Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville by Stephen Jay Gould

The book is a collection of essays on baseball by SJG, published posthumously. The essays serve to take us on a tour of baseball through over 50 years from the author's childhood when he was a devoted Yankees fan to the near end of his life, when his son has grown up to be a Boston Red Sox fan.

I picked the book up mostly to read his brilliant essay on the myth of why 0.400 average can't be reached today due to the general overall improvement in the standard of the game rather than the incorrectly purveyed myth of the glory days. However in line with my rather silly principle of trying to finish whatever book I have started, I trawled through it. The book is more than an overdose of baseball to someone who is not a fan of the game. Perhaps if it were a book on football or even cricket, I would have found it mildly tolerable. With that qualified confession, here are my cribs on an otherwise fine book

 - The book has numerous spelling errors with some solid howlers like basketball being spelt as "backetball" WTF!? C and S are not even close on the keyboard!

 - The book has an element of repetition which grates on the reader if you are not a forgiving & fawning Yankee fan. The fact that the author was not around for its publication may be a key reason since I am sure someone with his incredible gifts for narration and discussion outside his profession would have caught onto it

 It does dwell more than once on the unfair treatment to blacks in baseball for quite a few years but there does not seem to be much on Hispanic players and almost nothing on the Japanese players who have acquired some significance in baseball in the last 10 years. I even remember at least one essay in some magazine less than 10 years ago which paid tribute to this. Surely someone with the author's polymathic interests would have noticed this. Or did no one ask him to write one essay on this cultural import? Surely Hispanic and Japanese players must have brought some change into the game and its fan following. I confess my ignorance if anything exists in this sphere by SJG. I know that the great man passed away in 2002, but the first Japanese came into baseball in 1964. So even the trivial event is unlikely to have gone unnoticed by the perceptive author.

I confess I won't be reading another baseball book for atleast a few months now. Onto 2 books on other sports - Playing for Keeps by Halberstam and Tom Derderian's history of the Boston Marathon, books on basketball and running, at least one of which I claim to have some background in. And I have SJG's The Richness of Life, which I am yet to read. I will post on it someday. I must apologize for my lack of awareness or sensitivity to baseball, but that's the way life is. I am apologizing only since I like the author and the fact that he is an incredible polymath, but this baseball is beyond me.

Comments welcome