STOLEN SEASON: A Journey Through America and Baseball's Minor Leagues; by David Lamb; Random House; 283 pages; $20.
Some see baseball as a metaphor for life: It moves with the seasons; it is a daily game, sometimes slow and tedious; its participants are men of ordinary physical bearing; its outcome is uncertain until the last moment.David Lamb sees baseball as simply the best game - "the game where teamwork and individual performance are independent and interdependent; the game in which every player (except the foolish designated hitter) is expected to execute all offensive and defensive assignments. The game of perfect distances. Who was the genius, anyway, who figured out that a ball thrown from short and a runner dashing 90 feet from home would reach first at almost precisely the same moment, whereas 80 feet would have been too short and a 100 too long?"
And when Lamb returned to this country after spending eight years as a correspondent in Africa and the Middle East, the way he chose to get re-acquainted with the United States was through baseball. And not just baseball at today's glamorous major league level but baseball as the true national pastime, played in minor league cities and towns throughout the country.
At this level, you find a wide cross-section of players: those on the way up, hoping for a chance at The Show; those on the way down, trying to eke out a few more years of playing time; those who will never get beyond where they are now but play because they were born to play.
Lamb meets them all. Traveling across country in an RV he calls Forty-Niner, he stops at the Triple-A towns and the Rookie League towns; he chats with players, umpires, managers, groundskeepers, bus drivers and others who make up the baseball family.
Underlying it all is an abiding love of the sport - spawned in his youth when he was an avid fan of the Boston Braves. (When the Braves moved to Milwaukee, 15-year-old Lamb spent a stint as a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal, detailing the feelings of a fan who has lost his team. In his cross-country odyssey, he tracks down some of those Milwaukee stars: Warren Spahn, Eddie Matthews, Chuck Tanner, Hurricane Bob Hazle.)
"Baseball endures because its myths and statistics endure," he notes. "Winning 20 games or hitting .300 is still the same measure of excellence it was in the 1920s."
There is a lot of baseball here - the statistics, the lore, the analysis that aficionados revel in: "More than any other sport, baseball is a game of the mind, as much as of the body, because failure is the norm. The best major league teams lose one of every three games, the finest hitters fail seven times in 10."
But there is a lot of Americana as well.
"I always felt disappointed when I found a team that had taken the name of its major league parent. What, after all, does the Helena Brewers say about Montana? The Auburn Astros, Gastonia Rangers and San Jose Giants are no better. The minor league names I like best spoke of local character and there were some terrific ones to choose from: the Nashville Sounds, Durham Bulls, Toledo Mud Hens, Butte Cooper Kings, Eire Sailors, Charleston Rainbows."
Lamb's secret when visiting a place he had never been was to head for the bus station: "The Greyhound station gives me a sense of place, not only by putting me in the midst of downtown but also by fixing me within a region. It lets me know my routes of escape.
"In Chattanooga, for instance, I learned that there were two daily departures to Birmingham and 10 to Atlanta, although both cities were roughly the same distance away. That told me that the flow of money and goods out of southern Tennessee was linked to Georgia, not Alabama."
The Middle West, he thinks, is the perfect setting for baseball. "Amid the fields of corn and long summer nights and steepled white churches that filled to capacity every Sunday was the bedrock of a nation. . . . No one in New York or California paid much heed to the voices that came from this land, yet I knew with certainty that long after crack barons had taken over our cities, long after zealots had shot all the smokers and flag-burners and gays, and the urban family had become a relic studied in high school sociology classes, the Midwest would still stand out here on the plains, as square as it was sensible, feeding us and reminding us of who we were."
Of Salt Lake, home of the Trappers, he says, and you get the feeling he means it as a compliment, "Salt Lake is a Perry Como kind of place, an America of the '50s holding out against the beat of heavy metal. It's a place where trends and fads go to die. The city leads the nation in per capita consumption of bubble gum and Cracker Jack."
And of the Trappers themselves? "If Norman Rockwell had wanted to paint minor league baseball, I'm sure he would have landed in the Pioneer League, and probably with the star attraction, the Salt Lake Trappers. . . .
"The Trappers appealed because they were us. . . . They were proof that there would be another day and another race. If you didn't embrace them, you were probably one of the people who rooted for Goliath over David and never believed reindeer could fly."
What Lamb sets out to do, he does well. This, after all, doesn't pretend to be a definitive look at the minor leagues, but one man's journey through the land. And, metaphor or not, this is as much a book about life as it is about sport.