Review: Extra Innings

Extra Innings: The Joy and the Pains of Over-30 Baseball

by Patrick Smith

McFarland, 2007

As an, ahem, over-30 athlete myself, I could emphasize with Smith’s funny and thoughtful memoir of those of us still in love with playing a kid’s game; knowing better, but afraid to give it up, afraid to capitulate to he onset of AARP-dom.

Smith participated in a baseball league, rather than softball, like most of us post-college geezers. He gives short shrift to those who play in slow-picth leagues: where the challenge in that he wonders (on behalf of those of use who have played the fast-pitch game, I take umbrage, but only so far). The pitchers in his circles can still bring it at 80 miles per hour, and probably with a lot less control, making things dicey for batters who have day jobs they have to take into consideration.

Anyone who has participated in adult town-sponsored athletics will be able to relate to Smith’s story: the teammates who take the competition way to seriously, and the slackers who don’t take it to heart at all. The worry about being able to perform to one’s own standards, which gets more difficult with each passing year; the question one asks while standing in the outfield on a 90-degree day with his team on the down side of a blow-out: why am I doing this? Why do I put up with these clowns week after week? Don’t I have anything better to do with my time?

The long answer is “no.” For whatever psychological reason (that’s an entry for another time), these weekend warriors, who tolerate all sorts of indignities and injuries, cannot bear to part with this game of their youth.

It takes the length of the book for Smith to explain that baseball is a great teacher.

Baseball is, far more often than not, a spectacular, perfect disappointment….making small successes feel that much better and make large successes feel otherworldly. It’s like the guy who hits himself over the head with a hammer because it feels so good when he stops.

Extra Innings is an entertaining look at boys insisting on remaining boys, to a degree. But Smith, perhaps to round out the books, includes a good deal of unrelated topics, including his less-than-stellar academic career and a stint on the Baltimore Orioles ground crew, the latter of which could have stood alone as a theme for a book.

This is a departure for McFarland, a publishing house that usually sticks to scholarly treatises on “serious” topics. It certainly is the most profane, but in being so is the most realistic. I could easily see any one of these guys fitting on my old team. Perhaps that why I quit in search of a fresh start with a new gang of colorful characters.