My mom is a reader. My dad is a reader. Sometimes their interests cross, sometimes they don't. Mysteries they share. Baseball books, not so much. While visiting one of the local used books stores in Knoxvegas dad came back to the house with a bag of baseball books. They would be flying back to their home in the west so I didn't want to burden them with extra weight. I accepted his offer to keep a few books, knowing that he'd return for them in a few months. That and to see the grandkids.
This is one of those books. Seth Swirsky wrote to people connected with baseball. Not just pitchers, but wives, catchers, hitters, to gather their stories. This book presents facsimiles of the letters that he got back. Also included are telegrams and letters that he collected from the past.
I'm about three quarters of the way through it. For me it isn't a book to sit down and read from cover to cover, but one to pick up and savor the letters. Some of the stories are paired with events, others are about technique. The letters are on club stationery, some on lined paper. Some are elaborate, some are single sentence responses. Steve Carlton, David Cone, Cy Young, Luis Tiant, Hub Kittle, Jim Bouton, Juan Marichal, Maury Wills and many others put pen to paper.
You can also visit Seth Swirsky's website to browse the book and get more information.
I'm glad that this book gets to be on my nightstand and then my bookshelf, even if it is only for a few months.
This is a great book. Swirsky's original, "Baseball Letters" is also very good.
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