Word: sluggers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...magic summer in quest of the heart of America, minor-league baseball. Writing in the spirit of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Lamb forsakes dramatic narrative for an endearing travelogue filled with small piquant details. His odyssey is oddly humbling. He encounters a boyhood hero, Hall of Fame slugger Eddie Matthews, now a sixtyish minor-league batting coach nursing a fearsome hangover and brooding that his young disciples "don't know who I am, what stats I put on the board." Lamb himself, used to sparking conversations with tales of his globe-trotting adventures, quickly discovers that baseball...
Aaron was still a fearsome, albeit fading, slugger when he surpassed Ruth in 1974. In contrast, baseball purists should cringe at the way Pete Rose, his skills long vanished, was lionized for his Captain Ahab-like quest to break Ty Cobb's record for career base hits. Collision at Home Plate by James Reston Jr. (HarperCollins; $19.95) is a cautionary tale about the dangers of hero worship. This joint biography of Rose and baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti -- the former Yale University president who banished Rose from baseball in 1989 and then died suddenly little more than a week later -- never...
...Bash Brothers will lose it over the far fence. Watch, and wince, as Dave Henderson or Carney Lansford gets the clutch hit. Scan the depth of the A's bench; almost any scrub could start on another team. Note the new recruits, just in time for the big games: slugger Harold Baines and spray hitter Willie McGee, an N.L. import who may win that league's batting title...
...does not touch the ball. The result is a lot more whiffs now than in the old days. Last year batters earned 3% more bases on balls than in 1930, but struck out 75% more often. Flash, not finesse, is the hallmark of modern, macho baseball, where a slugger would rather corkscrew himself into the batter's box on a swinging third strike than ground out meekly to the shortstop. This all-or-nothing attitude is catnip to Ryan, whose fast ball ! still approaches stock-car speeds. The hitters say, "Show me" -- and he shows them...
...Harvard rightfielder Ted Decareau, but yesterday it was hard to tell the difference between the Oakland All-Star and the Crimson slugger...