Notes of a Baseball Dreamer

By Robert Mayer (Houghton Mifflin, 336 pages, $18.)Grade: A

Author Robert Mayer has no recollection of visiting the 1939 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, N.Y. But he says it's reasonable to assume, although he was 1-year-old and tucked in his mother's arms, that he burped once or twice at the spot where the '69 Amazin' Mets would someday play in the World Series - Shea Stadium.

In his memoir (originally published in '94 as Baseball and Men's Lives), Mayer describes himself as a member of baseball's ageless generation who believe Zen masters invented America's favorite pastime, not Abner Doubleday.Mayer is a card-carrying, dyed-in- the-wool, baseball enthusiast - a "boys of summer" eccentric who in 1989 took his family to see Field of Dreams and became misty- eyed in public.

"For the last fifteen minutes my throat was choked," Mayer writes. "I found myself fighting back tears. I am rarely so moved by films."

Born with a congenital weakness for the game and with Brooklyn Dodger-blue DNA, Mayer grew up on New York City's streets where stickball was a rite of passage by every kid who could swing a broken broom handle.

Mayer's universe is based totally upon baseball's laws and physics. Despite his parents' hope that he would become a famous accordion player, the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants are his sun and moon.

He sees life as a baseball metaphor. In a high school biology class, for example, he is instructed to bring in a urine sample to study under the microscope. When he sees sperm cells, he is embarrassed - and then envisions tiny, happy baseballs wagging their tails.

As an adult, Mayer finds himself in baseball-free Santa Fe, N. M. There, he has to rely on dusty memories of the Mets, an occasional high school baseball game and the newspaper box scores for his baseball fix. Mayer even tries to coach a Softball Men's Fun League team to fill the void, but most of the team's middle-aged men put an emphasis on "fun" and Mayer becomes frustrated and quits.

It isn't long before Mayer catches what he calls a Rocky Mountain high as the Colorado Rockies begin their inaugural season. He has mixed feelings about abandoning the Mets for the Rockies and their new manager, Don Baylor, an American Leaguer. That's until Baylor fills his coaching staff with former Mets and Don Zimmer, an old- time Brooklyn Dodger.

Psyched up, Mayer attends the Rockies' spring training camp. While taking pictures for his local paper, Mayer gets the chance to meet Zimmer. He tries to think of a brilliant conversation.

" 'Mr. Zimmer,' I said. 'As an old Brooklyn Dodger fan, I would like to shake the hand of one of the Brooklyn Dodgers . . . Good luck with the Rockies.' Zimmer grunted quietly and hoisted his bulk up the dugout steps . . . and began to slam grounders to the infield."

Notes of a Baseball Dreamer is a hilarious, engaging and sentimental look at Mayer's life, using baseball as a barometer. He reminds readers what's good about baseball, what's great about catching the game-winning flyout and what's OK about never growing up. - Laurence Washington

The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together

By Michael Shapiro (Doubleday, 356 pages, $24.95). Grade: A

The Brooklyn Dodgers' decision to move to Los Angeles in 1957 was a huge psychic wound that is still felt deeply among its now-aged fans.

In many ways, Brooklyn in the 1950s was a kind of baseball Camelot. The borough's 1 million residents had decades of rooting for an awful collection of lovable losers.

"Dem Bums" was a term of endearment.

But then something wonderful happened. The Dodgers became one of the best teams in baseball. And with Jackie Robinson's smashing baseball's color barrier, the team changed America's racial history.All of this has been well documented by writers such as Pete Hamill, David Halberstam, Doris Kearns Goodwin and, of course, Roger Kahn's enduring classic, The Boys of Summer.

Add to that collection, The Last Good Season, Michael Shapiro's superbly written account of the Dodger's final season in Brooklyn. It is a great, sweeping, tragic tale that tells us as much about America and its cities as it does about the game itself.Shapiro, a journalism professor and Brooklyn resident, does a masterly job of peering through the knotholes of the myths that still surround Dodger lore to see the reality of the situation. He opens the book with a marvelous account of an opening-day parade that captures all the romance of the team. This is a parade filled with the soul of the borough, as a collection of marching bands, orphans and even pastry chefs makes its way to the ballpark, Ebbetts Field.

But for all the pomp and ceremony, Shapiro notes that 8,000 seats, nearly a third of the stadium's capacity, sat empty that day. Despite having won the World Championship by beating the hated New York Yankees in a classic series, the team could not muster enough fans to fill the ballpark to see that pennant raised on the next opening day.

People tend to forget these things. The Dodgers and Brooklyn itself were losing their fan base and population as residents flocked to the suburbs blooming in Long Island. Who wanted to rent an apartment over a candy store in a crowded neighborhood when $10,000 bought a home with a yard on the former potato fields of the Island?

