The Devil's Snake Curve

March 10, 2014
In his highly entertaining and always enlightening “subjective retelling of the sport’s history,” Ostergaard takes a nonlinear approach to discussing the cultural importance of baseball, successfully combining historical and personal anecdotes, statistical facts, and famous myths and legends. His goal is to show “the ways in which baseball has been represented in the U.S., and how these representations can be understood in the context of American history.” He moves easily from the relationship between baseball and political thinking shared during the early 1960s by fierce enemies Fidel Castro and Allen Dulles, to the ways baseball managers and owners attempted to enforce rules about hair length and mustaches at the same time that those rules were being rejected in American culture in general. One of the most provocative sections details the eerie symmetry between Clark Griffith, whose Washington Senators had been “squashed” by the New York Yankees for 17 straight seasons, and Hemingway’s character Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, whose words and actions Ostergaard convincingly argues are subtle commentaries about the baseball postseason and the World Series.

March 1, 2014
Like many, a less-than-gifted athlete growing up, Ostergaard, a native of Kansas City, became a baseball (and Royals) fan and has now written this anecdotal and idiosyncratic once-over on the sport. Although containing much that has appeared in sundry baseball books before, it also offers many rare and entertaining tidbits, such as Ted Williams being recruited to shoot bothersome pigeons in Fenway Park or the fact that midcentury Yankee owner Del Webb's construction company built the camps that housed Japanese interns during WWII. Ostergaard obsessively links not only the history of the pastime but a great deal more to management and ballplayers' attitudes regarding facial hair. Readers who, like the author, see baseball as a metaphor for, well, nearly everything, and who deem the Yankees as not only representative of the misdistribution of wealth in America but also connected to such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War will love this book. Those who merely enjoy baseball as baseball may still find plenty to like in Ostergaard's oddball take on the sport.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)