Book examines minor league baseball

STOLEN SEASON, by David Lamb, Random House, 283 pages, $20.

“Nostalgia is a dangerous obsession. It turns stumblebums into princes and dunghills into shining mountain peaks. It makes yesterday sweeter than tomorrow can ever be. But nostalgia is an expression of faith, because inherent in our embrace of the past is the belief that rediscovering the lost values of our youth will return us to simpler, more innocent days.”

The lost values of his youth preoccupied the author when, after eight years in Africa and the Middle East as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, he came home to rediscover his own country by way of baseball’s minor leagues.

Lamb, a University of Maine graduate with previous books on Africa and the Arab world to his credit, took a summer off, secured a loan from the credit union to purchase a second-hand self-contained recreational vehicle that he dubbed “Forty-Niner,” and headed out.

He plotted an elaborate travel schedule, then junked it in favor of wandering the backroads wherever they might take him. “Baseball,” Lamb writes, “would be my re-entry ticket to a country I had been gone from too long.”

By the time the summer was over he had wandered from California to Texas and Tennessee, into Florida and then up the Eastern Seaboard to Elmira, N.Y., across the Midwest, through Montana and the Northwest and back into California.

“What I would find was baseball as I remembered it, played on real grass and in a time when the teams we cherished were ours for life,” Lamb writes in the preface to this magnificent work.

Along the way this once-rabid Milwaukee Braves fan gets to meet boyhood idols Warren Spahn, Johnny Logan and Eddie Mathews and other ballplayers from the old school who, unlike today’s pampered spoiled-brat millionaires, played more for the fun of it and the honor of being a Big Leaguer than for the paycheck.

In Durham, N.C., he runs across Max Patkin, the ageless Clown Prince of Baseball, still entertaining the crowds with his comedy schtick after more than four decades on the circuit. Long-necked, loose-limbed, motor-mouth Patkin with his cap on sideways and a question mark for a number on his back. (Holy Smokes. Is he still alive?)

Lamb commiserates with owners about the sad state of minor league baseball today — money-driven, with local ownership increasingly selling out to wealthy businessmen from the distant cities who have no stake in the community.

And the ballplayers: So many are called to try for the brass ring, so few make it to “The Bigs.” Still, hope springs eternal, despite the 12-hour bus rides, the hot dogs and soda pop meals, the measly paychecks.

Their stories can be inspiring, or they can be pitifully sad. Like the saga of Steve Dalkowsky of New Britain, Conn., born with “a left arm the gift of God, an arm so powerful he could throw the ball harder and faster than anyone who ever lived. That, at least, is what everyone said who saw him pitch…”

The Baltimore Orioles signed Dalkowsky, moving him through their minor league organization, where he set strikeout records despite control problems. Or more accurately, perhaps, because of control problems. No hitter with common sense dug in on Dalkowsky. Most preferred to take three pitches and return to the safety of the dugout.

In spring training, Dalkowsky threw a pitch by Ted Williams that The Great One said he never saw. He struck out Roger Maris on three pitches. He struck out Rick Monday, who had signed for a $104,000 bonus, four consecutive times. Each time Monday went down swinging, Dalkowsky, an unabashed flake, shouted at him from the mound, “$104,000, my ass.” He was cocky, his future bright.

And then it happened. Near the end of spring training, he fielded a bunt, fired the ball to first and grabbed his arm in pain. A knot the size of a golf ball swelled up in his elbow, and from there it was all downhill for Dalkowsky, baseball phenom. He was shipped back to the minors, started drinking heavily, and degenerated into a Skid Row bum. “Lost Season,” indeed.

All too soon the jig becomes up for the author, as well. As he drives Forty-Niner off into the sunset, surfeited by his Lost Season of chasing the siren call of baseball in small-town America, he prepares himself to re-enter the rat race that is big time newspapering:

“The season I had stolen from adulthood was, I knew, not mine to keep. Summer was over and it was time to go home.”

All good things must end.

Kent Ward is the NEWS associate managing editor.