* A belated happy birthday, Jim Brosnan

The predecessor to Jim Bouton turned 79 on Oct. 24.

Brosnan wrote The Long Season and The Pennant Race two books while still a player, but they never received the notoriety or earned him the same pop culture recognition as Bouton.

For what it’s worth, here’s an excerpt from his Wikipedia entry:

The first of his books was about his 1959 season, a season which found him being traded from St. Louis to Cincinnati around the halfway point, and was titled The Long Season. It garnered some degree of criticism by those who felt Brosnan had violated the “sanctity” of the clubhouse. In that way it anticipated, by ten years, the firestorm of opinion that would come in the wake of Jim Bouton‘s book, Ball Four. However, Brosnan’s book focused more on feelings and less on the kind of salacious details that Bouton’s book would contain. Regardless, its critics included Joe Garagiola, whose own autobiography, Baseball Is a Funny Game, was entertaining but was of the traditional variety. He characterized Brosnan as a “a loner; a rebel”.

Two years later, Brosnan again kept a diary, a fortuitous circumstance as the Reds would win the National League championship in 1961, before falling to the New York Yankees in the World Series. Brosnan also had one of his best years statistically, with 10 wins against 6 losses, and 16 saves as a reliever. Brosnan’s book was published under the appropriate title of Pennant Race.

Here’s an interview with Brosnan from 2007 and an ESPN piece by Alan Schwarz about Brosnan’s special place in baseball literature.

Tagged as: Jim Bouton, Jim Brosnan