Four good reads about the Summer Game …
Updated 7/30/2022 9:02 AM
(To make it easy for you to buy any of these books if you are interested, I made each image linked to buying the book right on amazon.com. I do get a commission if you use the links in this post.)
By Dale Scott, with Rob Neyer
University of Nebraska Press
Dale Scott had plenty of objectives in writing this memoir, not the least being a desire to tell the story of his sexual orientation.
More than anything, though, there was this: Providing an authentic inside look at the life of a major league umpire.
“That was certainly a big part of it,” says Scott, a long-time Portland resident who retired in 2017 after 32 years in Major League Baseball. “I hope it was fun for (readers) to take a peek behind the curtain and see what we do.”
Scott, 62, is most well-known as the first official in one of the four major pro sports leagues (NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB) to come out as gay in 2014. But Scott’s resume as an umpire speaks for itself. The Sheldon High grad worked 1,000 MLB games behind the plate, 3,897 games in all. He called three World Series and three All-Star Games and served as a crew chief for many years before retiring at age 57 after suffering his fourth concussion in five years.
Dale received help writing the book from fellow Portlander Rob Neyer, a veteran sportswriter/author who serves as commissioner of the West Coast League, a wood-bat summer college league. Scott estimates he wrote about “70 percent” of the content.
“Rob helped me through a lot of steps you take doing a book,” Scott says. “He edited and organized. He helped me immensely on a lot of things.”
Scott says he has already heard from many readers with positive feedback on the book.
“The No. 1 thing they say is, ‘I feel like I’m sitting at a bar, having a beer and listening to you talk,’ ” he says. “That’s a real compliment.”
Similar, I guess, to what viewers might tell Kevin Harlan or Bob Costas after a podcast, or a major sports broadcast.
“And a lot of people say they found it funny,” Scott says. “They laughed at some of the stories.”
I know I did. Scott tells many tales, providing anecdotes and insight into the life of a big-league umpire. Dale takes us through his career, from the bush leagues to the majors. I love how he conveys to the reader examples of umpire terminology (for example, taking a nutcutter, cockshot, monkey, working the stick).
He speaks from an umpire’s perspective. For instance:
“Many minor league presidents feel an ejection is a failure by the umpire. Either you missed a call or your game management is poor, which leads to ejections. This is far from the truth. Ejections are part of the game — a tool that’s necessary for good game management. Don’t get me wrong. You can have a bad ejection. But ejections are generally not evidence of an umpire’s failure.”
Scott addresses another topic I’ve often wondered about umpires and referees at the top level.
“I’m not sure anyone who has never umpired or officiated knows how you feel after you miss a call, even more so when it’s postseason or an extremely important regular-season game,” he writes. “It haunts you, follows you, and can (unfairly) brand you not only for the rest of your career but after you leave the field.”
Dale writes about players, coaches and managers he liked and others he was often at odds with. Among those he respected: Tommy John, Tom Kelly, George Brett, Nolan Ryan, David Cone and Lou Piniella, Among those in the opposite category: Jack Morris, Sparky Anderson, Lance Parrish (“he has the personality of a U-boat commander”), Cal Ripken Sr., Billy Martin (Scott was the last umpire to eject him), Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Kevin Brown, Dick Williams (“a surly prick”), Cito Gaston (“he actually challenged made to a fight”) and Dennis Eckersley (“he called me a fucking cunt”).
I loved that Scott named names.
“I was honest,” he says. “I’m really a pretty happy-go-lucky guy. I don’t bitch about people all the time. I complimented the people (who were good to deal with), but a lot of very talented players were just assholes.
"Cal Ripken is a good in baseball and an unbelievable player, but his dad was a prick. I was actually being nice. I could have said a lot more.”
Scott answers the questions I had about being gay — when he realized he was gay (at 19 or 20), how he told his parents (his father learned several years after his mother), how he dealt with the horror of AIDS.
““Being gay in the ‘80s and early ‘90s was fraught with fears, anxiety, grief, depression and anger,” he writes. And with the advent of AIDS, he was “facing the reality that having sex could literally kill me.”
Scott relates the story of how met husband Michael Rausch, his partner since 1986. He writes about the necessity of umpiring for many years in the closet, though many of his fellow umpires knew, or had a good idea.
