Fight to the Finish: How the Washington Nationals Rallied to Become 2019 World Series Champions
Consider these the instant replays of the newspaper business: the local team wins the Fall Classic and within days the major daily slaps together archival stories and photos and, bingo, instant memories.
It’s kind of hard to mess up these things since there’s little in the way of original writing, save, perhaps, for an introduction, which in this case was written by the Post‘s Thomas “Why Time Begins on Opening Day” Boswell, one of my favorite baseball columnists of all time. (How is he not a J.G. Spink Award recipient?).
Fight to the Finish, which, as the title indicates, follows the dramatic exploits of the former Montreal Expos, is the latest in this trend. The stirring comeback gives gives the WaPo bonus points. In many other instances, if the ball club had simply won the Series, “dayenu,” as my people say: it would have been enough.
FTTF is colorful and well done. My only complaint is that they start with desert, putting the stories about the post-season up front rather than build the suspense again by starting with the regular season.
I’ve long had mixed feelings about projects like this. On the one hand, they’re a marvelous keepsake for fans. Heck, I have a few books put out by New York Daily News, Times, and Post when the Mets won in ’69 and ’86. On the other hand, it seems like a money grab from the papers and publishers, if that’s a separate entity, (in the case, the book comes from Triumph). But at $14.95 for the paperback edition, Fight to the Finish is well worth the price.
is available on Amazon.com,
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