Bookshelf reviews: Extra Innings and The Card

July 8, 2011

As long-time readers of the Bookshelf know, I feel awkward when it comes to reviewing fiction. It’s so subjective. I like dogs and you’re a cat person or I like vanilla and you can’t stand it. I’m also of a mind that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything (although that philosophy kind of gets by me from time to time, especially if the book is stupendously bad).

The two new novels for today’s consideration are wildly divergent, each appealing to a different audience.

Extra Innings: A Story for the Aged, by Lane Strauss, a frequent contributor to ESPN The Magazine, expands on the thoughts by many fans and non-fans that games take waaaaaay too long. Think that six hour, 20-inning marathon was endless? The guys on these fictitious Tigers and Indians teams have been at it for more than 60 years.

Strauss comes at this particular, spectacular event and its effects from the perspectuses (perspecti?) of several individuals involved in the contest, including players, bat boys, owners, broadcasters, lawyers, hookers(!), tour guides, actors, et al.  Many of the characters are wonderfully profane, some a bit superfluous. But the telling is quite snappy, offered in very short chapters, as if too acknowledge that both younger and older demographics have short attention spans.

Extra Innings is a nice surprise from the run of the mill baseball novel, which, when it comes down to it, follows basically the same handful of story lines. As Bill Jordan writes in his review of The Fireball Kid on BaseballReflections.com,

Novels about sports, specifically baseball, usually fall in one of two categories. Either they are written about a kid who is bullied at school and finds their way on the diamond, or a middle aged man who hasn’t played in decades, but all of the sudden has Major League talent.

That might be perhaps a tad too simplistic, but you get the idea.

Falling somewhat into this line of thinking is The Card: A Van Stone Novel, a book for young adults by Jim Devitt.

Stone is a bat boy for the Seattle Mariners who, through a series of improbable events,  gets mixed up in industrial espionage. (Devitt worked in the Mariners clubhouse for several years, giving the book an added sense of authenticity and insight into the jobs ofa team’s behind-the-scenes employees.) The teenaged Stone is assisted in his quest to find out the truth by his best friends — a wise guy and a smart girl. Hmm, why does this seem familiar?

Admittedly, this genre isn’t exactly my cup of tea (I’m also not much of a mystery buff), so it’s even more difficult to assess. As an adult, I found it a bit slow moving in spots, picking up frantically in the end, with some improbable situations and obvious plot points that you know just aren’t going to hold up. But ask a “young adult” and I’m sure you’ll get a much different take. Goodness knows there are plenty of good reviews about the book, like this one from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer site, via Blogcritics.org, or this one from “Confessions of a YA writer,” or this one from Bookdads.com. The Card is widely available from outlets like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Like I suggested, you say to-mat-to, I say to-mah-to.

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