From Johnny Damon’s Idiot, to Dustin Pedroia’s My Life in the Game, to Tommy Lasorda’s I Live For This, to Don Zimmer’s Zim, to Brett Butler’s Jesus-freaking Field of Hope, to David “Big Fat Ass” Wells’ Perfect I’m Not, to Jose Canseco’s two-part saga of dumbfuckery…the shelves of your favorite local big-box mom & pop shop-killing mega-bookstore are littered with copies of stupid autobiographies of dumb men, ghostwritten at the third grade reading level by members of the very media they love to shit on.
But what’s this? Could it be? It appears Doug Glanville has written, perhaps, the first readable baseball autobiography since…well, I don’t know. If you know, let me know (and please don’t suggest Ball Four). The Game from Where I Stand presents an insider’s look at Major League Baseball from the perspective of an Ivy League-educated player with a degree in engineering.
My favorite comment was from a guy who … realized I was an engineer who had written a paper about building a new stadium in Philadelphia,” Glanville says. “So I was really struggling when I first came over to Philly in 1998, struggling and hitting like .190 so the guy yelled out ‘Why don’t you design a stadium you can hit in?'”
For more, visit NPR‘s website, or listen to the Fresh Air webcast.