The Fifth Season: Tales of My Life in Baseball by Donald Honig

From the Publisher

"If you were much of a boy growing up in the Maspeth section of Queens in the late 1930s and 1940s, you had the baseball fever. It seemed contagious, but it struck mostly from within... Often, in later years, when I was writing a long series of books on the game, some well-intended philistine would ask to have explained to him the fascination with baseball. I offered my stock answer: 'If you have to ask the question, you'll never understand the answer." "With this small confession Donald Honig begins his charming memoir of a life devoted to the charms of baseball, including the many great figures of the game he has known in the past half-century. Unlike many prominent chroniclers of baseball, Mr. Honig once played organized ball himself. At sixteen he was promising enough that he was signed to a minor-league contract by the Boston Red Sox and shipped to Florida for spring training - where he enjoyed a brief, exciting, and often hilarious career." How he made the uncommon transition from failed ballplayer to successful novelist and distinguished baseball historian is told with lovely insights and anecdotal delight.

David M. Shribman - Bloomberg.com

This new volume is a splendid book, wistful and reflective about life and love and men (and opportunities) left on base.

Margaret Heilbrun, Gilles Renaud - Library Journal

A beloved baseball writer (The Image of Their Greatness) and an accomplished novelist, Honig gives us a lyrical account of growing up in New York City besotted with baseball, his own abbreviated pitching career, and his passion for the greats and near-greats of the game. This nuanced, pitch-perfect memoir will make readers appreciate the nuances and permutations of the game itself. Stats, salary statistics, and free-agent greed are (thankfully) absent, replaced by warm recitations of bygone games and now-departed characters both on the field and off. A rich and engaging book; a keeper for all baseball or memoir collections.

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