How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin, and Their Colorful, Come-from-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series – and America’s Heart, by John Heidenry.
An odd inclusion (posted Jan. 2) for something so august as The Huffington Post (does this mean there’s hope for my work appearing there?), especially since the book came out in 2008 and the author has a more recent release (Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease).
Upshot: the book “is a nice homage to a team and era, but it’s caught between genres.
Sports writing — and baseball writing in particular, because statistics have become such a strong part of the modern game’s analysis — is deceptively difficult. Fifty years ago, it was enough to write colorful anecdotes about beefy jocks, gathering stories by drinking with the boys and preserving access by withholding any unflattering anecdote, describing their achievements in hyperbole and doggerel. Nowadays, a good sportswriter is expected to analyze, critique, and evaluate what he sees, not merely describe it using clever adjectives. Sports fans who write sports books frequently fall into this trap of merely attempting the former — like Lee Lowenfish, who wrote a thoroughly disappointing biography of Cardinal General Manager and statistical pioneer Branch Rickey…who also plays a major role in this book. John Heidenry is an engaging writer with a lot of sympathy for his characters, particularly the enigmatic Dizzy Dean, whom he does a good job bringing to life. But he isn’t a baseball expert, and ultimately a portrait of these men without a better understanding of their life’s work falls a bit short.
Well, that was more than an “upshot,” but nicely put.
is available on Amazon.com,
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