Yay! I Finished Reading Another Book - "Split Season 1981" By Jeff Katz

Well, sort of finished.  Remember the other day when I wrote about movies that I walked out on?  If "Split Season 1981" was a film, I would have been in the lobby so damn fast.   As it was, I finished the book by skimming the last several chapters so quickly that even Evelyn Wood would have been impressed.

How can you screw up a book on baseball for me?  Well, apparently, quite easily.  Because author Jeff Katz, the so-called mayor of Cooperstown, has essayed a historical tale that is so dreadfully dull that it literally took me five months to finish it.

This should have been a slam dunk.   Oh, wait, that's basketball.  As the secondary title says, "Split Season 1981" is all about Fernandomania, the Bronx Zoo, and the strike that saved baseball.  I remember the summer well.   Baseball players went on strike in mid-June and didn't come back to work until August.   This resulted in a split season where there were division pennant winners for the first half and the second half.   It was all very convoluted.

And that's exactly what the book winds up being.  Convoluted.   And dull as the infield dirt.

Maybe it's because that the labor negotiations are a function of telling the story. But Katz mires himself in all the minute details of the legal standoff that the book ends up reading like a daily law journal.   More than once, my chin hit my chest as I struggled to hold up the book in front of me.  

Again, in the author's modest defense, I don't know how you can write this tale without taking us through all the weeds.   But, it kills the middle third of the book and most readers are likely never to recover.

And, unlike, for instance, Molly Knight's recent superlative book on the Los Angeles Dodgers, the author here gives us no new information than what you might have read in the newspapers at the time. I yawned so much that my cheek muscles actually hurt from the exercise.

Indeed, any baseball book usually has a fan in yours truly.   And, for "Split Season 1981" not to achieve even one one-hundredth of that distinction is the ultimate shock.   

Dinner last night:  Beef and vegetable stir fry.