Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: My Lifelong Passion for Baseball

Gould was one of those people for whom baseball was an adored affliction. He was a true lover of the game and a traditionalist in the best usage of the term. Like nearly all thinking fans, he deplores the addition of another level of the playoffs, aluminum bats and the designated hitter. His love for the game, developed early in life by his worshipping of Joe DiMaggio and his being an unrepentant lifelong Yankee fan, comes through very strongly in his writing. My favorite part of the book is when Gould uses his impeccable scientific credentials to perform a statistical analysis on the decline in the variation of batting averages over the years. The standard deviation of batting averages has shown a steady decline from the beginnings of professional baseball in the 1870's to the middle 1970's. His conclusion is that this demonstrates a continued improvement in the overall level of play. He uses this to argue that it is most unlikely that anyone will ever hit .400 again. I don't agree with that, I have seen the banner years put up by George Brett and Tony Gwynn and understand that if each had gotten just a few more hits, then they could have reached that milestone. I do agree with his assessment of Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak. There are those who argue that he received help from dubious acts of scoring, but the vast majority of his hits were solid. The most amazing thing is that if there had not been two great fielding plays in game 57, his streak would be in the seventies. The statistical analysis carried out by Gould points out an incontrovertible fact, the streak should not have occurred. Of all the events in sports, it is the statistically most improbable one of all. I have read hundreds of books about baseball, from the sanitized idolatry of the books before Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" to some of the more recent shameless gutter sniping. Gould is an intellectual whose writing is some of the clearest and most honest about a game whose elegance in unmatched. I have been to Cooperstown and agree with his assessment that it is a most non-touristy town. Yet, that is the way it should be, baseball is a game that is played everywhere, so why not have the baseball hall of fame in a rural area?

This book should provide plenty of enjoyment for every baseball fan and all the devotees of the late essayist Stephen Jay Gould. While I will touch on the flaws later (because in some ways the totality of this posthumously published collection of Gould's essays is less than the sum of the parts), this is a wonderful book to sample at your leisure. Many of the pieces manage to be thought provoking and incredibly nostalgic at the same time. One of my favorites in this regard was an incredibly brief piece (The Babe's Final Strike) originally published in the NY Times in 1984 regarding the strikeout of Dale Mitchell by Don Larsen to complete the only perfect game in World Series history. It revived both my memory of watching those final moments on our small black and white TV on October 8, 1956 after arriving home from high school late in the game and also recalled the controversy that raged over the strike three call by Babe Pinelli that both guaranteed Don Larsen a place in the record books and also ensured that particular film clip of Yogi Berra jumping into Larsen's arms the status of perpetual inclusion in world series highlight collections.One of the best pieces in the book is actually the introduction by David Halberstam, a good friend of Gould's, a fellow intellectual, and an ardent baseball fan himself. It is literally the perfect bookend for the last selection in the book, a wonderful reprint of a long piece in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS which manages to incorporate a meaningful summary review of ten diverse baseball biographies into a discussion of the elemental attraction of baseball, the parallel changes in the sport and our culture while mixing grandiose generalizations with little known facts. In between these two marvelous selections are pieces as diverse as a lengthy tribute to THE AMAZING DUMMY (about both the often overlooked exploits of Dummy Hoy and also the role of nicknames in baseball) and FREUD AT THE BALLPARK, a very brief piece about how the author finally came to terms years later with the loss of the 1955 subway series by his beloved Yankees to the hated Brooklyn Dodgers.The book is composed of four sections. The first is REFLECTIONS AND EXPERIENCE, which is comprised of thought pieces about various aspects and events of the game. The second is HEROES LARGE, SMALL, AND FALLEN, which includes pieces on Mickey Mantle, Dusty Rhodes, Mel Allen, Jim Thorpe, Joe Dimaggio and "Shoeless Joe" Jackson in addition to the selection on Dummy Hoy; of course all these selections are about much more than the individuals profiled and their impact on the game. The third section is titled NATURE, HISTORY, AND STATISTICS AS MEANING. It examines some of the myths of baseball and such questions as "why no one hits .400 any more" and whether Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak really was an achievement in a class by itself. The last section is simply entitled CRITICISM. It is a collection of some of the best topical book reviews which