I’ve known Scott since I wrote a story on him and fellow Portland umpire Jim Joyce when they worked the All-Star Game together in Seattle in 2001. Both of those guys are great representatives of the city.
Now Scott has come out … with a gem of a book. I recommend it highly.
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By Dan Good
Abrams Press
Ken Caminiti is one of the true sad stories in major league baseball history.
His career credentials were outstanding. He hit .272 with 239 home runs across 15 big-league seasons. A three-time All-Star and Gold Glove winner, Caminiti was unanimous Most Valuable Player in the National League with San Diego in 1996, when he batted .326 with 40 homers and 130 RBIs.
By that time, however, Caminiti’s body was filled with the steroids he had been using for several years. Alcohol was a problem dating back to his high school and college years, and drug abuse entered the picture soon thereafter. Freebasing and smoking crack came into play even before he broke into the major leagues in 1987.
Caminiti’s life ended in tragic fashion. He died at age 41 in 2004 of acute intoxication after doing a “speedball” — a mixture of cocaine and heroin, the same toxic mix that took the lives of John Belushi and Chris Farley. It was deemed an accidental overdose.
Former teammate Craig Reynolds, who had become a pastor after retirement from baseball, said this to Caminiti’s daughters during his memorial service: “You’re going to hear some really good things about your dad here today. And later, after you leave, you’re going to hear some really bad things about your dad. And when you do, remember that those people didn’t know him the way everybody in this room did.”
The author provides a balanced look at Caminiti’s life and career, which perhaps was affected by the shame of enduring sexual abuse as a child. “Cammy” was a paradox. On one hand, he was an excellent and popular teammate, a hard worker and great competitor, a born-again Christian, a person willing to help others on many occasions.
Said his wife, Nancy, during one of his many stints in rehab: “Ken was one of those people just trying to be something for others, and I get it. But he couldn’t just do it for himself, you know? And he needed to.”
Caminiti did many things he was ashamed of, much of it the result of his alcohol and drug abuse. He was not a good husband to Nancy, who divorced him in 2002 after 15 years of marriage. He was a sometimes absentee father to his three daughters.
His confession to steroid use in a Sports Illustrated article in 2002 made him the first big-league player to admit to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. It was the cog that got things rolling, resulting in the Mitchell Report of 2007 that pinpointed abuse by such stars as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and provided impetus for stricter drug regulations in MLB.
Caminiti was a runaway train at the end of his life. He couldn’t stay clean, which in a way made cause of death seem to be more like suicide. Without drugs, he might have been a Hall of Famer. Instead, he left his admirers wishing for what could have been.
This book is a good read, but it includes no photos. With all the twists and turns and changes throughout Caminiti’s life, pictures of him at different stages would have been instructive to the reader, who is left only to wonder. A major omission, for sure.
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By Mitchell Nathanson
University of Nebraska Press
By my count, Jim Bouton wrote five books, not counting an update on his orbital hit, “Ball Four,” perhaps the most famous book in baseball history. I was unaware of any book written about the former major league pitcher until Frank Peters — who managed Bouton with the Portland Mavericks in the 1970s — handed me this one to read.
The book, published in 2020, is a gem — much better than I expected it to be. It covers the entire life of Bouton, who died in 2019 at age 80. It would seem to accurately portray the life of a flawed but talented, driven human being.
Bouton (and both his ex-wife and current wife) cooperated with the author, but this is not a kiss-ass authorized biography. Nathanson gives us Bouton, many warts and all. Through a good portion of the book’s 350 pages, Bouton is often presented not in the best of lights. He is difficult, a contrarian, a philanderer, devious to first wife Bobbie.
When at age 38 he decided to leave a good job as a sportscaster for another crack at pitching, he sold the house in which he lived with his wife and three children.
“The house sold for $125,000, and they moved into one costing only $75,000,” Nathanson writes. “The extra $50,000 became the sticker price for his dream. When the bills kept coming and that ran out, he cashed in the children’s college funds and sold a lakeside vacation home.
“He could get testy when asked whether it was worth it to out his family through all of this. ‘Look, it’s not like I sold a $20,000 house and put my family on a shack. We went from a $125,000 house to a $75,000 house, and as I kept telling the kids, there’s still food in the refrigerator.’ ”
Bouton took the family to Mexico for a chance to pitch in the Mexican League. After his release a few months later, writes Nathanson, “they arrived home nearly penniless. Bobbie emptied the kids’ bank accounts to pay for groceries, while Jim searched around again for a team that would have him.”
