Book of the Week # 14

This book seemed like a good choice for this week since, if the game isn't called on account of snow, tomorrow is opening day for the NH Fisher Cats.

The Last Best League: One Summer, One Season, One Dream by Jim Collins. (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2004)

"Every summer, in ten small towns across Cape Cod, elite college baseball players gather in hopes of making it to The Show. The hopes are justifiably high: The Cape Cod Baseball League is the best amateur league in the world,
producing one out of every six major league players, from Nomar Garciaparra and Frank Thomas to Jeff Bagwell and Barry Zito. In this meticulously reported and
brilliantly crafted narrative, Jim Collins chronicles a season in the life of the Chatham A's, perhaps the most celebrated team in the league. Set against the backdrop of a resort town on the bend of the outer Cape, the story charts the changing fortunes of a handful of players battling slumps and self-doubt in their effort to make the league playoffs and, more important, impress the major league scouts. There's Jamie D'Antona, a likable, party-loving, power-hitting third baseman from Wake Forest. Thomas Pauly, a Princeton pitcher who doesn't take his talent very seriously. And Tim Stauffer, an earnest player from Richmond and one of the country's most sought after right-handed pitchers. Who will make it? And why?We learn about everything from the physics of wooden bats and the physiology of elbows to the psychology of slumps and the lure of drugs. In the course of a single dramatic season, with euphoric wins and devastating losses, we come to know the intricacies of the major league scouting network and the rapidly changing profile of major league baseball. And the way one small town grows to love a group of young men on the brink of stardom. In the tradition of Friday Night Lights and The Boys of Summer, The Last Best League is about dreams fulfilled and dreams destroyed, about Cape Cod and the rites of summer, about coming of age in America. It offers a rare, unguarded view of celebrity-in-the-making. Diehard fans will revel in seeing baseball as it was meant to be played. The rest will at last understand what the game is all about." (From the book jacket.)

Jim Collins won the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Work of Nonfiction in 2005. An accomplished magazine writer and former editor of Yankee and the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, he lives in Orange, NH.