Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball Book

I love Stephen Jay Gould, and I love baseball. But this haphazard collection of baseball-related clippings from the last two decades didn't do it for me. Gould is a thoughtful and brilliant man, a big fan of the game, and a good writer. But this volume is unsatisfying. I can identify three primary for it.

First and foremost, it's just not his area of expertise. In his lifetime, Gould forgot more about hen's teeth and horse toes than I'll ever know, but baseball is comparatively just a diversion for him. He's obviously a fan, but he's no Roger Angell or John Updike or Roger Kahn or John Feinstein. I'd recommend The Flamingo's Smile or Bully for Brontosaurus, or any of Gould's other essays in natural history in a heartbeat. Just not this.

Second, it's mostly a lot of dated musings about the Yankees and Red Sox, which means it doesn't exactly unearth the untapped material of the baseball world. Where he deviates from this pattern, it's a lot of hero-worshipping of Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds. And it's not the insightful stuff a beat writer could tell you. It's the sort of material a smart person might come up with after watching a lot of ball games on television, nothing more.

Third, there is nothing to tie these essays together (not even an essay by Gould, since the volume was published posthumously). Basically, if Gould wrote the piece sometime during his lifetime of being published, and if it mentions baseball, it made the cut. An entire third of the book is reprinted book review essays, one after another.

I have to emphasize again that I love the man, and even in this flawed book there are some wonderful nuggets. But there is an endless list of better baseball-related (or Gould-written) books out there that are better choices.