Like Ken Caminiti, Bouton was a living, walking paradox. He cared about people. He had passion for life. He believed in and worked to further many good causes. He was, as his nickname suggests, a “Bulldog” about work ethic and getting things done.
And he could write. “Ball Four,” the first (and best) tell-all book about professional baseball, sold more than 5.5 million copies and is now displayed among the collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.
I interviewed Bouton on the phone once several years ago, before the Mavericks staged a reunion party (that included actor Kurt Russell, once an infielder for the club) at El Gaucho restaurant. He was an excellent interview and couldn’t have been nicer.
There is plenty of Mavericks stuff in the book, incidentally, along with four photos of Bouton in the uniform of the club in which he had two stints during a “comeback” tour that brought him back to the major leagues for one final fling in 1978 at age 39.
My feeling is, the author puts things in their proper perspective. The message I received about the title subject was this: Jim Bouton mattered. In the end, when judging the man’s life, it’s what mattered most.
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By Lawrence Ritter
William Morrow
This book was originally published in 1966, then republished as “The Enlarged Edition” with four new chapters in 1984. I love major league baseball history, and this is a collection of interviews from players representing the era of the turn of the 20th century.
Some of the subjects are household names in the sport — Hall of Famers such as Hank Greenberg, Paul “Big Poison” Waner, Lefty O’Doul, Goose Goslin, Rube Marquard, Harry Hooper, Sam Crawford, Edd Roush and Stan Coveleski. Some were accomplished pros not quite at the Hall of Fame level, men such as “Smokey” Joe Wood, Babe Herman and Rube Bressler. Others, like George Gibson, Bill Wambganss, Al Bridwell and “Specs” Toporcer, had so-so careers.
Ritter writes that he traveled 75,000 miles to interview the former players. Most of the interviews were done between 1962 and ’66, though four would seem to have been conducted in the ‘70s. That would mean the ex-players — two of whom began their major league careers in the late 1800s — were mostly in their 70s and 80s. The youngest — Herman, Greenberg and Waner, who all ended their careers in the ‘40s — were in their 60s.
What I enjoyed most were the observations on their contemporaries. We’re talking legends of the game, men such as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, Rube Waddell, “Wee Willie” Keeler, Branch Rickey and Connie Mack.
The author’s interviewees offer insight with anecdotes about these greats and also the game of baseball during their era. Ritter does a nice job providing photos of many of them, along with those of such as “Bugs” Raymond and Charles Victory Faust (you’ll have to read the book).
I have only one complaint, but it’s substantial. The stories are told in first person. Ritter let the tape recorder roll and was soft, if non-existent, with editing. Whatever was said, he took as gospel. The content, then, was left with dozens of examples of “I think” and “maybe” that could have been clarified if Ritter had taken the time to look up things.
A few examples:
“The Boston Red Sox beat us in the first World Series (1903). I think they were called the Boston Pilgrims then.”
(According to Wikipedia: “For many years sources have listed ‘Pilgrims’ as the early Boston AL team’s official nickname, but researcher Bill Nowlin has demonstrated that name was barely used, if at all … they were simply ‘Boston,’ the ‘Bostonians’ or ‘the Bostons.’ “)
“They weren’t called the Braves then (1905). I think they were called the Nationals.”
(According to Wikipedia: “Braves was first used in 1912. Before that they were called the ‘Beaneaters.’ ”)
“I was playing shortstop when Cy Young won his 511th game. Cy was at least 45 by then.”
(Young was with the Red Sox when he won his 511th and last game in 1911. He was 44.)
From Rube Bressler: ‘I had a terrific season (1914). My ERA was about 1.76 and all.”
(It was 1.77.)
Bressler with the Brooklyn Robins: “And even with that we wound up in sixth place in 1929, and I think maybe fourth the next season.”
(Yes, they were fourth.)
Everything doesn’t have to be conveyed verbatim. All you need to do is put the speaker’s words into context. Period.
Other than that, I very much enjoyed the book.
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Readers: what are your thoughts? I would love to hear them in the comments below. On the comments entry screen, only your name is required, your email address and website are optional, and may be left blank.
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