There was an awful lot of bizzaro “news” following the death of baseball legend Ted Williams in 2002. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Williams’ son, Ted Jr., who, according to many accounts, was a no-account person with no discernible skills of his own who pushed his ailing dad hard in the memorabilia business. So what does he do as a final gesture? Has his father’s head cut off and cryogenically preserved. Insert poor jokes here.
This very day, Bruce Spitzer releases his “what-if” sci-fi, Extra Innings that ponders what would happen if Williams was brought back to life. The story is set in the year 2092, where advanced technology gives the late-now-current Hall of Famer a second chance: not only is Williams reanimated, but rather than reattaching his head to his old body, he’s given a new, athletic model, thanks to the bad fortune of a young tennis player.
From the book’s Facebook page:
It’s the year 2092 and Ted Williams, the greatest hitter of all time, is brought back to life through the science of cryonics. Advanced medical science allows Williams to recover from an operation that grafts his head onto the body of a young man. With a complete memory of his former life, once again he learns to hit, throw, run and simply survive in strange yet familiar surroundings.
The novel resonates with the consequences of the major issues we face in our world today — the steroids debate in sports, global warming and flooding (Fenway is now an island), corporate greed, technology run rampart and the moral ambiguity of war. Most of all, this novel is about second chances and redemption, triumphing over adversity, and the search for meaning in this life and the next. Flawed in his first life, Williams must decide in the second, what’s more important, a chance to win his first World Series, or a chance to be a better man?
I started reading this one over the weekend. Seems like fun (I’ll post a fuller review at some point). It gives the author a chance to talk some baseball history mixed in with the way the world has deteriorated thanks to environmental issues, and how the game might “progress” over the ensuing decades. (Haven’t come across it yet, but when it comes to salaries, will ballplayers receive large land grants in lieu of salaries? Skip to the 3:45 mark.)
Extra Innings is getting some extra buzz because Spitzer, as a veteran media guy, knows how to work the system and make things interesting. His website allows visitors to “vote” on which background music suits the video book trailer better. The visitor participation is cool, but really, why not extol the virtues of the entree rather than the parsley on the plate?
Spitzer’s website for the book is quite loaded, including a couple of very brief excerpts.
is available on Amazon.com,
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