* Stirring the Straw

Time to play major catch-up, so we’ll begin with this piece from the NY Post on Darryl Strawberry that was published during the World Series (I told you I was backed-up).

In his Oct. 17 column, Kevin Kernan writes

His book “Straw: Finding My Way” has sold 60,000 copies and has landed him on the best-seller lists. There are negotiations to turn the book into a movie. He is working on several other ventures.

* Review: Straw

From TrueblueLA (“Where The Dodger Dogs Are Always Grilled”), this review of the new Strawberry autobio.

* RK Review: The bigger comeback trail

Darryl Strawberry and Josh Hamilton. Brothers from different mothers.

Both had all the talent in the world. Both were number one draft picks (Strawberry in 1980, Hamilton in 1999) and were expected to do great things.Both became born-again Christians when their lives turned toward the dark side. And both have autobiographies in which they openly talk about their dependency issues.

In Straw: Finding My Way (Ecco, 2009), the former Met, Dodgers, Giant, and Yankee agonizes over the mistakes he has made over and over again. Like many young athletes, he was given too much too soon when he made it to the big leagues and didn’t know how to hand it. He spent what should have been his Hall of Fame years drinking, drugging, and womanizing. Even when he found God and became born-again, the problems persisted. Numerous trips to support groups might have been a temporary help, but after awhile he found his way back to depravity, including violence against his wives, despite — or maybe because of — the fact the he had to deal with domestic violence himself as a child.

Straw, written with John Straugbaugh, is the ballplayer’s purgative, it seems. He wants forgiveness and understanding. He knows he let his fans, family, and friends down and wants to be “good” again. The narrative is frank; he makes no excuses for his behavior other than a lack of discipline.

Then we have Josh Hamilton’s 2008 offering, Beyond Belief: Finding the Strength to Come Back, written with Tim Keown. Hamilton, the top pick by the Tampa Bay Rays, had the family support Strawberry was missing, but that ultimately didn’t help. He, too, fell in with a bad crowd, at first experimenting with tattoos, then turning to drink, then cocaine, and finally, crack. He too, lived with the shame of disappointing a family that didn’t know how to help him, and fans disgusted with the talent he wasted.

Beyond Belief seems to have become a favorite of the inspirational circuit, perhaps because it’s been a round longer, perhaps because Hamilton is still an active player and fresher in the minds of the public. His exhibit of power at the 2007 home run derby will be talked about for years. As a skeptic, I can only wish him the best. His story is even more graphic and frightening than Strawberry’s. At least Straw had relatively lengthy and successful career; Hamilton is still an open book. Unfortunately, he sustained another injury earlier this year. Let’s hope he doesn’t suffer a relapse: that’s how his first foray into substance abuse started.

Perhaps because Hamilton’s story has been out awhile, it’s become a favorite on the inspirational circuit. If either of these titles can do some good, if they can help readers of any age or race, I believe that would mean more to the authors than sales figures.

One is retired, his career, while good, could have been so much more. The other is still playing, and the jury remains out.  We have heard these promises too many times.

RK Review: Straw: Finding My Way

with John Strausbaugh (HarperCollins).

What is it with Harper Collins? Have I not been paying attention, or has this become the go-to publisher for titles dealing with New York baseball players and their problems of one kind or another? I may be wrong, but I believe Darryl Strawberry’s autobiography was on the docket before Selena Roberts’ A-Rod expose. Who’s next? Lenny Dykstra on his gambling addiction?

Strawberry was supposed to be the savior of the Mets in the early 1980s — their Ted Williams– after they had been stinko for almost a decade. He had his partner in crime (not literally, mind you, though it was close), Dwight Gooden, were the new batch of wunderkinds that would lead the team into a new era of good feelings, capturing — or a least contending for — pennant after pennant.

Alas, being young, gifted, and newly rich proved to be too difficult a burden, according to Strawberry. Access to easy drugs and women were too powerful to turn down, and he is quite blunt in his descriptions and how great it was at the time. Add to that the difficulties of growing up with an abusive father who never showed him any love, who constantly told him he would never amount to anything, and what else could you expect, he seems to say.

Seems.

At one crucial juncture, Strawberry found God and sees the error of his ways. Not that was a guarantee of a pious life from that point forward. He is very honest that he strayed constantly, returning to the behavior that perhaps cost him a chance to be a Hall of Famer, back to the bottle, back to the drugs, back to the groupies, despite the fact that he had married twice. He knows he needs to do better, sincerely wants to do better, but those demons are strong and seductive.

Just when it looks like he might break the devil’s grip comes a new challenge: colon cancer, in which he is againmost forthright, describing the mental and physical fatigue that made him doubt his continued existance and lead him back to previous sins.

Strawberry and Strausbaugh paint a sympathetic picture: the former athlete seems genuinely contrite, wishing to leave his bad self in the past, presenting a new good, charitable self for the future.

Again I say “seems.” I know I come off as very cynical here sometimes, but how often have we been disappointed by the men and women we hold up as heroes, only to be disappointed when they fall? Strawberry knows this too well, as he writes about his repeated attempts for redemption and his repeated failures. I don’t think any reader of his book will wish him anything but the best of luck and peace, but total belief is now reserved for the incurable optimist. We’ve been burned too many times before to pledge blind belief.

* National Public Radio: Darryl Strawberry

The Straw man was on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show last Thursday. You can hear it here:

Or you can watch it here:

Is my math off, or doesn’t radio + video = television?

* Meet the Mets

A joint review of two new books by former Mets graces the pages of the Sunday Times Book Review Section.

