Last summer, Off The Bench was gifted a publisher’s copy of “The Last Best League” by Jim Collins for review. It’s been a solid 9 months since the book arrived in our mailbox in DC and the book is fringed around the edges and sports what appears to be very light water stains. There’s a bookmark somewhere in the middle of chapter 5 of 12 and I haven’t touched the book in recent months despite carrying it about DC every day in my backpack. But I owe a solid review and I have thoughts on the book.
I didn’t get through it – I couldn’t get through it – but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s well written, seemingly captures life in the Cape Cod league, and is a fun look back at the top pro prospects of the 2005 draft class. It’s just not for me. The forward, in which author Jim Collins describes the scene that inspired him to quit his job, devote a summer to following and chronicling amateur baseball, and ultimately writing this book, educates the reader exactly what they’re going to be reading for the next 300 pages. Collins’ masterfully whimsical baseball storytelling is a gift only given to former players. He’s able to capture the interactions in the dugout, the players’ frustrations and nerves, and a coaching staff’s anxieties. But for a former baseball player still grappling with the reality that the dream of playing in front of 30,000 fans every night is over (me), this book is a painful memoir into one’s own memories.
The forward that I mentioned serves as inspiration to quit one’s job and pursue a life of fun and passion. As I recall, Collins was having a family picnic on one of those semi-foggy early summer Cape Cod afternoons just beyond the outfield wall of some field. He noticed that players started to show up and that then there were fans. As only a former ballplayer would, Collins recognized that this was an exceptional brand of baseball being played. He was mesmerized by their infield-outfield practice and noticed the subtleties of each player’s gait that gave the slightest indication that they came from all parts of the country. Collins couldn’t shake that night from his head for months. I couldn’t shake the idea of quitting my job to write a book about baseball from my head for the entire time I held “The Last Best League” in my hands.
But the end product of this book is good. Tim Stauffer and Jamie D’Antona are the two prospects in the book that have the scouts raving, each with the tools to make the Bigs, but each encounters struggles. D’Antona struggled in the season that Collins followed the Chatham A’s around the Cape. His sweet swing couldn’t quite match up with that next level of pitching, coupled with the increased difficulty of a wood bat. D’Antona would wind up hitting .303 in the minors, but only had a cup of coffee in the Majors in 2008. Stauffer looked the part that summer in the Cape. He had a true four pitch mix and threw hard enough to project as a Major Leaguer. He’s looked good some years, and struggled to stay in the Majors at other times, but sports a career 3.94 ERA in 584 innings with the Padres and, this season, with the Twins, who are 1.5 run favorites at Sportsbook.ag tomorrow night. Collins tells each story well and seems to completely understand balancing life as a highly regarded prospect and being 19.
The book itself is good and I find the reviews on the cover to be mostly accurate: the US News & World Report says the book is “An engrossing portrait of marvelously gifted boys in men’s bodies -swaggering one moment, full of uncertainty the next.” Ken Burns had this to say: “A gripping narrative that is clear-eyed, honest, and free of sentimentality, but full of the powerful emotions our national pastime always exerts.”
The full sentimentality of baseball storytelling aside, one’s opinion of this book is subject to one’s baseball life. You must love the game to appreciate the stories of the individual games and of the long hours dedicated to the craft that sometimes fail to pay dividends. But you can’t be detached from the game to make you long for those games and friendships. I wasn’t in the right place to read this book heading into the fall and winter last year. I thought I might be once the season started, but I was not.
It’s time for me to put the book on the shelf and make my backpack all the more lighter. It feels like I’m giving up, but I know that it means I’m not quite ready to reminisce on that struggle to figure things out that is so central to “The Last Best League.”
-Sean Morash
