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“I just look out the window and wait for spring to come,” Baseball Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby once said, when asked how he passed time during the off-season. As a certified baseball nut, I know the feeling. But here’s a more constructive idea: pull up a chair and delve into two recent books that will add to your knowledge about the endlessly fascinating game of baseball.

Just-Tell-Me-I-Cant-Hardcover-P9781455521586Before the end of the 2012 season, Jamie Moyer retired at 49 after becoming the oldest pitcher to win a major league game. In Just Tell Me I Can’t: How Jamie Moyer Defied the Radar Gun and Defeated Time (Grand Central Publishing), Moyer and sportswriter Larry Platt tell the story of how a pitcher who never threw close to 90 mph wound up with career 269 victories (and perhaps an outside chance at the Hall of Fame).

The book is dedicated to the late sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman, whose 1989 book The Mental Game of Baseball (co-authored with the late baseball scout Karl Kuehl) has become a bible for many players, including Cy Young Award-winning pitchers Roy Halladay, who retired earlier this month, and Greg Maddux, who awaits a likely call from Cooperstown. Dorfman is a recurrent presence throughout Just Tell Me, and it’s no wonder because his life story is truly compelling. Born with chronic respiratory ailments, Dorfman willed himself to become a championship college soccer goalie and later a successful high school English teacher and women’s basketball coach.

Each chapter begins with a Dorfman aphorism. Here are a few:

“Control is lost when a player’s feelings and thoughts focus on consequences.”

“To aspire to great achievement is to risk failure.”

“Hoping you will do something means you don’t believe you can.”

And my particular favorite for a game in which success is much more rare than its counterpart:

“No one can make you feel like a failure without your consent.”

Even if a reader is unconvinced by self-help terminology, Just Tell Me I Can’t provides both valuable insider baseball knowledge and a chance to meet a genuine personality in Moyer. He warns about the danger of “white on white” pitches, where too much of the ball goes over the heart, or middle, of the plate. He brings to life his struggles to become consistent. Moyer also includes entertaining stories about the two great teams he played on: the 2001 Seattle Mariners that won a record-tying 116 regular season games and the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies, World Series champions that brought Moyer’s hometown just its second baseball championship. We also learn about the pitcher’s philanthropic work with the Moyer Foundation, in which Moyer and his wife, Karen Phelps Moyer, daughter of basketball’s Digger Phelps, provide bereavement counseling for children who have lost loved ones.

From the West Coast comes another book worth enjoying in the off-season: Ken Korach’s tribute to his Oakland Athletics’ broadcasting partner, Holy Toledo: Lessons from Bill King: Renaissance Man of the Mic (Wellstone Books). I must admit that this story of northern California’s remarkable sportscaster also includes his work for pro basketball’s Golden State Warriors Holy Toledoand pro football’s Oakland Raiders. But I am not the type of baseball purist that cannot give some props to other sports, especially when spring training is still weeks away. And make no mistake: Bill King knew and loved baseball. “He lived the game every day, and to me that’s the greatest thing I can say about him,” his Oakland broadcasting colleague Marty Lurie tells Korach.

The title Holy Toledo comes from King’s signature exclamation during an exciting moment in a game. Korach provides verbatim examples of some of King’s memorable broadcasts, not all of them victories. Baseball fans should relish the five pages of King’s call of Los Angeles Dodgers’ Kirk Gibson’s memorable 1988 World Series home run off seemingly invincible Athletics’ closer Dennis Eckersley.

Korach’s pages are also filled with testimonials to King from some of the biggest names in West Coast sports, from San Francisco Giants broadcaster Jon Miller who wrote the foreword to A’s executive; Moneyball inspiration Billy Beane; basketball Hall of Famer Rick Barry; to Los Angeles Raiders owner Al Davis and his greatest coach, John Madden. At times, these interludes may interrupt the book’s narrative flow but they help convey the essence of a remarkable, largely self-educated man who fell in love with San Francisco after his return from serving in the Pacific in World War II.

King experienced the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counter-culture of the 1960s, breathing the air of cultural freedom and developing a love for all the fine arts. He lived on the water across the bay in Sausalito in an apartment without a telephone. Late in his life, he took up painting—a sunset portrait of the city skyline from his home in Marin County graces the back cover of Holy Toledo.

The front cover of Holy Toledo is even more striking: a Mephistophelian caricature of King by artist Mark Ulriksen, whose early April 2013 New Yorker cover of the aging New York Yankees prophesied their mediocre 2013 season. In Holy Toledo, you’ll meet a memorable man whose name was on the ballot this fall for election to the broadcaster’s wing of Baseball’s Hall of Fame. King didn’t win—Texas Rangers broadcaster Eric Nadel did—but I hope Holy Toledo brings King’s story to a larger audience. As John Madden puts it, “We all wanted to live vicariously through Bill. The things that he did, we wished we could do: Not care, not worry and just sort of do things the way you want to do.”

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Genre: Nonfiction
Lee Lowenfish

Lee Lowenfish, a jazz and baseball journalist and historian of American culture, teaches sport history in Columbia University’s graduate Sports Management program in New York City. He is the author of the award-winning biography Branch Rickey: Baseball's Ferocious Gentleman and The Imperfect Diamond: A History of Baseball’s Labor Wars, and he collaborated on Tom Seaver’s The Art of Pitching. You can follow Lee @leelowenfish

One Comment

  • CodyJarrett says:

    My idea of a great review is one that makes me absolutely certain I can’t get to the bookstore fast enough. Like your excellent and beautiful books, Lee, this piece also makes me think of the one other thing I consider essential to a great review; I wish like hell I had written it.

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