The Last Book I Read

As my vacation was winding down, I found myself racing to finish several books I'd borrowed from the library, and the one I completed was Mickey McDermott's memoir A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cooperstown. Certainly not as weighty (nor was it intended to be) as some of my other summer reading, I was looking for a little insight into the national game as played in the fifties and sixties, and that's pretty much what I got. It seems though that McDermott's career as a carouser was more important to him than his career as a hot-shot pitcher, and so his early promise (memorialized by a rookie picture-- that McDermott hated-- that appeared in Life magazine around 1946) went largely unrealized (hence the ironic title of his book). In some ways, this is an entertaining corrective to the usual iconography of that golden age of baseball (you know, before unions and free agents and the designated hitter led it all to go to pot; which, by the way, I don't believe at all). But of course, the so-called recent ills of the game were really nothing new, nor were the off-the-field shenanigans of the players. McDermott's account is mostly breezy, even when he acknowledges how he wasted his gifts, and there are colorful anecdotes about teammates famous (like Ted Williams) and not-so-famous (most of the others). The stories of his brief stint in Cuba around the time of the revolution was particularly interesting to me, especially given the recent series in the Crankshaft comic strip on the same topic. So all-in-all, a good end of the summer read, but probably only if you are a baseball fan.