"Wilfrid Sheed arrived in this country as an English kid worried about his house being bombed and his country being invaded. Yet within a year he had become a typical 10-year-old baseball nut, with nothing worse on his mind than Bronx Bombers and Enos Slaughters and Bean-ball wars. Only in America - that year, anyway. His personal Ellis Islands were the ballparks of the 1940s, especially Shibe Park in Philadelphia, Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, and any surface anywhere on which kids his age were trying to get a game together - and he has left his heart in all of them." "With the skill and style that have made him one of our finest writers about America's games, Sheed brings back to life the aura that surrounded the games of his youth - and ours. Through this very fond, very personal memoir, Sheed captures the sights and smells of that bygone era: the surly hum of Shibe Park as another defeat was played out by the A's or Phils: the neighborhood tavern friendliness of Ebbets Field:, the droopy drawers of young Ted Williams and the godlike elegance of Joe DiMaggio; the imperious wave of old Connie Mack's scorecard as he shifted the Athletics' defense (the term is used loosely); and the agony of a Brooklyn Dodgers fan as the last strike of a World Series game slips through Mickey Owen's fingers." "But while his reflections are of his time, they are also about all times, about the obsession with particular athletes that all fans felt as kids; about listening to games on the radio and eagerly awaiting the morning paper, and incidentally learning math from box scores, history from record books, and geography from imaginary road trips to the end of the world, which was St. Louis in those days." "Nobody likes a nerd, but everybody liked a baseball fan, so Sheed felt free to take courses in abnormal psychology with Leo Durocher, the American language with the sports pages, and classical tragedy with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Parents who fear that their kids are wasting their time with sports should be reassured, and everyone else should be entertained by this brilliant meditation on how a child's mind actually works and learns. To clinch his case for a baseball education, Sheed maintains that he could have made this book at least twice as long, but would have trouble filling a single chapter with everything else he remembers from school." "Through his lovingly rendered portrait of his young mind at play, Sheed brilliantly recaptures that innocence of youth - and how, through a love of sports, we all can keep hold of that innocence within us."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved