Game Six

Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime by Mark Frost


This started off great. I love the way the author decided to craft the story of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series: he told it as if you were listening to a baseball game on the radio. He perfectly wove stories of the players and managers involved in the game around each pitch, each swing, each decision. This was a great baseball book…

Then he got to the ninth inning. As I read about innings nine through eleven, I felt as if Mark Frost had grown impatient and wanted to rush his way to Carlton Fisk’s famous homerun. Frost found his rhythm again for the twelfth inning, but my love affair with the book was over by then. He had fallen to cliché. For instance: “Yaz, at thirty-six, wasn’t the same hitter he’d been in his absolute prime, but he still had more sheer guts and gritty work ethic than any man who’d ever played the game.” Every nonfiction work driven by nostalgia will have a fair number of clichéd descriptions, but the end of this book was overrun by them.

And that doesn’t even take into account the afterword. My goodness. The afterword takes up more than 17% of the book’s text. I just finished reading it, and I wonder if the author just couldn’t let anything he researched be left out of the book. He wrote a since-1975 biography of just about every player and executive involved in that game. There were even 500 or so words on Jim Rice, who didn’t play in that World Series. The afterword also included several long diatribes about free agency, the finances of Major League Baseball, and the game’s lost innocence. There was even a passage suggesting that the beginnings of the steroid era are to blame for Dave Concepcion’s omission from the Hall of Fame. What? It was excessive and unnecessary. And it was annoyingly preachy. The afterword ruined the book.

Game Six was one of my favorite baseball books before the ninth inning. It was good before the afterword. Now, it’s just alright. A shame, really.

C