Agent Palmer

Thomas Oliphant’s Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family’s Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers is a loving snapshot of 1950s Brooklyn. It transports you to not only the 1955 World Series between the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers, but also to 1955 New York, covering Brooklyn of course, but a few surrounding boroughs as well.

Baseball fans will enjoy this book for putting us front and center with one of the more epic game sevens in World Series history.

I’ve never met Tom Adelman, but I feel as though we just had a wonderful conversation. Black and Blue: The Golden Arm, the Robinson Boys, and the 1966 World Series That Stunned America was the conversation we shared.

This book is fantastic, and that’s coming from an Orioles fan who has also enjoyed Dodger baseball for the past decade plus. Through telecasts I’ve absorbed the history of both clubs, but this book does something else.

Baseball is a Funny Game by Joe Garagiola is not about a baseball star. It’s hardly about the fundamentals of the game or its many statistics. It is simply the story of baseball told by an average catcher who bounced around the National League for a while who can tell stories with the best of them.

This book is baseball as it was and as it is, because the more things change the more they stay the same. America’s game is no exception.

Over the years baseball has changed. On the diamond, in the dugout, and off the field as well. And there are a ton of things in this book that emphasize that point, but this book is more than baseball, it’s Earl Weaver. And then again, some things don’t change.

It’s pitching, defence, and the three-run home-run. It’s arguing with umpires, tearing up rulebooks, and “debates” with your own players and management.

There are two reasons I picked up Confessions of a Baseball Purist by Jon Miller with Mark Hyman. One, Jon Miller was the voice of the Baltimore Orioles during my formative years listening to games on the radio and two, he really knows his stuff.

The book originally released in 1998 and the updated edition from 2000 may appear dated, but it is not antiquated at all. In fact, more of his observations are proven out than those that aren’t in the 18 years since this text has last been touched.