It's tempting to fall into baseball metaphors after reading a baseball book, even one as eccentric as Josh Ostergaard's The Devil's Snake Curve. If he were a pitching prospect, his scouting report might say "no heat, all junk." This collection of news reports, anecdotes, statistics and personal reminiscences turns an eclectic history of baseball into a backdrop for American political history.
Growing up near Kansas City, Ostergaard is a long-time Royals fan and so a natural Yankees hater. Yet it is the Yankees who permeate The Devil's Snake Curve, representing all that is good and bad about the United States. He tracks their dominance of the sport from beer mogul owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert, who bought Babe Ruth from the Red Sox, to tyrannical George Steinbrenner, who hired whatever talent he needed and famously forced his players to be clean-shaven and short-haired. As the Yankees have been the most consistently successful team in the majors, so, too, the U.S. is the undisputed power in the global league of war, economics and influence--and, like his Yankees, Ostergaard's America is characterized by chicanery, jingoism, evangelism and, most of all, money. However, despite his disillusionment with both baseball and the U.S., he can still join a Hall of Fame audience recitation of "Casey at the Bat," noting that "the melancholy burned away... it felt like being at the ballpark should feel. Carefree, open, simple." Baseball, thank goodness, has a way of doing that. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.