* Review: Willie Mays

The Sunday Times Book Review leads off with a full page about James Hirsch’s bio (which leads some to ask, why is it necessary to review the same book twice, given the limited review space).

The review, by long time New York writer Pete Hamill, is quite glowing in its praise, although he doesn’t actually mention the book until the fifth paragraph (which is another occupational hazard: reviewing the topic more than the book itself).

Hamill, who wrote the baseball novel Snow in August, calls the book “fine” and praises the author: “In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch tells the full story of Mays’s baseball life.”

In this book, Hirsch evokes a time now gone, one he himself didn’t experience. He was born in 1962, and never saw Mays play. But he has studied the films and videos. He has drawn on newspaper and magazine articles from that era, and previous books about Mays (most notably Charles Einstein’s “Willie’s Time,” published in 1979). He has interviewed many people, including Mays, who has “authorized” this biography. The result: Hirsch has given us a book as valuable for the young as it is for the old. The young should know that there was once a time when Willie Mays lived among the people who came to the ballpark. That on Harlem summer days he would join the kids playing stickball on St. Nicholas Place in Sugar Hill and hold a broom-handle bat in his large hands, wait for the pink rubber spaldeen to be pitched, and routinely hit it four sewers. The book explains what that sentence means. Above all, the story of Willie Mays reminds us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.

Hirsch is also featured in this week’s Book Review podcast, which you can hear through the link to the review or as an iTunes download.

But it seems no one of a certain age can wax nostalgic without some young whippersnapper ruining the fun, such as Josh Alper on wnbcnewyork.com in a blog entry called, “Memo to Pete Hamill: Baseball’s Just as Good as Ever,” in which he writes

Oh, sure, Mays meant something to people of Hamill’s generation. You probably know some of them, either your own fathers or grandfathers or uncles who grew up in those days and can still wax rhapsodic about the Giants, Dodgers, Jackie, Willie or the Duke at the drop of a hat. For those people, today’s game will never measure up. Hamill is working in that wheelhouse and that’s just fine and dandy.

The issue is that all the things Hamill lists as problematic/less romantic about today’s game are bogus. You’re free to dislike artificial turf, designated hitters, steroids and anything else, but it’s dishonest to mention, as Hamill does, “the innocence of the game.”

Can’t Stop the Bleeding offers similar knocks.