I’ve already written my requisite April baseball book review, but after finishing Will Leitch’s new book Are We Winning? the other night, I decided I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it. Leitch’s last book, God Save the Fan, was a drive-by-shooting of sports anecdotes and pop culture references, blasting away with well-aimed snark at ESPN and the mainstream sports media. When I saw Leitch had another book coming out, I figured it’d be more of the same, just directed at the baseball community. And there’s a place for that, to be sure, but I find snark something to be consumed in small quantities.
I was surprised, then, to find that Leitch has attempted something a bit more difficult: a book about baseball and fathers. Let me rephrase that — he’s attempted something that’s a bit more difficult to do well. It’s not terribly difficult to write about baseball and fathers; the two subjects are so enmeshed in the psyche of every American male that ever played (or coached) t-ball that it’s harder to separate the two ideas than to conjoin them. The problem, as with other seemingly obvious concepts, is that it’s so familiar to us, that we are so ready to travel down well-worn mental paths, it becomes almost impossible to avoid the ready cliches and pithy truisms attached to the ideas.
Leitch accomplishes something more than cliches and truisms. The structure of the book follows a trip Leitch took with his father and family friend to see a 2008 game between the Cardinals and the Cubs, but it’s the moments between the bits of baseball that push the book along. It’s refreshing to see a writer deliver an honest portrayal of his father without lapsing into psychological blame-shifting or whitewashed hagiography. There are momentary self-indulgences — I know more about Will Leitch’s Little League career than I probably need to — but they are forgivable, and most of the personal anecdotes serve the purpose of the book well enough.
While writing the book, Will Leitch requested that readers send in their own memories and stories of baseball and fatherhood. Leitch and his wife read through them all, and then selected pieces to open each chapter. I looked forward to the beginning of each chapter — the paragraph or two reinforced the universal experience from a slightly different, uniquely personal perspective. Some of the stories are funny, some of them are sad, and a few of them were both funny and sad in unexpected ways, like the father who purchased a left-hander’s glove for his son (reasoning that right-handed folks should wear their baseball gloves on their right hands) and forced his son through half of the Little League season throwing with the wrong hand before the coach realized what had happened.
There’s a little too much mythologizing about the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry for this Tigers fan, but I can’t begrudge any true baseball fan the right to talk excessively about his or her hometown team. For example, as this is my blog, I feel fine letting you know that the Tigers have won 5 in a row and are just a half-game back from the AL Central division lead. You may not care, but I do. And if you care about baseball, or ever cared about baseball, then Are We Winning? is worth a read, to be reminded that for most fans, baseball didn’t start with multimillion dollar salaries, steroid allegations, and luxury taxes — it began with a game of catch in the backyard, or t-ball season, or a trip to the minor-league park to see real baseball for the first time.
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