Battle Creek, by Scott Lasser

Battle Creek by Scott Lasser

Years ago when I was living in San Francisco, my friend Paolo loaned me this book. I enjoyed it so much that I had to get my own copy, even if all I could find was a paperback, nothing like Paolo's hardcover -- even autographed by the author.

While playing couch potato the last few weeks, watching first the Olympics, then the US Open tennis, I thought I'd read an easy book during all those commercial breaks. It also seemed appropriate to read one related to sports, in this case, baseball.

Lasser's book is about the coaches and players on an amateur baseball team trying to win the national championship. I'm a baseball junkie, but when it comes to playing, baseball is one of the few sports that I'm hopeless at. However, I've played organized tennis for nearly twenty years, including the years in California when friends of mine were on teams that made it to the nationals, so I'm familiar with how seriously some people take amateur sports. It can get silly, really; Jeff jokes all the time about writing a TV series called Desperate Tennis Players. Winning -- or perhaps more important, not losing -- seems to mean so much to some people.

If Lasser's book were only about how people can become obsessed with winning even at amateur levels, it would be a boring story. Battle Creek is really about life -- not in the hopelessly sentimental way that the likes of Kinsella usually bring into baseball-themed novels, no, not at all. This is a very sad story whose on-field happy ending was achieved at tragically high prices. In the end, it was about choices that all of us have had to make at some point in life. Baseball is but a backdrop to the real story of life.