How Life Imitates The World Series – Thomas Boswell, 1982 ★★★½

Dealing Out Poetry and Hard Slides

Baseball lends itself to two kinds of writing styles, lyrical and analytical. Thomas Boswell is a rare baseball writer who pulls off both with equal finesse.

Whether writing about stars or taking in the sport’s appeal to all ages, Boswell waxes poetic and, at times, sentimental about the communal power of the game, its power to simultaneously apotheosize and humanize its actors. But before those Ken Burns violins get going, Boswell throws in a zinger or one-liner to make clear he’s no sap.

He may love the atmosphere and personalities around the game, but winning and losing is what matters:

In a majority of games, the winning team scores more runs in one inning than the loser does in nine innings.

Actually, I’m not sure this is true anymore given the explosion of home runs in the last few years. But as the kind of unorthodox statistical analysis Boswell offers throughout this book, it still impresses.

How Life Imitates The World Series is a compendium of Boswell articles that first appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In those days, Boswell wrote for both The Washington Post and Playboy magazine. You can tell which pieces ran in which publication by their length and the saltiness of the quotes.

Major League Baseball was a unique kind of animal in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Age of Jackson, Seaver, and the Phillie Fanatic himself, Steve Carlton. Labor troubles were brewing, and steroids slowly entering the bloodstream as well, but in the early free-agency era a kind of stubborn purity remained.

Game 4, 1980 World Series. A knockdown pitch by Phillies hurler Dickie Noles sends Kansas City Royals star George Brett sprawling in the dirt. Boswell identifies the Royals' failure to retaliate as a key turning point in the Series, which Philadelphia won. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLqOPycN2RQ.

Boswell was there to take it all in. On the 1980 World Series:

Never have two October foes hit so well when it didn’t matter, or so atrociously when it did. These teams with the highest combined batting average for a six-game Series (.292) put 168 runners on base but only scored 50 of them. With no one on base, they batted .300. With runners in scoring position, .236.

On the baseball bat:

Call it “My Soul Pole” like Baltimore’s Al Bumbry, or “My Business Partner,” as L. A.’s Jay Johnstone does, the bat is the most pampered, coddled, protected, and defended piece of equipment in baseball.

On legendary promoter and renegade club owner Bill Veeck:

The wear, tear, and inevitable infection from his relentlessly active life have led, over the decades, to more and more surgery and less and less leg, until now Veeck’s limb attaches near the groin. Beer and courage have always been his painkillers. In a sense, Veeck has measured out his life by what was left of his right leg.

Bill Veeck. According to Boswell, when Veeck ran the Chicago White Sox (1975-1981), he moved his office into the team press room and made sure his telephone number was in the phone book. Image from https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/7b0b5f10.

Much of the pleasure from reading Boswell comes from knowing the guy was having so much fun in the writing. He enjoys the camaraderie of baseball, being recognized by the players and learning more about them in turn.

He spends so much time with the Baltimore Orioles, the club closest to his place of employment, that the book seems co-written by Earl Weaver, the Orioles’ then-manager and tireless proponent of “pitching, three-run homers, and fundamentals.”

Earl Weaver laughs and Jim Palmer grins in 1978. It wasn't all sunshine for the Oriole manager and his star pitcher. Boswell quotes Oriole Mark Belanger: “Palmer airs his opinions on a lot of things. And Earl’ll tell you any damn thing he wants to. He doesn’t care who you are, and that certainly includes Jimmy.” Image from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/giving-up-on-baseball.

A lot of Weaver’s bulldog mindset seems to have rubbed off on Boswell, who emphasizes the importance of attack and gamesmanship. He interviews several pitchers on the art of the spitball, illegal then as now; and explores the explosion of base-stealing in tandem with power hitting, which he dubs “Lumber ‘n’ Lightning.”

He writes:

The result is to establish a sense of momentum, of increasing pressure on the defense. The motto: Get the most runs from the least base hits.

Base-stealing in general, and hit-and-run in particular, are tactics Boswell saw an unlimited future for in 1980. That didn’t happen, but I quite enjoyed his analytical breakdown anyway, particularly as it related to the 1979 World Series, one of my favorite Fall Classics not held in 1969 or 1986.

Willie Stargell. In the book's title essay about playing under pressure, Boswell notes how Stargell set an example for his Pittsburgh teammates after an off day by telling reporters: "Lay it on me. Don't make excuses for me. I was as bad as you can be." Image from https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/stargell-willie.

The most relevant essay to this point is also perhaps the best-known piece in How Life Imitates The World Series, when Boswell unveils a new method for measuring offensive output, Total Average. He makes a strong case for it, too:

Baseball’s two fundamental units of measurement are the base and the out. Each base is one step closer to home plate. Each out is a single step nearer to the end of the inning. That’s Total Average – a ratio between the bases a player accumulates for his team and the outs he costs his club.

Elaborating on this, Boswell notes that the top two all-time players for Total Average were Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, with quite a distance between them and no one else close. The best active players then, going by TA? George Brett and Mike Schmidt (both third-basemen, by the way, normally a position for top defensemen.)

This book came out in 1982, and the Total Average article the year before. Methods of keeping baseball statistics have changed a lot since, but I don’t recall ever seeing Total Average get a mention. After reading Boswell’s account, I think it’s baseball’s loss.

Thomas Boswell. He has been employed at The Washington Post since 1969, longer than Bob Woodward, back when the Washington Nationals were still called the Senators. Image from Facebook.com.

Boswell’s enthusiasm for the star players shows up often, but he does spend time with mortals. He profiles semi-pro players, Little Leaguers, and minor leaguers with no chance of making it to the Show (“We’re stealing time from this young man to keep him around for organizational purposes,” admits a farm director.)

A trip to Cuba pushes the wonders of communist baseball; more satisfying and less starry-eyed is another tour Boswell takes of a winter league in Puerto Rico: “There are no programs. If you can’t tell the players without one, you shouldn’t be here.”

A good deal of time is also spent on the downside of baseball success: the unforgiving end. Star pitchers share stories about when they started to realize the power of their youth had gone, and what they had gained from experience would not be enough to compensate.

But if baseball is a cruel mistress, those who live by it seem content to accept her for what she is.

“I think about baseball when I wake up in the morning,” Carl Yastrzemski tells Boswell. “I think about it all day. And I dream about it at night. The only time I don’t think about it is when I’m playing it.”

Carl Yastrzemski says farewell to the Boston faithful on "Yaz Day," his final day as a player, October 2, 1983. To this day, no player has played on one team longer than he, 23 years. Image from http://www.jimmyfund.org/about-us/boston-red-sox/players/carl-yastrzemski/,

I’m not in love with this book; at times I find Boswell tedious. He loves to throw bad puns out there, and writes too often with a focus more being quoted than being read. (“The evil that the Bosox do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their moans.”)

When he pauses to write something personally revealing about his baseball-centered life, the result is neither personal, revealing, nor interesting. The effort to make everyone around the game seem so personable strains credulity to the point that when Steve Carlton shows up and demands to know why Boswell is looking at his locker, the sudden orneriness is almost refreshing.

In the main, and allowing for the passage of much time, How Life Imitates The World Series is a solid book which shows a smart baseball writer doesn’t have to choose between admiring baseball’s aesthetics and recording the myriad ways to win. Boswell accomplishes both quite well here.