You know Me Al: A Busher's Letters

It is little wonder why this book was extraordinarily popular in the first half of the last century (it was first published in 1914). It is a very funny book about baseball; or it is a book about a blowhard baseball player who is too full of ego and too dim to see how outrageously inappropriate and silly his actions are.

Written as a series of letters to his lifelong friend, Al, the book covers two years of Jack Keefe's life as a new White Sox pitcher, who lacks social skills (and spelling skills!) but who seems to fall in love with every young chippie he meets. Hotheaded and opinionated, Jack routinely storms into Mr. Comiskey's office to demand more money, earning him (fairly early on) a bust back down to the bush leagues. But Jack, show more artless as he is, has talent, and is soon back under contract to Comiskey. Jack always comes out last, while boasting to Al how he's gotten the best of every deal, and this book lasts just long enough to be funny without being exasperating.

Recommend to fans of early 20th century fiction -- and/ or baseball. show less

So this is touted as one of the best baseball books ever written and its pedigree is almost a century old being published in 1915. A thoroughly enjoyable book and somewhat irreverently written. Unusually it consists entirely of letters written by a bush league player who has made it to the majors. A vain and unsophisticated man but his letters are thoroughly enjoyable. While illuminating about baseball in those days it's more about the protagonist Al and his baseball and personal life so one doesn't at all need to like baseball to enjoy it. A great quick read.

I do love baseball and I've always heard that Ring Lardner was a hilarious writer. This fictional collection of letters from an early 20th century bush league baseball player captures the voice of a foolish, vane, moronic athlete. It is the voice of someone with absolutely no self-awareness, who is so consistently a patsy that his perpetual folly descends into mockery and cruelty. He is such a typical meathead player that it made me feel bad to keep reading. Maybe it was funny in its day (1915), but not any more when the sheer stupidity of modern celebrities is paraded through the news on a daily basis.

Ring Lardner's novel,YOU KNOW ME AL, is a recognized classic, a tongue-in-cheek look at professional baseball in the early 20th century. First published nearly a hundred years ago, I don't think Lardner's book has ever been out of print. It's that good and still that relevant when it comes to baseball: i.e. a dumb jock is still a dumb jock. The novel is comprised of letters from Jack Keefe to his pal, Al Blanchard, back in Bedford, Indiana. Keefe is a former "bush-leaguer," who has made it to the bigs as a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. He is a semi-literate, blustering braggart who somehow manages to become a mostly sympathetic character in the course of his many letters about his ups and downs as a pitcher, his run-ins with show more management (Charles Comiskey, owner of the White Sox; and managers Callahan and Gleason), and his love-life adventures, an initially rocky marriage and fatherhood. A boorish boob/rube in many ways, Jack further endears himself to readers in his role as a doting new father of "little Al."

When he was writing the book, Lardner was a sports writer for newspapers, so he was very familiar with baseball's vernacular as well as all the best players of the time, many of whom are used in his narrative. And this was the era of Ty Cobb, Sam Crawford, Walter Johnson and many other now legendary giants of the game. A hundred years later these figures turn this humorous book into a quasi-history of a sort.

While reading YOU KNOW ME AL, I often thought of Mark Harris's baseball tetralogy (THE SOUTHPAW; BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY; TICKET FOR A SEAMSTITCH; and IT LOOKED LIKE FOREVER), because Lardner's work is such an obvious influence on that of Harris.

I liked this book very much and will recommend it highly to baseball fans and historians. show less

Jack is a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, and the story is told in a series of letters to his old friend Al, back in his hometown of Bedford. The slim enjoyment this book provides comes through Al's interactions with Sox owner Charles Comiskey and other real baseball legends, including Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson. But most of the book consists of an endless pattern: Jack tells Al he isn't going to do something, then in the next letter he tells him he did it (and provides some feeble justification to make himself feel better--or maybe he really is that dumb!) After a while this gets extremely old, and it isn't very funny either, nor is most of the rest of the book. There is no real excitement from the baseball games in the book, show more either. Jack is actually an excellent pitcher and wins most of his games. He has a bottomless reservoir of self-confidence and attributes most of his losses to poor support from his teammates. But, given the letter format, we only hear about the games after they are over through Jack's sketchy accounts, and since the White Sox aren't contenders, there is no drama. The women Jack falls in love with are also a great drag on the story, as every one of them turns out to be some sort of shrew. Jack's most endearing trait turns out to be his genuine affection for his infant at the book's end. But getting that far, even though this is not a long book, is not an enjoyable slog. show less

FROM AMAZON: You Know Me, Al is a classic of baseball, the game and the community. Jack Keefe, one of literature's great characters, is talented, brash, and conceited. Self-assured and imperceptive, impervious to both advice and sarcasm, Keefe rises to the heights, but his inability to learn makes for his undoing. Through a series of letters from this bush-league pitcher to his not-quite-anonymous friend Al, Lardner maintains a balance between the funny and the moving, the pathetic and the glorious.
Nostalgic in its view of pre-World War I America, a time before the "live" ball, a time filled with names like Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and Eddie Cicotte, this is not a simple period piece. It is about competition, about the ability to show more reason, and most of all it is about being human. show less

Ring Lardner's classic of baseball humor, consisting of the fictional letters between Jack Keefe, a lifelong "busher", and Al Blanchard, his best friend back in their hometown of Bedford, Indiana. The letters show Keefe as a naive, boastful athlete who always complains about his expenses and blames others for his own faults on and off the field. Lardner incorporates real players of the times (circa 1914), and paints his humor with a broad bush. Some of the comedy is too dated to be effective today, but much of it still rings true, and the book is a good portrait of the times and what it was like to be a ballplayer then.