Under the general headline “The Boys of Bummer,” Bruce Handy, a writer and deputy editor of Vantiy Fair, critiques Ron Darling’s The Perfect Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound, and Darryl Strawberry’s Straw: Finding My Way.

Of the former, Handy says he likes it a lot; of the latter,

Thankfully, perhaps, “Straw: Finding My Way” isn’t much of a baseball book. It’s a recovery memoir, detailing Strawberry’s journey to self-acceptance and Christian sobriety via multiple arrests, trips to rehab, marriages, divorces, cancers and ­bottomings-out that never quite were, with his Mets career, and subsequent stints with the Dodgers, Giants and championship Yankees of the ’90s, as background music, or maybe bait.

He also believes Darling’s book, described as “a pitcher’s answer to Ted Williams’s classic, The Science of Hitting, will enjoy more popularity and a longer shelf life, than Strawberry’s.

He also calls to attention the new baseball standard quote.

Use to be, it was Jacques Barzun’s “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” which I believe should be banned from all further books. It’s a sure sign that the author is either a) a newcomer to the game, or b) writing to an audience for whom baseball is not a passion.

But of late, the standard epigraph, which Darling employs in his book, comes from the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale and Commissioner of Baseball:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

… this quotation really annoyed me. For one thing, the manly but melancholy, elegiac view of baseball — the unforgiving verities of its geometry, the fleeting beauty of its playing, blah blah blah — is one of our hoariest sports clichés, the default setting whenever anyone who read Hemingway or Robert Stone or Cormac McCarthy in college sits down to write about the game.

The Times‘ website offers first chapters for each book:

Straw

The Perfect Game

* Author interview: Darryl Strawberry

Time magazine did a Q&A with the former Major Leaguer. And here’s a transcript from his April 28 appearance on Fox’s Hannity show, where he humped his new book, Straw: Finding My Way.

* Bits and pieces

The back page of The New York Times Book Review features a full page advertisement from Bauman Rare Books. I usually don’t pay attention because as much as I lvoe ‘em, they’re out of my league, to borrow from a famous title.

But a photo of Joe DiMaggio caught my eye and sure enough there were several (expensive) books listed, including:

• A 1973 Old Timers’ Day program signed by “24 ’standout’ players, including DiMaggio, Rizzuto and Stengel.” $4200
• Whitey and Mickey, a “double biography” of the two Yankee legends, signed by both. $1600
• The DiMaggio Albums, a two-volume album of newspaper stories about the Yankee Clipper, signed by DiMaggio. $2200
• America’s National Game, by Albert Spaulding, A first edition from 1911. $2800
• The National Game, by Alfred Spink. A 1910 first edition. $2200
• Wait Till Next Year, by Jackie Robinson and Carl Rowan. A 1960 first edition, signed by Robinson. $4900.

Well, my birthday is coming up soon… I’m just sayin’.

* * *

Entertainment Weekly highlighted three new baseball titles in its April 10 issue, not all of them garnered favorable remarks. The controversial memoir Odd Man Out by Matt McCarthy received a B. Becoming Manny got a C-, and Alyssa Milano’s Safe at Home: Confessions of a Baseball Fanatic, a D.

A few things come to mind. One, did they just pick three titles at random? why these books and not others that might be a bit more likely to win a higher “grade,” like Bruce Weber’s treatise on umpires, As They See ‘Em? Two, does these guys just not like baseball? In that case, why bother? Three, as much as I don’t like Milano’s book — and my sentiments are echoed in many places — such “dog-piling” seems mean. Just let it die a natural death.

* * *

Meanwhile in the April 10 issue of The Week, Tome Werner, chair of the Boston Red Sox, picks his favorite titles on the game, including, among others, Bang the Drum Slowly (Mark Harris), The Teammates (David Halberstam), and Game Time (Roger Angell).

* * *

Finally, The New York Times Magazine printed a Q&A with former Met Darryl Strawberry, who — guess what — has a new book coming out.

* Holy ^T$*, Canseco was “right” after all

In an item on The New Yorker website, Ben McGrath reminds us that Jose Canseco, the author of Juiced and Vindicated reported on A-Rod’s juice use years ago, but no one wanted to believe him. Does that make Canseco a Cassandra?

In other book news of special interest to New York fans:

• Don’t look for a second volume by Joe Torre, this time about the Dodgers.
• And here’s a shocker — Darryl Strawberry writes about how riotous he and his 1980s Mets teammates were in his new book, Straw: Finding My Way, published by Ecco, a Harper Collins imprint. HC is also the company behind the Selena Robert’s book on Rodriguez, as mentioned previously on The Bookshelf.

* Announcement: New Strawberry book on tap?

Yes, according to this bitty item in The New York Times:

STRAWBERRY TO WRITE A BOOK Darryl Strawberry is writing a memoir, “Straw,” that will come out in 2009, according to the publisher Ecco.

Ecco is a Harper Collins imprint.

Strawberry collaborated on his story once before, with Art Rust, Jr. in Darryl, published by Bantam in 1992. He also did a book with his wife, Charisse, in 1999 titled Recovering Life, written after his battle with cancer.

More on the Ecco project.

Seeing that Strawberry is only 46 makes me sad that he squandered his talent. It reminds me of the scene in A League of Their Own, in which the candy magnate Harvey (Leonard Marshall) offers Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) the job of managing the Rockford Peaches. He expresses his disappointment by telling the alcoholic Dugan, “You’re a young man, you could still be playing….”

Nowadays, 46 doesn’t seem too old to still be be playing. (Spoken like a true 50-year-old.)