The Bookshelf Conversation: Sridhar Pappu

They say the Golden Age of a thing — in this case a sports thing — is often what you remember from your childhood, a time when you had a love for the game that wasn’t affected by too much “grown up” knowledge of salary disputes, gossip, scandal, etc.

Roger Kahn got the ball rolling with The Boys of Summer, a nostalgic look at the Brooklyn Dodgers of the late 1940s to early-fifties which became a classic in the genre of baseball literature; perfect for the Boomer Generation. Even if you weren’t a baseball fan, the Dodgers were a cultural institution. How many World War II movies included some wounded freckle-faced soldier who, with his dying breath, wanted to know how the Bums were doing?

The Boomers have been replaced in the nostalgia marketplace. Now it belongs to those who grew up in the late-sixties to mid-seventies who are getting the attention, covered by authors like Dan Epstein and Jason Turbow. Michael Leahy‘s The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers has become one of my favorite books, not just about baseball but in general.

Add Sridhar Pappu to that growing list of writers to cover the social commentary/baseball challenge in The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age, published last fall (yeah, still trying to catch up). Not only does his work look at the unique 1968 season in which McLain win 31 games while Gibson dominated in the National League, but he also examines larger issues of that year, especially in terms of civil and racial unrest in America.