Baseball: A Literary Anthology

The Library of America and editor Robert Dawidoff have done an excellent job in collecting the reportage, fiction, memoir, and poetry that make up Baseball: A Literary Anthology. Spanning the murky and convoluted origins of the game to the present hyper-commercial supershow, the book essentially is a 700-page love letter on the mystery and beauty of the game. Much of the writing, not surprisingly, captures baseball's urban, postwar apogee as epitomized by the fierce internecine baseball wars carried out in New York between the Giants, Dodgers, and Yankees. To me this writing carries a romantic nostalgia for a harder, tougher, yet somehow more elegant America, full of smoke and alcohol and fedoras and profane, hard-bitten sportswriters. show more Nowhere is this more keenly evoked than in the book's penultimate piece, Don DeLillo's justly famous "Kafko at the Wall," a dazzling and panoramic account of the famous 1951 playoff between the Dodgers and the Giants at the Polo Grounds. A minor but telling cavil: I find it incomprehensible that nothing from Eliot Asinof's superb Eight Men Out -- the definitive account of the "thrown" 1919 World Series -- was included herein. show less

Hodge podge of stories by baseball writers and others

Probably excellent - I made it 1/3 of the way through. I'll try again at the *start* of the season next year.

My mother was a Giants fan, my father was a Dodgers fan so of course I grew up with the Mets. Like my parents, I listen to Yankees games and root for the opposing team. Take my review with a grain of salt. Baseball is my favorite sport.