#josh ostergaard

[kforourke]

That’s All, Folks

October is the best month of the year for many reasons—the profusion of pumpkin spice-flavored foods notwithstanding—but the best reason may be playoff baseball. Specifically, the World Series! Even if you don’t like baseball (and if you don’t you are wrong), this year’s World Series between the Red Sox and the Dodgers, two teams that I care little for, was spectacular, even if the Sox did win again.

If you didn’t watch Friday night’s 7-hour-plus heart attack extravaganza, the longest game in World Series history, you missed out. Baseball is the best sport because it is the worst, most frustrating sport; at its best, it will have one standing up out of fear & tension, only to (falsely) relieve that tension again & again. When the Phillies played in the 2008 World Series (which, ahem, they won), I watched pretty much every game standing up.

Baseball is also the best sport because its history is both fascinating and fascinatingly intertwined with American history; my friend Josh Ostergaard’s highly entertaining book The Devil’s Snake Curve does a great job explicating the connection between the two, plus Ostergaard’s personal history with the sport. Here’s a sample, on the history of the hot dog:

The earliest known usage of the term “hot dog” to describe the food dates to 1895. Until then, “hot dog” was used primarily by sports fans to describe a good athlete showing off his skills. People still use the phrase this way.

Baseball fans in the late nineteenth century were eating a food named after the players they watched on the field. Old-time fans were trying to consume the prowess of the athletes, ingest their strength, and carry it home in their blood. It was like killing a grizzly bear and making a necklace of its claws.

I highly recommend you pick up the book, if only to fill the void between now and when pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training in mid-February. Link HERE.

And no blog post about baseball would be complete without It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s love letter to Chase Utley (coincidentally also my favorite player...)

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Image of Babe Ruth playing for the Red Sox via Wikimedia Commons.

[ronkaplansbaseballbookshelf]

The Bookshelf Conversation: Josh Ostergaard

The Bookshelf Conversation: Josh Ostergaard

Jealousy reared its ugly head once again when I saw the full-page review of  Josh Ostergaard‘s The Devil’s Snake Curve in The New York Times‘ Sunday book supplement in June. It brought back memories of Chad Harbach’s 2011 debut novel, The Art of Fielding, which garnered him tremendous kudos, not to mention a huge advance. (The latter point is particularly difficult in light of the harsh reality…

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[ronkaplansbaseballbookshelf]

Bookshelf Review: The Devil's Snake Curve

Bookshelf Review: The Devil’s Snake Curve

A Fan’s Notes from Left Field, by Josh Ostergaard. Coffee House Press, 2014.

(Not to be confused with Confessions from Left Field: A Baseball Pilgrimage, published by Raymond Mungo in 1983.)

To be honest, I did not have high expectations for this one after reading the review in the NY Times‘ Sunday book supplement a few weeks back. It somehow reminded me of The Art of Fielding, another “literary”…

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[ronkaplansbaseballbookshelf]

Well it's about Times

Well it’s about Times

It took almost half the baseball season, but The New York Times finally published a couple of baseball reviews in its Sunday book section.

And the honors go to:

The Devil’s Snake Curve, by Josh Ostergaard

A Nice Little Place on the North Side, by George F. Will

Both titles get the full-page treatment, which frankly, I don’t understand, given all the available material out there. I would love to…

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"I love baseball history, and in truth I find it a lot more interesting than the contemporary sport. I find it difficult to care who wins or loses, and also I don’t have cable TV or any capacity to watch TV unless I’m at a friend’s house or in a public space with a TV. Maybe I care less because the Royals have been bad for so long, and because I lived a few blocks from Wrigley Field for several years. If winning was the only point I’d have gone insane long ago. Or maybe I did go insane, and that’s how I wrote this book. Though if I was truly insane I don’t think I’d have been able to organize my thinking effectively or attend to aesthetics or write a useful cover letter."

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