THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9606020200
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: 83 lines
The Heart of the Game: The Education of a Minor League Ballplayer
By Paul Hemphill
Simon & Schuster. 284 pp.
Paul Hemphill tells us in his foreword that he wrote ``The Heart of the Game'' out of love for baseball, but thankfully, this isn't one of those pretentious tomes in which the author finds true meaning at the altar of the Lords of Baseball.
Rather, Hemphill approaches the sport from the inside out, eschewing rhapsodies on the poetry of baseball in favor of examining in close detail the maturation of a minor league player.
You won't find words such as ``pastoral'' in ``The Heart of the Game,'' but you will find out the seven ways a second baseman can make the pivot on a double play.
You'll learn about the importance of hard work in the making of a ballplayer, and the loneliness and insecurity that 20-year-old minor-leaguers feel every day, their outward bravado and insouciance notwithstanding.
This is a terrific book.
The author of several other nonfiction books (``Me and the Boy, Leaving Birmingham''), Hemphill is an intelligent observer and a fine writer. He is also an excellent reporter, and his homework shows. He knows who should be talking, and he lets them talk.
Chief among them is Marty Malloy, a feisty young second baseman from northern Florida, whom Hemphill follows for two seasons in the Atlanta Braves' minor league system.
Disenchanted with the emphasis on money in the big leagues (he is put off by both the players and the owners), Hemphill began attending minor league games in Macon, Ga., where the Braves had a Single-A franchise. There he spied Malloy, who reminded the author of his own brief stint in the lower minor leagues in the 1950s.
Hemphill writes: ``Marty Malloy seemed to represent an America that was hardly there anymore: small-town America, with its trust in hard work and the flag and the friendships that last a lifetime. . . . His father was the local high school coach, and the only thing he had ever wanted to do was play professional baseball. He was right out of central casting: everybody's rookie, every mother's son, a fearless kid totally without guile or pretensions, a boy entering manhood on the dusty infields of the muggy South.''
This passage may suggest that you are about to enter weepy Ken Burns territory, but Hemphill keeps his emotions in check. A Southerner himself, he is attuned to Marty's love of fishing and stock-car racing and country music. But Hemphill also comprehends what baseball is all about. It's about learning a very complicated sport very slowly, building on your mistakes and finding out that every year you realize how little you understand.
Thus, in tagging along with Marty with the Macon Braves, and the next year with the Single-A Durham Bulls you see just how tenuous the process is. A few players get promoted right up to the minor league system, but most get bounced around, hurt, taught about hitting the curve ball and how to deal with a batting slump, and, inevitably for some, cut.
You learn plenty about Marty, of course, but just as compelling are looks at the coaches, scouting directors, and managers who keep the minor league system going. Most of them never made the majors; they're middle-aged or older, making a decent salary but traveling eight months a year with young men half their age to do so. They know that few of their charges will make it to the big leagues, yet they do what they do for the love of the game, to make sure these kids can make the right play.
There is 55-year-old Bobby Dews, ``the son of a vagabond minor league catcher,'' a career minor-leaguer himself who went on to become the Braves' field coordinator.
Hemphill writes that Dews ``knew more about each and every player in the Braves' organization than any person alive. . . . When he drove away from his house in Albany, Ga., to make the opening of spring training at West Palm Beach in the middle of February each year, he knew that he couldn't expect to see much of his wife until the close of the Fall Instructional League in West Palm at the end of October.''
Dews embodies the belief of Willie Stargell, the Braves' minor league batting instructor and a former star first baseman with the Pittsburgh Pirates, that ``somewhere in there, your passion for the game becomes a way of life.''
If you've grown unhappy with the state of baseball lately, this book is likely to restore your passion for the sport as well. MEMO: Tim Warren is a writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md. by CNB