Baseball and the Baby Boomer

Talmage Boston’s Baseball and the Baby Boomer: A History, Commentary, and Memoir is a series of long essays on various individuals who have helped shaped that generation’s relationship with baseball. Boston focuses on an individual or an ideal in each chapter/essay, for instance fathers and sons, using the cautionary tales of Mickey Mantle and Jimmy Piersall or a lovely chapter on “baseball’s lyricist” (Bart Giamatti). As Lou Brock puts it in his preface to the book, “I began to think I was reading a love story—love of the game, love for its heroes, and love for the values and lessons the game has taught the Baby Boomer generation.” Boston has a fine writing style, although he goes a little heavy on the father-son mythology (doesn’t his daughter like the game at all?), but this is, after all, a book about and for the baby boom generation. As Frank Deford points out in his introduction (Boston does have some nice blurbs and, clearly, friends in high baseball places), the people he writes most lovingly about are those who were the heroes of his youth, not his manhood. If other baby boomers can shift their gaze from their own navels to this book, they’d probably find a lot to like in this book.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, judge it by baseball’s magic numbers:
page 27
line    9
first   3 words: “fall into the”

I feel compelled to add that these words share the spread with a full-page picture of a very young Mickey Mantle and his partner in debauchery, an equally young Billy Martin, looking cocky and on the prowl. If you’re going for ball four, the next word is “bottle.”  How appropriate.

Baseball and the Baby Boomer
Talmage Boston
Bright Sky Press
978-1-933979-26-7