I just read this book and think it's a terrific monument to a great scientist. He will truly be missed, but this book also shows a side of Gould that some of us have never seen before -- the human side. Reading about the perpetual heartache he suffered rooting for the Red Sox (despite the fact that he was a Yankees fan) brings him down off his pedestal and into the bleachers with the rest of us bums. And the depth of intelligence and nuance he brings to the subject of baseball is marvelous to behold. It's a shame that he wasn't alive to see this book published, as it seems the idea was very close to his heart.By the way, the jacket art -- by Vanity Fair cartoonist Arnold Roth -- is quite frankly one of the best I've ever seen. Check out the guide in the back of the book pointing out the various players depicted. Buckner on the back flap is priceless.I did want to quibble (gently) with the reviewer below who complains that editorial "updates" about things Gould had mentioned were not included. Whatever his problems with the work done on the book, it looks as though he's somewhat mistaken about that one point; the information about McGwire hitting 70 home runs is in a caption in that chapter, and a coda of sorts to Chuck Knoblauch's season is in a caption, too. (It talks about his dismal performance in the World Series that followed.) So it appears that the editor chose to include whatever information seemed necessary in the book's captions -- and if you're not a reader of captions, I guess those facts are easy to miss. Anyway, personally I didn't find that any more editorial explication than that was needed. I thought it struck a very nice balance, myself.

Stephen Jay Gould was a marvelous paleontologist, but also an ardent follower of baseball. He even appeared in Ken Burns' "Baseball" documentary. As a boy, his favorite team was the NY Yankees, and he was once beaten up by some fans of their opponents, those lovable bums, the Brooklyn Dodgers. His heroes were Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, and he writes about them as elegantly as DiMaggio himself prancing gazelle-like across the outfield, scooping up flyballs. This book collects three dozen of Gould's baseball essays. He writes about things like the umpire Babe Pinelli, who called the final strike of the perfect game that Don Larsen pitched in the 1956 World Series. The final pitch was technically outside the strike zone, but only by a few inches. But, considering the context (both a World Series and a perfect game on the line), Pinelli thought that the batter - Dale Mitchell - should have at least made contact, perhaps to tap it foul, because questionable pitches can go either way. Afterward, Mitchell groused that the ball was not a strike, and Gould perceptively concludes that Mitchell was right, but Pinelli was righter. Also included in this collection is Gould's famous essay about why no one hits .400 (batting average) anymore. What he argues is, curiously, there are no more .400 hitters because players in general are all much better.As an avid baseball fan and Yankees lover, I enjoyed this book a lot. Any book that re-lives the memory of the ball going through Bill Buckner's legs in the 1986 Mets-Red Sox World Series, thus giving new credence to the Curse of the Bambino, has my gratitude. The problem, though, is that Gould was not around to oversee the final assembly and publication of this book. Gould had thought of collecting his baseball essays for years; in 1992 Stephen King in fact suggested such a project to Gould. An editor's note tells us that Gould himself left the manuscript "neatly organized, and in good hands," at his office before he passed in May 2002. Maybe Gould was too close to the end to pay close enough attention, maybe the editors were too reverent in handling the late, great man's final work. But this book feels like an unedited mass, cobbled together from scattered writings, with enough repetitions and factual lacunae that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. While some of Gould's articles mention newer heroes like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, too many of the essays were written in the 1980's. Gould's essays in natural history tended to discuss history, wherein the events were already done. However, his baseball essays were often written while events were still unfolding. Herein lies the problem with editing. His essay about hitters batting .400 was written in 1986 in mid-season, and he concludes with the gutsy prediction that Wade Boggs would hit .400 that year. No editorial blandishment actually tells us if Boggs did or not actually achieve this remarkable feat (he in fact fell a little short, at .357). In an

Stephen Jay Gould was a teacher and entertaining friend to me through his wonderful writings for more than 20 years. His passing last year saddend me, but this last love letter to the game he loved makes me appreciate him more than ever. His tremendous gift for being simultaneously a guy in the stands with a hot dog and coke, yet still the analytical investigator (garnered, I suppose from his experience as a Yankee fan and Red Sox ticket holder) created superb insights into the game of baseball on a human and scientific level. As always, he seeks to gently teach his reader by taking them along on his journey. This is a book to read over and over, and to keep for those who share his affection for our Pastime.