Review roundup: May 21

MLB Reports reported on David Stinson’s Deadball: A Metaphysical Baseball Novel. Upshot: “…David Stinson accomplished his mission. I read. I learned. I experienced. I thought. I questioned the baseball past and starting looking to my baseball future. I am. Therefore baseball is the answer. The Metaphysics of Baseball. Welcome to Deadball.”

The Jackson (Miss.) Clarion Ledger published this piece on Grisham’s Calico Joe. Upshot: “Calico Joe is a wonderful book that begs to be made into an iconic movie.” Iconic movie? Please. If this gets made — as it probably will — I predict it will be one of the sappiest, cliche-ridden baseball flicks of all time. Just sayin’. I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

The Los Angeles Times, on the other hand, also reviewed CJ and came up with this: “When it comes to reviewing books, my dirty little secret is to lift excerpts here and there, not just to offer a test drive of the book’s rhythms and sensibilities, but to capture the beauty of the words themselves…. So it is rather telling that I did not circle one excerpt in this book — no mustardy Hi-Liter on the pages, not a single underlined phrase. Not bad, in the sense that I can donate my unblemished copy to the local library in good conscience. Bad in the sense there is no riff or passage worth noting.”

Two baseball titles — You Stink!: Major League Baseball’s Terrible Teams and Pathetic Players and Major League Dads: Baseball’s Best Players Reflect on the Fathers Who Inspired Them to Love the Game get the mini-review treatment in a roundup in the Asbury Park Press.

The Washington Post ‘s Jonathan Yardley wrote this one on The Last Natural: Bryce Harper’s Big Gamble in Sin City and the Greatest Amateur Season Ever, the way-too-premature bio of the “highly-touted rookie.” The critic’s comments include: “‘The Last Natural’ is an absolutely preposterous title and Miech, a longtime sports writer, is at best a pedestrian stylist,…” and the conclusion, “So read “The Last Natural” for the insight it provides, but caveat lector. The book is riddled with awkward, at times implausible transitions; with non-sequiturs, some of which border on the hilarious (“ ‘You lose sight of the fact that he’s seventeen,’ ” Inglehart said while wearing dark sunglasses”); and with herky-jerky prose that only rarely settles into something approximating rhythm. An editor is thanked in his acknowledgments, but there is little evidence that any editing was done. A disappointing but informative book about an interesting subject.”