Growing Up with Baseball Growing Up with Baseball: How We Loved and Played the Game How We Loved and Played the Game

In this charming collection of essays, ordinary people recall their earliest encounters with baseball, describing sandlot pickup games, lazy hours listening to the radio and countless summer afternoons at ballparks. The result is both a vivid anecdotal history of America's pastime and a colorful portrait of how people lived and played in the middle and late 20th century. Many of these touching stories will seem pleasantly familiar to readers who engaged in such youthful rituals as poring over box scores, imitating players' batting stances, begging for autographs and, of course, visiting a big league park for the first time. Others are unusual and, at times, fascinating: a Seventh Day Adventist talks about how his first exposure to the wider world came through baseball; a missionary's son describes afternoons at Ebbets Field with his mother; and a number of writers describe the inventive tabletop games and backyard contests that they came up with to pass the time. Refreshingly, the writers manage to avoid the syrupy nostalgia that tends to infect too much writing on baseball. Land, a history professor, recruited his contributors through the Society for American Baseball Research and specifically asked that they focus on their own experiences without lamenting how times have changed. Because most of the authors are amateur writers (a large number happen to be teachers or academics) the quality of the essays varies, but the prose is almost uniformly clear and entertaining.