THIS AIN'T BRAIN SURGERY: How to Win the Pennant Without Losing Your Mind

Two things set career baseballer Dierker apart: he went from broadcaster to manager with zero managing experience, and he suffered a brain seizure in the Astrodome dugout during a game. The first item gets ample coverage in the book, but surprisingly, the second does not. An accomplished major league pitcher with a no-hitter and a few all-star appearances to his credit, Dierker foreshadows his impending tragedy from the beginning, as he strikes out Willie Mays in his major league debut (also Dierker's 18th birthday), right up until the fateful day in 1999. Yet the actual event warrants barely six pages. A Hawaiian shirt–wearing party guy, Dierker clearly had no interest in writing a mawkish memoir, but the reader will nonetheless hunger for a bit more on how his horrific flirtation with death shaped his life. Dierker's prose is witty and easy—reading it is like hearing stories over a beer from the guy sitting next to you at the ballpark. But the yarns often come up short: old teammates trumpeted as "characters" come across as flat, and the book could use sharper focus: it's alternately a pitching book, a managing book, and a book about old-time baseball, when players drank beer and raised hell. After 37 years in major league baseball, Dierker undoubtedly has stories to tell, such as his teammates' first glimpse at the surreal new Astrodome in 1965. That his book isn't chock-full of them is somewhat disappointing. (July)