Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a depressing book. Not because its subject is depressing; we're not talking about the Ukranian famine of 1932 here. No, this is a "You are there" book written at the end of baseball as we knew it. We weren't aware of that at the time, though we could see that things were changing. But we thought, and were repeatedly assured, that the changes would work themselves out. However, if you're over 40, you know they didn't, and baseball is a far less fun activity as a fan than it was then. There are innumerable little tidbits that make you see how much things have deteriorated. Tom Seaver pitches 12 innings. 12! A manager today would have the talk radio hordes ready to unman him for that, but it is only one of many. Steve Carlton threw 30 complete games in 1972. Contemplate that. 30. More than most teams, heck, probably more than most divisions today. He won 27 games on a team that won 59 total. Unfathomable. But unlike the managers who fear their million dollar boys will throw out their arms, Carlton came back and achieved that for more than another decade. Sure he was a great. But there are innumerable tales through here of guys who weren't greats, just solid players, performing in ways that would be unheard of, or at the minimum, worth millions of dollars, today, and doing it happily, without whining, griping, complaining, simpering or gloating.
Angell chronicles 5 wonderful seasons in the history of baseball, the years of Finley's Athletics and the Big Red Machine, and a new owner for the Yankees named George Steinbrenner, the arrival of Robin Yount and Mark Fidrych and George Brett and oh so many others. But because it is reporting, he also documents the arrival of guys who flashed briefly and then vanished. Baseball is like that.
But it is the creeping arrival of ugliness that hurts to read. Reggie's showboating. Young kids who don't respect their manager. And big money. The sports page went from stories about hits and errors to tales of contract negotiations, threats, and free agency. I know money has always been a part of the game, and there were drunks, wife-beaters, and thugs in baseball since the beginning. But the big contracts and big payrolls have made all the teams change their perspective, and though throughout this book the players assure us we won't think differently about them as a result of these changes, we do. Teams are no longer teams as they once were, a reliable group of guys who continued for years together and added the missing piece or replaced the aging veteran incrementally. They are an assemblage of whomever can be gathered up to make a winner. Because we still want a winner, but we no longer care about the guys who do the winning. How sad. And for me and many of my generation, how boring. Baseball just isn't what it was, and it isn't the DH or the long season or frigid World Series games. No, it's money, and the game has been permanently corrupted by it. So read this to see how it once was, how glory and honor could be achieved on the field rather than in the contract.
And feel disheartened for what we've lost, with nothing good to replace it.

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