Baseball Dads: The Game's Greatest Players Reflect on Their Fathers and the Game They Love
By: Wayne Stewart / Narrated By: Jason Griffith
Length: 4 hrs and 8 mins
Very sweet, but I still haaaaaate baseball…
Will you think less of me if I admit that I LOATHE baseball? C’mon, gimme a break! After all, I have to LIVE with a baseball freak extraordinaire. I just ask my husband something simple, say, about a freakin’ jersey design! and I get a three-hour long treatise on the glories of the “thinking man’s sport” which DEVOLVES into a harangue about stats. All this leaves me wanting to claw my eyes out, with my poor knees numb and locked, and basically: One has to wonder how I wound up listening to a book called Baseball Dads.
It’s like this, see: I ROCK! I will TOTALLY take one for the team this Father’s Day, and I will be a decent enough person to admit that, though the sport bores me to TEARS (my husband once dragged me to one of the last days at Candlestick Park, and my friend and I spent 8 out of the 9 innings swilling beer and scarfing pretzels, then we spent the last inning finding a spot of shade to nap in…)—I did indeed enjoy the sweetness of Baseball Dads.
Supposedly, the greatest players are covered, but I recognized only a few. Perhaps you’ll recognize more, I dunno. Every single type of relationship is covered: dads who push; dads who encourage; dads who seeeeemed to have dreams of their own and DESPERATELY wished to have those dreams fulfilled by their sons. Sometimes, it was kinda pathetic, but mostly, as the sons appreciated the pushing and nudging greatly, I s’pose I’m happy for the lot of them.
Then too, we’ve got baseball pros who are good and fine men, followed by the total freak who gets multitudes of tattoos and winds up in rehab centers. Tough love abounds in the stories.
Jason Griffith isn’t the best narrator for the book. He kinda has those ol’ anchorman tones, and that rather takes away from some of the good down-home charm of dads and sons clinging to each other as the son works his way to the Major Leagues. Still, Griffith isn’t wretched. Perhaps it’s just that I, as someone whooooo… ahem… has never been able to find the excitement in the game, was sorta hoping for the warm and human papa-son bond. It’s kinda there, and maybe the choice was given to use Griffith because he does a mean stat rattle-off, but as a cuddly wuddly female who prefers screaming at basketball arenas to screaming at baseball parks, I was hoping to get in touch with the warm and fuzzier side of baseball.
Still, like I said, this is a very sweet book, and you’re not going to hear anything BUT I Love Ya, Dad from any of the stars featured.
Awwwww, okay okay! I admit it. It DID make me wanna go out and toss a baseball with my kids. If I had kids…
I guess I’ll have to settle for a baseball whizzing by a supremely uninterested cat…
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