The Baseball: Stunts, Scandals, and Secrets Beneath the Stitches (2011)
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I like to think that I know a lot about Baseball and I do. But I don't know everything, I'll admit to that. The history of the game is well over 100 years old and is next to impossible to know everything out there about the game. This is the reason why I gave The Baseball a chance. It seemed like it was going to open up a Pandora's box of more never-before-heard-of tidbits about the game.
Well, there were quite a few things that I had never heard of till I read this book. But there were also plenty of things that were rehashed given the fact that some of the stories were well-known and most baseball fans would have already known about prior to this book.
This book did not live up to what I thought it was going to be. It started off one way and then turned into something else all together. The first four chapters to me is where the fun is. All the stories here are extremely engaging even if you have heard of them before. After this, it's all down hill. The rest of the book is devoted to the making of a Baseball and how it's put together. And then it gets to what the book is really about: Ballhawkers.
Ballhawkers are those people that are at games for the sole purpose of getting as many baseballs as humanely possible, be it during batting practice or snagging foul balls and home runs during the actual games. Once I realize that the best part of the book was already long gone, it dawned on me that this book is nothing more than self congratulatory "how to become a successful" ballhawker. I say self congratulatory because it's really about the author Zack Hample bragging about how many baseball's he has snagged over his lifetime. Hell, there is a section devoted entirely to other Top 10 Ballhawkers in a Q & A section. This was just a little redundant and unnecessary and a waste of time. This and a lot of other useless things are in the book for the sole purpose of padding the pages as much as possible to make the book "legit" in size.
A good chunk of the book goes into the ins and outs of where to position yourself for the balls as well as what Baseball parks are the best and worst for ballhawkers. One section of the book, Zack completely dropped the ball in regards to the history of Commemorative Baseballs through the years regarding stamps and stitches from the All-Star games,World Series, Playoffs and other special occasions He touts how cool and different these balls are from regular season balls, and yet, all the photos are in black and white. Dude, if your going to have a chapter on this, at least have color pictures to back up what it is your going ga-ga over.
I would only recommend this book to those that are already ballhawkers. Nope, I wouldn't recommend it to them either. Check it out at the Library for just the first four chapters only.