Pain and Baseball

Or maybe it's baseball and pain. Pat Jordan's memoir, A False Spring, despite being about America's pastime and one of my very favorite subjects, literary or otherwise, was excruciating to read.

After signing a big contract and leaving home for the first time, star pitcher Jordan quickly discovers that professional baseball life in the minor leagues brings a host of challenges that he's unprepared to meet. He can't just "mow 'em down" with his power because he's begun to have episodes of complete wildness, a fatal flaw in a pitching career. He doesn't know how to cope with the foreign locales of small-town Nebraska, Iowa, Georgia, and Florida. He doesn't know how to have a relationship with one of the local girls who hang around the team, one who seems to have eyes only for him, or with this teammates, for that matter. The pressure, the travel, the routine, and the loneliness make baseball life an insurmountable challenge.

Jordan looks honestly at these failures, showing at every turn how much growing up he needed to do. He shares some insights -- this is a memoir, after all -- but for the most part he allows his inabilities to speak for themselves. I found some of the incidents truly painful to read; when a kind word or a right action might have saved the situation, Jordan usually just flounders on. He's a sympathetic character -- more lost and clueless than bad -- but I often wished he'd had some mentoring, an insightful father figure or a smart and caring grandmother figure to help him along. I also occasionally wanted to shout at him, finding his most unlikable moments deeply frustrating.

Jordan's journey from Golden Boy to former player shows a side of baseball that fans never see, from a highly personal and interior viewpoint. Failure stories are at least as instructive as success stories, when told honestly and with a certain amount of grace. That alone makes this book worth the price of admission.

Excerpt:

What would I be without baseball? I could think of nothing.

Note: This book counts toward the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.