Baseball Week: Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

I didn't realize it when I picked it, but Roger Kahn's THE BOYS OF SUMMER combines a baseball history with one of my favorite genres -- the journalist's memoir. But Kahn didn't dream of being a journalist as a kid growing up in middle-class Brooklyn -- of course, he wanted to play first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. His father claimed to have played in college, his grandfather took him to afternoon games and his sister became a fan during a long convalescence. Only Kahn's mother disapproved of the game and tried to get her son to read biographies of Haydn instead of Christy Mathewson's autobiography.

Kahn planned to study law at NYU before a professor noticed he could write a little and recommended he apply to the New York Herald Tribune, then considered the "writers' newspaper" to the boring, pedestrian New York Times. (That is Kahn's opinion and not endorsed by writers of this blog, who never read the Herald Tribune.) Kahn's first sports piece for the Herald Tribune was about a "walking race" between City Hall and Coney Island on Thanksgiving, which he noticed took twice as long as the new elevated subway but saved the 10-cent fare. He subbed in for a few Dodgers games until, at 24, he was tapped to cover the team full-time. And Kahn would probably agree it was fortuitous that not only were the Dodgers still in Brooklyn (they moved in 1958), but they had Jackie Robinson, who played his first game with them in 1947.

Half of THE BOYS OF SUMMER covers Kahn's two seasons with the team, and the other half a series of interviews he did with the players for the book -- a sort of "Where Are They Now?" of professional baseball. Both sections had their strengths, but I enjoyed the seasonal coverage much more for the camaraderie that Kahn depicts among the traveling team (they still took trains at that point!) and the action. When he finds them, most of the players are doing okay, but professionally they're a shadow of their former selves: Mostly salesmen or public faces on larger corporations, they're reminded every day that they once were great.

But Kahn gets some amazing stories as he travels, from George Shuba's secret to batting practice (pouring lead in the bat you use for practice swings) to the moment when Carl Erskine's father threw a curve that broke all the dishes in the house. If those names mean nothing to you now (as they did to me), you'll learn from this book.

Coming up on Baseball Week: Bernard Malamud's diamond myth, Buzz Bissinger's unblinking eye and more.