And the arrival of television had also begun to transform the game. At first, people watched baseball at their neighborhood tavern. But with a TV in every living room, fewer fans passed through the turnstiles.

All of these forces were pressing in on the Dodgers, who by 1956 were still a great but aging collection of veterans whose glory days were fading fast.

In the press of that era, Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley bore the brunt of the blame for moving the team. He became the most hated man in New York City, for not only did the Dodgers flee the city, but the New York Giants followed their lead and left for San Francisco.

But Shapiro's book makes a convincing case that the real villain in this drama was not O'Malley, but Robert Moses, the powerful bridge- building and neighborhood demolishing city planner and possibly the one person who could have kept both teams in the city.

At best, Moses was lukewarm to the idea of using his condemnation powers to secure a site for a new stadium to replace the Dodgers' existing home, the legendary but cramped and aging Ebbetts Field.

"I am ready to concede that Brooklyn is crazy about the Dodgers," Moses wrote to an aide. "Whether it is crazy enough to support a $6,000,000 stadium is another matter."Shapiro makes a convincing case that O'Malley really did want to keep the team in Brooklyn. But he also describes how the owner's then-fantastic plan of building a domed stadium was a dream destined to go nowhere.

O'Malley actually enlisted architect Buckminster Fuller to design a ballpark encased by one of the big domes that later became Fuller's signature element. But even the student detailed to the assignment sensed something was off in O'Malley's enthusiasm for the plan.

"He seemed a little too nice, a little too enthusiastic," the student told Shapiro. "He didn't ask the right kind of questions. He talked about the idea. But he didn't push."

That kind of dreaminess, coupled with Moses' stubborn opposition, doomed the team as it chugged through the final season.

This is a wistful, sad story that says a lot about shifts in lifestyles that altered the landscape of American cities.

It seems ironic today that baseball has come full circle with new, intimate ballparks that echo the feel of an Ebbetts Field.

But as The Last Good Season demonstrates, that nostalgia for another time might be more a construct of the modern imagination than the reality what existed back then. By 1956, Camelot had come and gone.

- John Ensslin

Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches, and Baseball

By David Wells with Chris Kreski (William Morrow, 425 pages, $25.95). Grade: C

Had David Wells not stirred controversy by altering some of the statements that appeared in galleys of his new baseball memoir, readers of this 400-plus-page book might have wondered what all the fuss in Yankee land was about.

The book has some salty things to say about Wells' 16-odd years in the big leagues, but they are buried beneath reams (and reams) of often numbing detail about this pitcher's peregrinations through the major leagues; his struggles with back, elbow and gout problems; and his taste for head-banging music, late-night partying and burgers and beer.

Furthermore, there's little in the rants and riffs in this book that the brash, big-mouthed Boomer has not said before. In a 1999 Playboy interview, he was considerably more vitriolic about Roger Clemens than he is in these pages; and in a 2001 HBO interview, he talked about being horribly hung over when he pitched his perfect game for the Yankees in 1998.

While the Yankees fined Wells $100,000 for tarnishing the team's image with the book, his love affair with the Bronx bombers is actually a through line in the memoir.

What's more, his supposed dissing of Yankees teammates has been wildly overblown. Yes, he makes a lewd comment about the famous incident in which Clemens beaned Mets star Mike Piazza, but he also praises Clemens as "easily the best right-hander of our generation."

His remarks about his teammate Mike Mussina - that they don't hang out a lot - are in no way derogatory; he puts Mussina high on his dream-team list of starters.

As for Wells' comments about the widespread use of steroids in baseball, his estimates are lower than some recently made by others.

In advance galleys of his book Wells wrote: "As of right now, I'd estimate that somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of all major leaguers are juiced." In the wake of a media storm, he pulled a Charles "I was misquoted" Barkley, telling reporters that he had failed to go through it "with a fine-tooth comb." In the finished book, this figure has been downgraded to "somewhere between 10 and 25 percent."

Of course, Wells has been called a loose cannon and loudmouth before.In these pages, Wells uses his colorful language to give the reader a locker-room view of baseball, from the minor leagues and winter ball to the World Series, in an era when big money and free agency have made the sport more peripatetic than ever.Such passages, however, are scattered sparingly throughout a seemingly unedited book: a big, fat mess of a book that tells you more than you ever wanted to know about the also-ran years of the Toronto Blue Jays and the condition of Wells' aching back, a book that would have sold a lot fewer copies without the recent controversy.

Michiko Kakutani

John Ensslin is a staff writer for the Rocky Mountain News. Laurence Washington is the co-Publisher/editor of Blackflix.com . Michiko Kakutani is a book critic for The New York Times.

Back to Top