The OK one is Ron Darling's The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching and Life on the Mound. Darling is the former Mets pitcher, now a broadcaster for SportsNet New York. To give the reader the "feel" of the pitching experience, Darling organized his book using specific innings of games in which he was the starting pitcher. So, for instance, Ch. 1 describes the first inning of his first major league start, against the Phillies on Sept. 6, 1983; Ch. 2 is Game 4 of The 1986 World Series, Mets vs. the Red Sox; etc. The intro chapters (before we got to actual games) were so-so, but it's improving, and the descriptions of Darling's game-day preparation (he took a nap just before going out to warm up) are interesting. How these guys handle the pressure is mind-boggling to me.
The second book is called Watching Baseball Smarter, by Zack Hample. (Hample's other claim to fame is having grabbed more than 3,000 baseballs from major league games, including Bonds' 724th home-run baseball; his first book is titled How to Snag Major League Baseballs.) He's played professional ball himself, which gives him street cred to describe various aspects of the game, from the different grips pitchers use and the effect each has on a pitched ball to details about fielding, base running, and the answer to the question all baseball fans ask: Why do those guys grab their crotches all the time? (Ans: Those cups are uncomfortable, dammit!) Hample includes a glossary of terms, which are italicized in the text, so you can look stuff up as you read, or just read the glossary through all at once. It's a good dip-into book while watching a game and some play is a new one on me or Mike Kruko uses a term I haven't heard before. (This book was recommended to me by Heather Hafleigh, with whom I've been having an e-mail conversation about baseball in general and the Giants in particular.)
The best one, though, is As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires, by Bruce Weber. Weber is a reporter for The New York Times, and he brings the same clear, well-written, literate style of that newspaper to this book. I'd recently become intrigued by the enigmatic nature of the umpire, curious about not only the nuts and bolts of umpiring but what motivates a man (the female umpire is rare beyond rare) to want to be one in the first place. Weber interviewed dozens of current and former umpires, players, managers, and Major League baseball execs, and also trained as an umpire, after which he spent a season working games, from Little League to Spring Training. ("Just about the first thing they teach you at umpire school is ow to yank your mask off without upsetting your hat." Talk about your great lead . . . .) I checked this out from the library, but it's too good to let go of, so I've decided to buy it, to have the time to read it at a slow, delicious pace. Get this book; it's good.
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