With the flutter of the year's first robin redbreast, with the promise of the first warm breeze of spring—the patter of an early April rain, the almost phosphorescent green of young grass, a scent of new life in the morning air—the season turns at last from winter to provide us what we are always given, this time of year: the cloying metaphors of baseball columns. The sentimental globules of Opening Day reflections. The sickly sweet reviews of new baseball books, like the genteel retching of a consumptive maiden.
And so, as the 2019 baseball season gets underway, we have the first snap of pitches into the catcher's mitt. The first spikes scraping at the chalked lines of the batter's box. The first cracks of bats slicing grounders through the infield. And, of course, to go with them, the first ink-and-paste-and-wood-pulp scent of new baseball books. The first of the inevitable efforts of modern baseball prose, desperately seeking a way to meld some good old-fashioned boys-of-summer nostalgic elegance with the deadly statistics of number-crunched sabermetrics. And the first attempts to build large metaphors for all the world: social, psychological, metaphysical—out of the spectacle of grown men at work on a field of grass.
As always, some of the new books on offer this year are for specialized taste. If you're a Dodgers' fan, there's always something for you. The Red Sox, the Angels, the Marlins: Someone somewhere has written something about them for their devotees.
Most of this is even more ephemeral than the usual seasons of the usual teams in baseball. Even more fleeting than the usual run of a new spring's crop of baseball books. Tom Haudricourt's Special Brew: An Inside Look at the 2018 Milwaukee Brewers is of this ilk, although better done than most. The Brewers had a shockingly successful season last year, finishing atop the Central Division of the National League with a 96–67 record before losing 4–3 to the Dodgers in the league championship series. If they had only done a little better—taken one more game and slipped into the World Series—the interview-driven book by the Milwaukee reporter Haudricourt would seem an even more compelling tale of how a failing team gets rebuilt in contemporary baseball.
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