One of the best of this group is Mike Bryan's Baseball Lives: Men and Women of the Game Talk About Their Jobs, Their Lives, and The National Pastime. Originally published in 1989, Bryan has put together an entertaining and original work that takes a look at some of the obvious and not-so-obvious jobs that make up the behind the scenes world of professional baseball. Bryan grabbed his tape recorder and set out to interview over 50 individuals who love the game and, in many cases, have dedicated their lives to it. Best of all, he simply turned the recorder on and, in the spirit of Lawrence Ritter's landmark The Glory of Their Times. Bryan knows enough to let the participants do the talking. This is not a heavily edited book, and it reads like the stories are being related to you in a private conversation. Bryan, by the way, is more recently the co-author of Cal Ripken's, The Only Way I Know.

Baseball Lives explores a wide variety of professions, including: groundskeeper; ticket taker; beer vendor; major league scout; public address announcer; scoreboard operator; tavern owner; team physician; and even the guy who drives the team bus. While the vast majority of the pieces in the book are about non-players, Bryan does include a few interviews with star players who were on a roll while he was putting the book together, namely Dennis Eckersley and Andre Dawson.

Virtually every piece in the book will be of great interest to baseball fans, but a few are particularly memorable. My own favorites were about the Baltimore dental student turned Jumbotron operator (who still works for the Padres today), the female attorney in the major league front office whose job was to track down MLB copyright violators, the seasoned craftsman in the Louisville Slugger bat factory who had a thousand stories to tell, veteran groundskeeper Pat Santarone who knows more about grass than any living person, and the longtime proprietor of the famous souvenir bazaar right outside of Fenway Park. In what was probably one of the more prescient pieces, Bryan interviewed (then relatively unknown) sports agent Randy Hendricks and his brother. The Hendricks brothers are regular wheeler-dealers today and represent, among others, that player whose nickname rhymes with "Sprocket." Roger Clemens was still making a name for himself when this interview was completed, and it's funny to read about Clemens as an up-and comer.

The best accolade I can give this book is one that I regularly use when discussing baseball reading with fans and friends. That is, this is one of those baseball books I own that constantly gets pulled off the shelf for re-reading every couple of months or so. It's easy to read, fun, and I guarantee that each time you put it down you'll ask yourself the same thing I always do. "How do I get a job like that?"

Baseball Lives may be available for purchase on the web at one of these sites.

--Birdbrain, March 10, 1999