When baseball's spring training begins, the dreams and hopes of players, managers, owners and even umpires once again start anew. Each major league team thinks it has a chance to win it all; every rookie phenom or aging veteran is playing for keeps. In Where Nobody Knows Your Name, journeyman sportswriter John Feinstein (A Good Walk Spoiled; A Season on the Brink) takes us through the 2012 Triple A season with eight men who "are extremely good at what they do--but not as good as they want to be."
If reading a season's worth of Triple A sports reporting sounds like following the tavern tour schedule of a Michigan cover band, Feinstein makes it more like being backstage with Dylan. Among his "eight men out" is 36-year-old Scott Posednik, who'd bounced among eight major league clubs before winding up in the minors, hoping for one more shot. He did get called up in 2012, playing out the year with the Boston Red Sox and batting a solid .302. But the Sox didn't take him back in 2013, when they won it all, since, as Feinstein notes, they wanted "to go young."
Feinstein's other heroes have similar stories. Even after 10 years as a minor league umpire, Mark Lollo got to work only eight games in the majors in 2011, then retired after missing a close call at the plate on the last play of the 2012 minor league season. Baseball's tough, and never tougher than at the Triple A level... the almost-good-enough league "where nobody knows your name." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.