NPR Baseball Driveway Moments ($15 @ Amazon) is an audio book I got from the local library to listen to on a long drive. It’s a series of short stories and interviews; some that are funny, some interesting, and some a little sad. A great interview with Yogi Berra and you get a sense of what it used to be like, when players stayed with the same team for their entire career. Yogi talking about talking to everyone as a catcher but Ted Williams not wanting to talk, so focused on hitting. The story about how Yogi acquired the name Yogi.
Stories about Hank Aaron breaking Babe’s home run record. I remember watching on tv with may parents, it was a big deal in our house and for me it was the record breaking, but listening to this you hear about the racial tension and the death threats and all the rest. One about signals in baseball, fascinating to see a system that is a hundred years old still working well – not everything needs to be bits and bytes!
A story about a man that sold his baseball collection for millions because of a break-in to try to steal them. He decided that if his options were to lock them away in a bank or sell them, better for someone else to enjoy them. He said – and it sounded real – that he would have rather kept the cards. Another story about the organist getting thrown out of a game for playing three blind mice after a bad call and getting his fifteen minutes of fame (and enjoying every bit of it!).
If you’re a baseball fan I think you’ll enjoy it, and maybe even if not. It’s about baseball, but it’s about people and their stories.
