The title of Peter Gammons' book on his life as a baseball writer and broadcaster has something of a twist to it.
If someone comes up to him and says, "I heard you have written a new book. What's it about?" he can answer "It's all about the players." Which it is. But he also gets to plug the title, which is a nice little literary trick.
It would have been easy for this to be a straight autobiography. After all, Gammons might be the most significant sports journalist of his generation. He essentially pioneered a new type of baseball writing for his time, driven by information - piles and piles of it, every week. Gammons came out of college in the late 1960s and eventually found his way to the baseball beat at The Boston Globe in the 1970s. There he eventually became famous within the baseball industry for his Sunday Notes column, which became a must-read for everyone in the business. The idea actually was something of a throwback to the Old Days of 90 to 100 years ago, when baseball writers did something similar on Sundays. But Gammons gave it a more national frame and seemed to know everything that was going on in an age that made it possible.
Put it this way: One time I was talking with former Red Sox star Dwight Evans in the press box of Buffalo's baseball stadium in the 1990s (I forget which name the building had at the time). He said that if Gammons had been a general manager instead of a writer, he probably would be ranked in the top five of those holding that position.
Gammons certainly loves the game of baseball, from the seventh game of the World Series to a relatively meaningless game in the Cape Cod League in the summer. I would guess he got a huge kick about the time that he had his own baseball card published as part of a set. But he makes it clear here that one of the biggest parts of his enjoyment of the sport is its people. We're off, then, on a tour through a variety of personalities that he encountered over the years.
That tour started in Boston, and so does the book. Gammons was around the Red Sox when they kept climbing the mountain in search of a world championship in the 1970s and 1980s, only to slip when it was often close enough to seemingly touch. Think Charlie Brown and the football that Lucy never let him kick. But the Red Sox mattered during those years, and stories about those teams are still fun. As a native Massachusetts resident, he joined in the thrill that was the 2004 season.
From there, Gammons eventually moved on to the national stage, through work with Sports Illustrated magazine and the ESPN television network. He didn't realize it at the time, but he was a pioneer among sports reporters who specialized in information and moved his act over to television. There was a stampede of TV people following his wake.
The switch meant that not only did Gammons' work have a national audience, but that he could broaden his scope beyond Boston and its Red Sox - although he seemed to have a soft spot for the team at all times. In the book, Gammons had the chance to tell the stories about his stories - riding the bus with Frank Robinson in the Caribbean, watching Japanese players cross the ocean and find success, being around Cap Ripken (Senior and Junior) during their remarkable times with the Orioles. There are even nice words about Barry Bonds - a rarity, it's safe to say - about how much of a student of the game he was, and how good he was.
Along those lines, a chapter titled "Geniuses" was a great deal of fun to read. He has stories about such players as Greg Maddux, Johnny Bench, Robin Yount, Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, Mariano Rivera, and Billy Wagner. For example, one August Maddux was facing the Astros' Jeff Bagwell in a key situation of a game. Maddux had a rule not to throw Bagwell an inside fastball, but he did in this case - and Bagwell sent it into orbit. A teammate asked what happened to the rule, and Maddux said he did it intentionally ... because the teams probably would meet in October, and Maddux wanted to give something to think about. Sure enough, Maddux struck out Bagwell in a big moment of a playoff game ... with a change-up.
The book also has stories about players who didn't quite make it, but were still memorable in their own way. Gammons' book ends with a collection of what he calls moments, with one of them centered on someone named Jeff Allison. He was a great, great high school pitcher in Massachusetts - a first-rounder by the Marlins. But he had a drug habit, and ended up in jail a couple of times. In 2006, Gammons received an email from Allison announcing that he had been clean and sober for two years. The ex-pitcher became a businessman in the Boston area with a wife and three kids, thus winning his own personal World Series ring.
There are a few redundancies that are told along the way in the proof version of the book. That can happen for a book that apparently was in the works for a long time; we'll see if they are fixed later on. There's also little about Gammons' life after the aneurysm he suffered in 2006. We find out that he got his memory back - important for a man who knew more about the game than a Google search. We don't find out much about its after-effects, or about his life away from baseball.
"It's All About the Players" will remind its readers than there are plenty of good people out there in the game of baseball, and so its smile quotient is quite high. That's reflective of Gammons' approach to baseball and life. Be positive. To put it in a more appropriate way, tie goes to the runner.
Five stars
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