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A review by jeremychiasson
The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski
5.0
Joe Posnanski’s Baseball 100 made me realize that the thing I like to write/read most are profiles, assessments, and reports about people. As a child I filled Hilroy notebooks with snarky assessments of my Pee-Wee Baseball teammates (“Sean Thomas’s fastball,” I opined, “couldn’t break a pane of glass”). As an adult I leap at any chance I get to write a letter of reference for someone, or fill out a form rating people on different attributes. GOD I love writing reference letters! If the person fails, they can’t really blame you, but if they succeed, you can bask in their reflected glory, imagining that your letter was the deciding factor.
In these fantasies, I like to envision some sort of stodgy, hard-to-win-over audience reading my letter. Sometimes it’s a committee of severe, powerful women in blazers whose glacial hearts are collectively melted by my words. More often than not, I envision a highly privileged man in a tweed suit. Sometimes he’s South Asian, sometimes he’s white, sometimes he is a high-ranking member of the Yakuza, but he always has bushy eyebrows, a mahogany desk, and a callous disdain for the application process he is a part of:
As Chadwick Pender-Singh III (a.k.a. The Dragon of Dojima") idly thumbs through the letters his assistant left on his desk, he wonders why he is even sparing these applications a second glance. In Chadwick’s mind he has all but awarded the “Heather Reisman Scholarship for Soldiers Who Can’t Read Good” to one of his cronies’ children. Couldn’t he just send out a form letter thanking the rejects for wasting their time, and then hit the links? God knows his short game could use some work! Oh what the hell, he thinks, I’ll just read the top one to prove the whole selection process is a pointless charade. Let’s see, here’s a letter from a Mr. Jeremy Chiasson, who appears to be some sort of shop clerk at a chain store, pleading the case of one of his little street urchins that he calls employees. Surely such a lowly petitioner could never rock my entire worldview using only the powers of the English Language…
All this is to say I really enjoyed reading a 900 page book filled with nothing but stirring profiles of 100 of baseball’s finest. This book is worth the price admission alone for his profiles about players from the Negro Leagues, men who were never given their shot to play in the majors. As such, we have to rely heavily on oral history, eyewitness accounts, and piecemeal statistics to reconstruct and imagine their greatness. Posnanski does his damndest to summon their spirits from the depths of baseball’s racist past, and mostly succeeds.
Let me just say here that Posnanski’s ranking system isn’t really the point, so don’t get too hung up on debating who is #1 on his list. Many of the rankings are symbolic or coincide with uniform number. He ranks DiMaggio #56 purely in honor of the 56-game hit streak. Just enjoy the book for what it is. Joe Posnanski is a first-ballot sportswriter, who has done a service to the annals of baseball history with his incredible portraits.
Posnanski also somehow manages to find fresh and fascinating takes on players who have been profiled and biographied to death like Willie Mays, Ted Williams, and Honus Wagner. His write-up on Tom Seaver was high art. This is an incredible book, and all-time sports classic in my view. I’m sad that this effing doorstop is over now, but I take comfort in the fact that it is extremely re-readable.
In these fantasies, I like to envision some sort of stodgy, hard-to-win-over audience reading my letter. Sometimes it’s a committee of severe, powerful women in blazers whose glacial hearts are collectively melted by my words. More often than not, I envision a highly privileged man in a tweed suit. Sometimes he’s South Asian, sometimes he’s white, sometimes he is a high-ranking member of the Yakuza, but he always has bushy eyebrows, a mahogany desk, and a callous disdain for the application process he is a part of:
As Chadwick Pender-Singh III (a.k.a. The Dragon of Dojima") idly thumbs through the letters his assistant left on his desk, he wonders why he is even sparing these applications a second glance. In Chadwick’s mind he has all but awarded the “Heather Reisman Scholarship for Soldiers Who Can’t Read Good” to one of his cronies’ children. Couldn’t he just send out a form letter thanking the rejects for wasting their time, and then hit the links? God knows his short game could use some work! Oh what the hell, he thinks, I’ll just read the top one to prove the whole selection process is a pointless charade. Let’s see, here’s a letter from a Mr. Jeremy Chiasson, who appears to be some sort of shop clerk at a chain store, pleading the case of one of his little street urchins that he calls employees. Surely such a lowly petitioner could never rock my entire worldview using only the powers of the English Language…
All this is to say I really enjoyed reading a 900 page book filled with nothing but stirring profiles of 100 of baseball’s finest. This book is worth the price admission alone for his profiles about players from the Negro Leagues, men who were never given their shot to play in the majors. As such, we have to rely heavily on oral history, eyewitness accounts, and piecemeal statistics to reconstruct and imagine their greatness. Posnanski does his damndest to summon their spirits from the depths of baseball’s racist past, and mostly succeeds.
Let me just say here that Posnanski’s ranking system isn’t really the point, so don’t get too hung up on debating who is #1 on his list. Many of the rankings are symbolic or coincide with uniform number. He ranks DiMaggio #56 purely in honor of the 56-game hit streak. Just enjoy the book for what it is. Joe Posnanski is a first-ballot sportswriter, who has done a service to the annals of baseball history with his incredible portraits.
Posnanski also somehow manages to find fresh and fascinating takes on players who have been profiled and biographied to death like Willie Mays, Ted Williams, and Honus Wagner. His write-up on Tom Seaver was high art. This is an incredible book, and all-time sports classic in my view. I’m sad that this effing doorstop is over now, but I take comfort in the fact that it is extremely re-readable.