Since baseball season has started, leave us peruse and remark upon two books concerning America's national pastime. The title, of course, is in honor of Chicago Cubs great Ernie Banks, who always looked upon a great day with enthusiasm and was known for wanting to make almost every game a double-header, if he could.
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Wilson also dealt with some of fame's demons, and was one of four Royals who did time for a misdemeanor attempt to purchase cocaine in 1983. He rebounded from that to continue to be a vital part of the team in the 1985 Series win, but injuries hampered his career later in that decade and he went to Oakland as a free agent in 1990 before ending his career when the Chicago Cubs released him in 1994.
Inside the Park outlines this part of Wilson's life, as well as many of his post-baseball struggles and how he overcame them. He dealt with depression, financial setbacks and a second round of substance abuse, and was forced to sell his Series ring at a bankruptcy auction in 2001 (The board of his charitable foundation purchased and presented a replica of the ring to Wilson to mark Inside the Park's publication). The book, which reads mostly like a transcription of several interviews, allows Wilson to own up to his faults, offer his side of a couple of issues and outline how he came back from his problems, finally managing to make his life outside the baseball stadium match the quality of his game inside it. It's a good redemption story, probably mostly of interest to Wilson fans and Royals fans but still offers something in its own right as an account of coming back from being very, very far down.
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Will is best-known as a conservative opinion columnist, so folks who like the idea of firing people because of what they believe would probably want to take a pass on his book, even though he inserts next to no politics and only a little free-market economics.
Cubs fans are probably known for their love of Wrigley almost as much as they are known for being the victims of a team which abuses them anew every year. And Will, who now lives in Washington, D.C. and roots for the hometown Nationals, knows their pain. Born in downstate Illinois at just about the right time to take advantage of the rise of radio baseball, he followed the Cubs through most of his childhood and adolescence.
Once establishing his bona fides as a Cubs fan (the usual sign is considered to be permanent tear tracks down the cheeks), Will offers a quick but engaging skim of the century that Wrigley has spent at Clark and Addison, from the team's actual beginnings elsewhere in Chicago through its long, long post-World War II slide. He poses an interesting question: Has the team's emphasis on its ivied home played a part in its hapless history? Can a ballpark built when the only thing a ballpark was supposed to do was give people a place to sit and watch the game be what a team needs in the 21st century?
As expected of the erudite Will, we meet Greek philosophy and thinkers of many kinds and ages who would probably be surprised to find themselves tasked with explaining aspects of baseball, but the same skill that made Men at Work and Bunts engaging reads for thinkers and fans alike makes it all work. Possibly the only misfire is the book's dedication to current Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, who may have overseen an economic boom for the sport but is still guilty of many grievous sins. I'm thinking about writing the Washington Post to get Will fired because of that.
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