Agent Palmer

It has been five years since I read and posted about Earl Weaver’s autobiography It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts. Since then, a new Earl Weaver biography has been published by John W. Miller, The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball.

This book doesn’t just tell the story of Earl Weaver. It puts Earl Weaver in the context of what baseball has become and how we arrived at it before the rest of the league.

Thomas Oliphant’s Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family’s Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers is a loving snapshot of 1950s Brooklyn. It transports you to not only the 1955 World Series between the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers, but also to 1955 New York, covering Brooklyn of course, but a few surrounding boroughs as well.

Baseball fans will enjoy this book for putting us front and center with one of the more epic game sevens in World Series history.

I’ve never met Tom Adelman, but I feel as though we just had a wonderful conversation. Black and Blue: The Golden Arm, the Robinson Boys, and the 1966 World Series That Stunned America was the conversation we shared.

This book is fantastic, and that’s coming from an Orioles fan who has also enjoyed Dodger baseball for the past decade plus. Through telecasts I’ve absorbed the history of both clubs, but this book does something else.

Baseball is a Funny Game by Joe Garagiola is not about a baseball star. It’s hardly about the fundamentals of the game or its many statistics. It is simply the story of baseball told by an average catcher who bounced around the National League for a while who can tell stories with the best of them.

This book is baseball as it was and as it is, because the more things change the more they stay the same. America’s game is no exception.

Over the years baseball has changed. On the diamond, in the dugout, and off the field as well. And there are a ton of things in this book that emphasize that point, but this book is more than baseball, it’s Earl Weaver. And then again, some things don’t change.

It’s pitching, defence, and the three-run home-run. It’s arguing with umpires, tearing up rulebooks, and “debates” with your own players and management.