For Love of the Game: A Novel

The book is ultimately about the main character, MLB pitcher Billy Chapell, becoming a man. This is expressed in many ways, even in the seemingly random part of the book when he reminisces about choosing the number 21 for his jersey because it is the age when a boy becomes a man.The choice of the number, he says, was a compromise between his parents, who each originally preferred a different number. There is a good deal of Chapell's reminiscinces about his parents that play into his formation as a man that are missing from the film version, which is too bad.I loved the movie, but it threw in tons of drama in the romance that isn't there in the book. That was a negative part of the movie, to me. In the book, the relationship is pretty much all positive until the end, when Chapell's choice truly to love and devote himself to this woman, and retire from the game, is part of his path to manhood. I guess the movie takes the path differently to arrive at a similar conclusion, but I preferred the way Shaara originally told it.This was also Shaara's last work, found by his son in his desk after he had passed away. What an appropriate ending to a writing career - a story about a man ending his baseball career with a perfect game. This book for the author is a lot like that game for Chapell.

The great Mike Barnicle wrote, “That’s one of the great gifts of this, the greatest of all games, baseball: it allows you, still, to lose yourself in a dream, to feel and remember a season of life when summer never seemed to die and the assault of cynicism hasn’t begun to better optimism.”And in his introduction to his father’s last novel, Jeff Shaara wrote, “What is it about baseball? … My father understood that baseball is a part of all of us, and will always be. He understood the purity of the game, the simple and the complex, and he understood that no matter how often the game changes, or how many records fall, we will still be there, still watching, for the love of the game.”Summer. Optimism. Purity. Love. Dreams. You get all of it Michael Shaara’s For Love of the Game—a wistful, quick read about pitcher Billy Chapel. He’s aging. He knows it. The season is winding down. he's on a bad team. There's a growing weight to the season. Billy Chapel pitches for the last-place Hawks. He thinks about baseball but mostly because fans and hotel employees all ask him about it. Is he done signing that bucket of baseballs? You pitchin’ today? You okay?But Billy’s mind is drifts to Carol, his lover of four years. Golden blonde. "Perfect" legs. "They were light to each other whatever the darkness."A sportswriter comes to his hotel room with bad news. He’s been traded. “They were going to hold it back until the season was over and not let you know till then. That’s only—a few days off. But they figured it was better not to break the news now. But when they let it loose, Billy, they won’t tell you first. Just as they do so often with … Willie Mays, fellas like that. The big boys they—can’t face. You’ll hear it on the news or read it in the paper, and that’s the first they expect you to know.”Seventeen years with the same team and it’s over. Shaara’s style is deeply interior—often quick and clipped:“Knew this day would come.Did you?Yep. But. Well.It’s come.Yep.Chapel had seen this coming, knew it was coming, and had planned nothing, nothing at all.”Carol, when she appears, has her own issues—she’s quitting her job and going home. Carol, who was married once and no longer thinks Billy needs him, is thinking of getting married again.For Love of the Game builds toward Billy Chapel’s last turn on the mound for the Hawks and the action remains all in Billy Chapel’s head as he throws a stellar game and continues to alternatively reminisce, ponder his future, and grow increasingly worried about a pain in his arm.“Pain only there, in the right arm. Better now. How much reserve? No way to know. From the back of the brain … a slow dark signal from deep down there, way back where the dreams formed and much of the work was done. There’s not enough left, Billy Boy, Billy Boy. They’re going to get you.”(The ellipses are Shaara’s. For Love of the Game loves ellipses.)Billy Chapel even contemplates his own dilemma in the context of The Old Man and The Sea—lone, wounded man on a singular, gallant, last-gasp mission. That Billy Chapel makes the Hemingway comparison (and not us readers) might be a little too on-the-nose, but For Love of the Game is an often poetic portrait of veteran pitcher, alone on the mound, playing a mystifying, beautiful sport.

Billy Chapel is a major league baseball pitcher, a 17-year veteran, perhaps one of the best to ever throw a fastball.Here, in Michael Shaara’s FOR LOVE OF THE GAME, it’s the second-to-last game of the regular schedule – one to be played against the Yankees. The Bronx Bombers are on the verge of winning a play-off spot and Billy is penciled into the line-up against them even though his own dismal team lost its chance at a post-season berth early on in the schedule.Only hours before the first pitch, Chapel’s professional and personal lives sustain potentially psychologically crippling blows. The temptation for him is to just quit and return home to the mountains of Colorado.Back in the 60s when I was a teenager, I followed every game of the Los Angeles Dodgers, ideally on my transistor radio small enough to dangle from the handlebars of my Schwinn. My heroes were “Dandy Sandy” Koufax and Don “The Big D” Drysdale. (Yes, there could then be, and were, heroes.) And if the two pitched back to back in a Sunday double-header, OMG!I remember Vin Scully’s broadcast of the last inning of Sandy’s perfect game against the Cubs on September 9, 1965 as if it was yesterday. It was after “lights-out” at the private, boarding high school I attended and I had to discreetly listen under the covers. Yes!I later lost interest in pro baseball when I entered my twenties and started working for a living; the enormous sums the premier players hold-out for don’t help me meet my budget. And, eventually, exposure to real life rubs the polish off all one’s heroes of whatever ilk.But enough of my banal experiences. Let’s return to FOR LOVE OF THE GAME.Much of the book’s narrative is fueled by what goes on inside Billy’s head as he deals with the challenges of game day. What results is a story that, while bringing back a memory of my previous dedication to the game - especially as it involves a pitcher - also defines what it means to be a “professional” as the term applies to any career choice.FOR LOVE OF THE GAME is an evocative, poignant parable about what it means to have reached grown-up status in life. At a brief 152 pages, it’s a little gem.

Wie in einer der englischen Rezensionen zu lesen ist es ein ideales Buch fuer die Reise; nur 160 Seiten und in ca. 3 Stunden ist man durch. In diesen 3 Stunden ist man aber wirklich gefesselt.Sollte jemand den Film mit Kevin Costner gesehen haben, dann laeuft bei in vielen Faellen der Film im Hinterkopf mit - aber hier ein Kompliment, zumindest fuer die echten Basebase-Stories in diesem Buch ist der Film sehr nah' dran.Ich habe mich selbst wie Billy Chapel gefuehlt, wenn er beschreibt wie er die Hitter analysiert und genau weiss was sie vorhaben und mit welchem Wurf er sie dann verbluefft.Sicher kein Buch das den Nobelpreis verdient, aber gute Unterhaltung.

Ein starker Roman, ein gut Stück anders als die Verfilmung (die mir auch sehr gut gefällt).An den extrem reflektierenden Stil aus kurzen Sätzen, manchmal nur Worten, mußte ich mich erst gewöhnen, aber langweilig wurde es eigentlich nie. Es schadet nichts, wenn man bei der Lektüre ein bißchen was über Baseball weiß - der Autor geht davon aus, daß das der Fall ist.Warum werden Romane wie dieser nicht ins Deutsche übersetzt?