep salaries as low as possible as free agency mushroomed in the mid-1970s, Pete Rose and his gambling problems, and, most recently, the shadow of steroids.

Vecsey, a writer for The New York Times since 1968 (and Newsday for eight years prior to that), is at his best when he writes from a personal perspective. The prologue considers sharing his love for baseball with his grandson, for example, and other comments (far too few) serve as an example of how this game can take a hold of someone as a youngster and never let go.

Narrator Nebelthau does a sweet job conveying the sentiments of an obviously older fan’s take on the game, kind of like how your grandfather might explain how things were in his day. I don’t think this would have worked with a “younger” recitation.
Here’s the sample: