23 Days to Opening Day

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 23 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book is The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

“Hey, Dad. Whosa better fielder? Cookie Lavagetto or Joe Stripp?”

“Comparisons are nefarious,” Gordon Kahn said.

“Please, God,” said Olga, who aspired to atheism, “let him become interested in a book. One book. Please. Any book.”

Her large eyes gazed on the off-white ceiling toward Yahweh. And soon, in His infinite humor, the Lord God of Yisroel placed in my hands a book that enslaved me. Pitching in a Pinch, bound in dun, published in 1912, was a memoir written (with help) by Christy Mathewson, who say the canons of legend, is “the greatest pitcher ever to toe the mound.” It appeared one day on a high shelf among botany guidebooks and novels by Frank Norris and Michael Arlen. “A relic of my own boyhood,” Gordon Kahn said, and he fetched Pitching in a Pinch and displayed a photograph of “Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, sliding. Note spikes high.” Interested in a book? I was overcome. Pitching in a Pinch became my constant companion. No one has ever read a baseball book harder or for more hours of a day or with such single-mindedness. I read nothing else, no Dickens, no Twain, no Swift. Mathewson (with help) created a baseball world that added humor to the earnest and heavy baseball cosmos of my fantasy.

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.