What Baseball Means to Me: A Celebration of Our National Pastime

As a guy who started playing baseball at 6 yrs old and has a fond love of the game, this book is like going to Cooperstown. The pictures of legends and historic moments and places make you feel like you're meeting your baseball hero for the first time. Its wonderful to see how so many other celebrities and famous icons share their love of the game and make you feel like you were there with them. A great piece for anyone who loves the sport.

Although I purchased this book as a gift for my sports fanatic son-in-law, the book was so inviting that I took a little time to peruse it before I wrapped it and found myself taking a trip down memory lane. I especially enjoyed the comments about what baseball was like when I was growing up. It took me back to a time when I, too was awed by my first trip to Yankee Stadium. Definitely a good read for any "baby boomer" who remembers the "good old days" when team rosters stayed virtually the same for more than just a season or two!

The best advice I can give you for reading "What Baseball Means to Me: A Celebration of Our National Pastime" from cover to cover is based on the same principle by which you should never leave a baseball game earlier. You might see something worth remembering. This is certainly the case with this book, which is edited by Curt Smith because the idea that this is a collection of "essays" is a definite misnomer. What happened was that 150 people, from former and current baseball plays like Phil Rizutto and Pedro Martinez, along with writers, politicians, presidents, and other types of celebrities were asked to provide responses to the statement "what baseball means to me." In the case of coach Mike Ditka and writer Elmore Leonard that means a slight paragraph, while David E. Birney and Dan LeBatard provide poems, and Doris Kearns Goodwin compares and contrasts her early love affair with the Brooklyn Dodgers and her current affection for the Boston Red Sox for several pages. These responses are accompanied by more than 200 photographs from the National Baseball Hall of Fame (whose seal of approval appears on the cover). Ultimately it is supposed to be the stories told about the love of baseball that matters and not the identity of the person writing the response, but the book works against that goal. I get the sense that "What Baseball Means to Me" was compiled rather than edited. The responses are arranged alphabetically rather than thematically, so George Bush is followed by George W. Bush. This is not a coffee table book that you sit down and read cover to cover; a series of symbolic rain delays are probably helpful in getting through all the responses. I would have liked the book a lot more if there had been a more logical pattern of organization beyond the alphabet. Instead of being engrossed in this volume I was constantly distracted by entries that were not worthy of inclusion. When I got to Bob Costas and found a brief series of sentences separated by ellipses, I knew this book was in trouble. However, at the end of the alphabetical rainbow are Bob Uecker and Ted Williams, so hang in there. Still, everybody who loves the game should find a couple of choice gems within these pages if they take the time to mine them out from the rest. My choice memory from the past was called forth by a photograph of Mel Stottlemyre sliding home to complete an insider-the-park grand slam home run at Yankee Stadium on July 21, 1965. That was the year I started watching baseball and had decided I was a Yankee fan (I liked New York as a state and the Yankees in the Civil War), and I remember watching that game on television and them showing the play over and over because the announcers could not get over the fact that this had just been done by a pitcher (Mel hit that big gap in deep left center, way beyond the monuments). So there are things here to touch upon your love of the game, but we still cannot help but feel disappointed that this book i

Curt Smith is right on the money with this wonderful book. It made me cry in parts because the passion that so many of the writers have for the game of baseball is that same passion that is in all of us for something we truly love. The choice of people was very timely. There were people I knew, and others I didn't know, but I enjoyed reading every one of their essays. This book would be a great Father's Day gift. It's one of those books that you see and think is beautifully done, but once you start reading, you can't put it down. A real treasure. I'll keep it on my coffee table for a long time.

This is one of the most beautiful books I've seen in a long time. The stories are not about being celebrities, but about baseball and how it gets hold of you and never lets go. Theirs are not stories of being famous, but of being Americans with a common love of The Game. If you love baseball or know someone who does, get this book.