Lamb had been working as a foreign correspondent in Africa and the Middle East for several years, and having returned to the U.S., decides to reconnect with his youth by touring minor league baseball teams across the country.
He actually starts the book talking about how in 1955, the first year after the Braves moved from his hometown of Boston to Milwaukee, he managed to get a gig writing columns for the Milwaukee paper about his perspective on the season. He literally wrote a letter to the Milwaukee paper and they agreed. They even flew him out to Milwaukee one week, which was a pretty big deal for a kid.
So the members of that team are threaded through the book, even though that was a major, rather than minor, league team. He travels out to ace pitcher Warren Spahn's ranch in Oklahoma, or talks with Hall of Fame third baseman Eddie Mathews, at that point working as a hitting instructor for the now-Atlanta Braves (the franchise chased the TV dollars and promise of a publicly-funded stadium south after a just dozen years in Milwaukee.)
But the book is a nostalgia trip in a lot of ways, and Lamb clearly thinks the minor leagues, where the players make very little, subsisted on hot dogs from the concession stands, and played in aging stadiums, sometimes in front of just a few dozen people, better resembles the way he remembers baseball as a kid. Because there's a lot of grousing, both from those '50s Braves players and Lamb, about the current (for the late-1980s) crop of players being all about money. About them not wanting "it" bad enough.
It's not surprising - baseball seems like a very nostalgic sport - but it's also not good when I'm grumbling out loud, "Nobody is paying Ozzie Smith big bucks to hit home runs, Lamb. They're paying him to be the greatest defensive shortstop you'd ever be fortunate enough to see, you fucking putz."
When Lamb's not telling us to both get off his lawn and just sticks to describing life in the minors, the book is pretty good. He talks to a lot of minor leaguers. Young guys who still think they're on the way up, but also young players who are starting to realize the dream is never going to happen. There's also Ron Washington, future World Series-losing manager and baseball meme (courtesy of the Moneyball movie) toiling in AAA at 37, trying to prove he should get one last shot at the majors. Lamb goes into how shoestring some of these operations are, where the owner of the team bought them for a dollar, and he runs the ticket stand and comes up with promotions to boost attendance, or is calling advertisers to sell space on the outfield wall. He talks to ones that succeed and ones that fail. He spends a couple of pages talking to a pair of minor league umpires, also hoping to reach the big-time someday, and what they have to do to get the mud they use to keep the baseballs from being too slick for the pitchers.
Despite the fact he's making this circle of the country in an old RV, and setting aside an eyeroll-inducing "real America" intro for the section when he reaches the Midwest (I live in the Midwest, and have my whole life. The qualities he ascribes to the people are nothing unique or special, to the extent they even exist here), it's not a travelogue, ala Blue Highways. He keeps the descriptions of any travel issues to brief digressions here and there. The cops knocking on the door of his RV because he parked at the far end of a mall parking lot and they found that suspicious. His friend meeting him in the Carolinas and grousing about the cold showers until they finally get a real hotel room. Brief issues that tie his impromptu journey to the shoestring existence a lot of the players are going through. The team bus is late, a hitting slump is affecting a guy's relationship with his girlfriend, things like that.
'This was to be Monson's fifth season in pro ball and his second at Stockton. Talking to him in the dugout, what struck was that the pressure of the minor leagues - the pressure to succeed and advance or be gone - had taken part of his youth from him. He spoke of, "turning my life around for baseball," of the need for a pension plan in the minors, of the fear of debilitating injuries, and of a book he'd like to write titled Highs and Lows: My Life in Baseball. Somehow those were things one might expect to hear from a much older man. Monson was twenty-two.'
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