| ]Ron DARLING, the former pitcher for the great Mets teams of the 1980s (and later for the Montreal Expos and the Oakland A’s, but who cares?), has written a thoughtful and lively new book about the art, craft and business of his trade. It’s a nuts-and-bolts kind of baseball book — a pitcher’s answer to Ted Williams’s classic, “The Science of Hitting,” to cite the hopeful comparison made on the book’s jacket — but it is also, in part, a memoir. A workplace memoir. It tells us not only how Darling pitched, but what being a baseball player felt like to him, and what the game meant to him. That relationship was, of course, a bittersweet one; the game ultimately left him, as it does all players....
“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. Believe it or not — here’s an act of expiation — he devotes more space to his 1999 arrest for cocaine possession and prostitution solicitation than to the three World Series he appeared in, combined. But Strawberry (along with his co-author, John Strausbaugh) tends to skate through particulars off the field as well as on, not ignoring his foibles but never digging in too deeply, either as storyteller or as analysand. That said, “Straw” does have the virtue of sincerity and of seeming profoundly felt. Its narrator emerges as a real and complex man: humble in the face of his failures, palpably hungry for redemption, and yet still capable of myopia and self-righteousness. You feel for him in a way you never did — at least I never did — when you were merely cheering and/or booing him at Shea.
Darling’s book, written with Daniel Paisner, should enjoy a wider readership and a longer shelf life. The former pitcher, an affable, frank and witty guide (though not a gossip), devotes each of his 10 central chapters to picking apart specific innings of specific games he either played in or, in two cases, observed as a sportscaster with the Mets (his current occupation). There’s plenty of lefty-righty ballpark wonkery, but “The Complete Game” also illuminates baseball’s workaday psychological grind. A nice example:
“When a good hitter leads off, he does something as soon as he makes an out, or gets a hit, or scores a run in the first inning and goes back to the bench: he gives everyone the scouting report. . . . This guy’s meat. The mood of that bench can tilt, just on the basis of one of these tossed-off comments. Guys who might have been tentative about their at-bats can all of a sudden become confident. That batter will never come back to the bench and say, He’s unhittable. But there are certain catchphrases you’ll hear. Sneaky: that usually means the pitcher has a good fastball. Tough: self-explanatory. . . . As a pitcher, you start to think about it as if you’re launching a marketing campaign for a new product: your stuff. You want it to announce itself and create a certain first impression. You want to engender just the right buzz in that opposing dugout to ensure that no hitter gets too comfortable.” |
