Bookshelf review — For your convenience: Imperfect

[Note: My spring baseball roundup appears on Bookreporter.com and is reposted here as individual reviews for your convenience.]

Jim Abbott tells an old-fashioned tale of hard work, dedication, and refusing to give up in Imperfect: An Improbable Life, co-written by Tim Brown.

Born without a right hand, Abbott nevertheless gained success as an outstanding athlete. The book uses a familiar back-and-forth concept, alternating between his September 4, 1993 no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians and his recounting of how he arrived at that point.

Abbott excelled at the University of Michigan; he was the first baseball player to win the Sullivan Award as the nation’s outstanding amateur athlete and was selected for the U.S. Olympic team in 1988. The year before he led the American team to its first win over Cuba at the Pan-Am games.

His “inconvenience” (Abbott would probably not appreciate the term “handicap”) did not deter scouts from checking him out. He was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in 1985 but chose to attend school instead. Abbott signed with the then-California Angels in 1988, making the team out of spring training the following year without spending even a day in the minors.

This could have been a sideshow attraction, but Abbot truly belonged in the Majors. He was 12-12 in his rookie year; three years later, he won 18 games and finished third for the American League Cy Young Award, emblematic of the league’s best pitcher. After missing the 1997 season, he won each of the five games in which he appeared for the Chicago White Sox. Abbot enjoyed a 10-year career, finishing with a record of 87-108 and a respectable 4.25 earned run average.

Abbott now works mainly as a motivational speaker, which is no doubt a reason he wrote the book.

Tagged as: Jim Abbott