The Long Ball: The Summer of '75 — Spaceman, Catfish, Charlie Hustle and the Greatest World Series Ever Played
by Tom Adelman
Little, Brown and Company

We've all seen the play. The Boston Red Sox's Carlton Fisk pounces on a sinker down and in, and, as the ball drifts along the foul line on its way out of Fenway, Fisk dances down the first base line, pushing, pleading, waving it fair, which it is — but just. The homer caps a Sox win in the 12th inning of Game Six in the 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, a game some claim to be the best World Series game ever played. In the end, however, we all know that Boston's gotta lose, so the win merely sets Sox fans up for another heartbreaker, as they lose the next game and, ultimately, the Series. So it goes.

Although the Rex Sox coming up short is a tried and true baseball tradition, the 1975 season represents a watershed moment in baseball history. It was the year free agency reared up and bit baseball in the ass. In "The Long Ball," Tom Adelman makes the case that free agency essentially killed the neighborhood rivalries baseball had always nurtured. With players contractually bound to one team in what was essentially a form of indentured servitude, fans saw the same squad year in and year out, and the same teams suited up against one another year after year, fostering the intense rivalries only familiarity can breed. Although every era in baseball is its own self-contained Golden Age, according to Adelman, guys like Pete Rose, Catfish Hunter, Johnny Bench, Spaceman Lee, Louis Triant and Yaz were a little ballsier, a little drunker and a little scrappier than the Oakley-wearing, Kentucky Fried Chicken-and-sport-drink-hawking multimillionaires who round the bags these days.

That said, there's an element of apple pie wonderment in Adelman's writing, and there are times where he falls in love with his own prose, as when he relates the last days of Casey Stengel or reports the sad, drunken dreams of Mickey Mantle. Often, it's hard to tell what Adelman's getting at, however. There are moments you think that he's going to really dig into the free agency issue, but he treats it only sparingly, sticking it in when the mood suits him. The era of free agency broke wide open when Catfish Hunter challenged the legality of the contract he signed with huckster Oakland A's owner Charles Finley (a guy who had a mechanical rabbit pop up behind home plate to feed balls to the umpire) contract. Hunter won his case, became a free agent and in what seems like a precedent-setting move, signed with none other than the Yankees.

Adelman packs the book with obscure stats, pitch selections and plenty of behind the scenes baseball lore — most of it second-hand — making it both an interesting summer read, and a pain in the ass to wade through. The minutiae piles up as you read about how some obscure left fielder missed a sign in July and cost the Giants the game, and about one Randy Jones sinker ball after another, and by the time September rolls around you barely remember who's sliding into what. While the beauty of baseball is that it's a numbers game, the game's not all necessarily in the numbers, something Adelman seemed to forget somewhere along the way.

— Paul McLeary (pjmcleary@yahoo.com)