Are We Winning?

As most of you know, I read a good amount of books.  Mainly fiction, but every once in awhile I will read something nonfiction.  Rarely do I read sports books.  Which I think is weird, since I love sports.  Some of you also know that I am a huge fan of Deadspin, especially the Will Leitch days.  Well, he has a new book out, called Are We Winning?  Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball.  I decided to pick it up last week and pretty much could not put it down once I started it.

The book is about a trip to the Cardinals/Cubs game in ’08 when the Cubs clinched the division.  Leitch attends the game with his father and a friend (a hated Cubs fan).  Actually this is just the backdrop of the book.  Leitch is writing the book to his nonexistent son.  It is broken up into chapters by inning.  He explains modern baseball and how it is doing just fine, but also his own relationship with his father.

My favorite part of the book can be read here.  He discusses Steve Bartman and how that could have been any diehard baseball fan.  Anyone could have reached for that foul ball and ended up being blamed for ruining a season.  Utterly ridiculous the way Bartman was treated.

The book also made me think of the relationship with my own father.  In fact, so much of Leitch’s description of his dad, reminded me of my dad.  Playing catch and my dad being able to launch flyballs into the stratosphere, or being able to throw the length of our field without much effort always amazed me.

If you are a fan of baseball or just want to read about father/son relationships, this is definitely a book you should check out.

Author: Ngewo