Big Books for Fans of Big Leagues

Orel Hershiser reads few baseball books. When he does he scans them for information that helps his pitching.

Yet, like many Los Angeles baseball fans, Hershiser read for fun and enjoyed Roger Kahn’s “The Boys of Summer.” Kahn lyrically described the 1952 and ’53 Brooklyn Dodger seasons he covered for a New York newspaper and then revisited the players 20 years later.

“I liked its depth and how well he got into the team and its personality,” said Hershiser, who read the book a few years after he joined the Dodgers when many of the former players were his spring training coaches.

Hershiser’s Heroes

“I only knew them as heroes. What I did not know is that when they were 19 or 24 years old, they were just like us. How they tried to kill time on the road, how life on the road was sometimes boring, how everything would get blown out of proportion and be gut wrenching the day you were playing, but when you go back and look, the game was only one paragraph in a book and all anybody remembers is the World Series.”

Hershiser was among several people who mentioned “The Boys of Summer” when a selection of Big League fans were interviewed about their favorite baseball books now that the Dodgers’ home season has opened.

In addition to Kahn’s work, readers liked another book about the Dodgers, Jules Tygiel’s “Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy,” a study of Robinson’s breaking of baseball’s color barrier in 1947.

Other favorites included Mark Harris’ novel, “Bang the Drum Slowly”; Roger Angell’s collections of essays, “The Summer Game,” “Late Innings” and “Season Ticket”; and Eliot Asinof’s “Eight Men Out,” a study of the 1919 Chicago White Sox who were bribed to lose the World Series.

A few lesser-known titles also appeared, including Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s 1983 novel, “The Celebrant,” Japanese baseball great Sadaharu Oh’s mystical autobiography “A Zen Way of Baseball” and Arnold Hano’s “A Day in the Bleachers,” an entire nonfiction book about Willie Mays’ spectacular catch in the 1954 World Series.

State Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), former Dodger catcher John Roseboro and New York writer Grace Lichtenstein all praised Tygiel’s book for what it taught them about race relations and the civil rights movement.

“You can say that Jackie Robinson was the first black in baseball, and that blacks brought more speed and more excitement to the game,” said Lichtenstein, the author of five books including a study of the women’s professional tennis circuit.

“But it went farther than that. He was responsible for giving black America the impetus to demand their rightful place everywhere. . . . The book is the story of the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.”

A Long Season

Tom Boswell, the Washington Post columnist who has written three volumes of baseball essays, said his favorite baseball book is former Cincinnati Reds pitcher Jim Brosnan’s “The Long Season.”

“Most baseball books tend to veer toward the mythological, the heroic or the pretentious,” he said. “But of all the sports, baseball is the least concerned with those.”

Brosnan’s book about the 1959 season deals with detail, with humor and with craftsmanship, Boswell said, and with “difficult, but not heroic” everyday things. Brosnan negotiates his own contract, exults when he gets Willie Mays out, gets drunk after surrendering a mammoth home run and frets when he is traded to another team.

More than a Game

Steve Boros, the Dodgers’ special assignment scout who has written an unpublished autobiography, praised W. P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe.” The novel describes an Iowa farmer who sees visions of a former player telling him to build a baseball field. “I married a girl from Iowa and I can relate to the way he depicts rural life,” said Boros, a former baseball manager in Oakland and San Diego. “It’s a nice blend between baseball and another ideal pastoral way of existence, which is life on a farm.”

Hershiser is not apt to read any of those books. He said that growing up outside Detroit he read many baseball periodicals but few books. What he seeks in books, he said, is information that helps him win, and he recently found some in a stop-action, pictorial baseball essay.

“You can see when pitchers have good mechanics,” he said. His goal: “Throw with a firm left side to create a whip with your (right) arm. You can reassure yourself of good habits.”