Six Good Innings: How One Small Town Became a Little League Giant
February 13th, 2010 | 
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- ISBN13: 9780061473586
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Summertime in Toms River, New Jersey, means two things: Tourists and Little League champions. The Toms River dynasty began in the 1990s, when its team made it to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, three times in five years, finally bringing home a historic world championship victory in 1998. But with each passing summer in Toms River comes renewed pressure, as the latest collection of twelve-year-old All-Stars strives to leave its mark on the town’s imposing baseball legacy. In Six Good Innings, acclaimed sportswriter Mark Kreidler deftly illuminates the sometimes tense relationship between the town and the team that carries its hopes and dreams. With empathy, incisive reportin… More >>
Six Good Innings: How One Small Town Became a Little League Giant
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If you’re gonna advertise a book by comparing it to ‘Friday Night Lights’, then it had better deliver. Unfortunately, ‘Six Good Innings’ is much like a long, uneventful baseball game. It is a tedious read. It’s not that I’m biased against baseball. I grew up reading plenty of sports biographies–baseball, included. I remember reading ‘I’d Rather Be A Yankee’ late into the night and multiple biographies of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, and other greats. I think this book could have been interesting. Unfortunately, it comes up short. There’s just nothing special about it.
Rating: 2 / 5
Six Good Innings is an average book, and unfortunately for the author, it’s about an average baseball team. The book was doomed from the start because of its subject matter, the 2007 Toms River Little League All-Star team.
Books like this succeed when one of two elements is present: (1) the team is outrageously successful and wins a championship; or (2) the team is made up of compelling personalities that drive the narrative. Six Good Innings features neither of these elements.
Without spoiling the plot, there isn’t a whole lot to get excited about here.
And the personalities are either exceptionally bland, or the author has buried the personalities for the sake of his story.
Most significantly, what is missing, and what could make this a compelling book, is a discussion of at what price these teams seek success. Is this level of commitment, pressure, tension, and demand appropriate for a group of seventh-graders? Frankly, if the book questioned the role ESPN has played in this development, treating seventh-graders like another piece of content to fill airtime, that would have been interesting. Given the author’s employment by ESPN, such a discussion seemed unlikely from the start.
The author also glossed over the role the parents played, and the lessons that were taught to these young athletes in this “win-at-all-costs” endeavor.
All in all, the book was an average read about an average team. Nothing more, nothing less.
Rating: 3 / 5
Let me prefice this review by saying I love the LLWS. I watch it every year. While I am saddened by the comercialization of it, ESPN still puts on a good show.
This is a book I was excited to see, due to the above mentioned love for the LLWS. However, what follows are 256 pages of boredom. Instead of focusing on one years worth of kids, the author thinks it would be a great idea to jump around, in no particular order, through several stories from different years. This creates a disjointed feel and doesn’t allow the book to build any momentum.
The author makes it a point to mention ESPN a couple times in akward fashion. It’s only when you realize that the author works for ESPN do those mentions make sense. It comes across as fake and unnecessary.
The actual book has a plodding feel to it. Almost like a short magazine article being stretched into a novel. Some of the individual stories are interesting, but others leave me wondering why they were included in this book. Maybe it was to beef up the page count?
In the end, this book holds a very good premise, but the execution of that premise is severely lacking. Even being a hardcore LLWS fan, I found this book a bore so I can’t in good faith recommend it to many other people.
Rating: 2 / 5
Mr. Kreidler opens his book with a six page description of a home run. This is worthy of comment in itself. Anyone can describe a home run in one page, or even a single sentence, but to be able to devote six pages to it is an accomplishment to be admired. Unfortunately, the rest of the book does not live up to this early promise. Problems are apparent from the beginning. The sentence structure is difficult at times. Some are almost magical but others leave you reading and re-reading, trying to make out who is the subject of the sentence, or what, exactly, is taking place on the field. Who is doing what to whom?
Baseball is an easy thing to love. It is in our blood from the time we are little. If Major League Baseball has become jaded and bloated on its riches, and shown disdain for what is sacred, Little League Baseball is untarnished, without taint and innocent of the sins of its bigger brother. But Mr. Kreidler somehow manages to make the game uninteresting and the youngsters who accomplished so much, unsympathetic. I found it hard to care, as I read, what happened. There is no magic in this account, and there should be.
I suppose my expectations were unrealistic. I looked for the poetry of Bull Durham or The Natural. If you look for the same, you will not find it here. This is more of a wordy newspaper article than the work of near-poetry the subject deserves. I hope you will get more out of it than I did.
Rating: 2 / 5
I live north of Toms River, so when this book was offered for review, I couldn’t wait to review it. Kreidler is obviously going for a “Friday Night Lights” feel for his book, but one reason that book is such a classic is that you feel the effect of the sport on the town and how the people basically live their lives through the fortunes of the team. But Mark Kridler pretty much sticks to the various games themselves here, and the fact that he tends to jump back and forth through the years is distancing to the reader. But if you have a kid who enjoys/plays baseball, this is a good addition to their baseball shelf.
Rating: 3 / 5
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