Bunts

Bunts
by George Will
Scribner, 1998

OK, I admit it. I've been spoiled over the last year and a half. On a daily basis I have a chance to converse with some of the best and most literate baseball fans on the net--my fellow members of the Dickie Thon Fan Club. And the whole time I was reading Bunts, all I could think was, "I read ten posts a day by the DTFC that are as good as this stuff."

Bunts is a collection of twenty five years worth of baseball-related columns by noted conservative George Will, who authored the 1988 baseball bestseller Men at Work. Unlike the long individual essays in Men at Work, most of the pieces in Bunts are very short, less than 500 words long.

Will's main business is writing about politics, but he has had a lifelong love of baseball. So for the past quarter-century, he would every six months or so put aside his political views and use his daily syndicated newspaper editoral to talk about baseball. Because he only wrote these baseball articles once every three or four months a year at most, Will had a lot of time between each one and has a tendency to repeat some of his favorite facts. This gets very annoying in the course of reading all the columns together in Bunts. I lost track of the number of times over the last twenty five years that Will has mentioned that the Cubs have had a losing record for so long that they could go undefeated for three seasons and they would still have a below .500 mark for their franchise history. While this is a neat little bit of trivia the first time you read it, by the time you're halfway thru with Bunts and you've read it in at least 10 different articles, you just want to shake Will by his bowtie and say, "Enough already, George, find a new fun fact to drill into our heads."

My big complaint with the book is not that it's a bad read, because it's not at times. A few of the pieces in it, notably an article on broadcaster Jon Miller that was specially written for the book, are exceptionally well done, and his nostalgic look back at his childhood rooting for the horrid 1950s Cubs is also very entertaining. But the majority of the columns simply have not aged well. As I said they are short pieces, and Will is just not able to really give enough thought or effort into some of the more complex baseball issues that he wants to deal with. The result is lots of fluff pieces on subjects like the greatness of Jackie Robinson or the Pete Rose gambling affair. Will could probably write a great long essay on these subjects, but with his limited newspaper column space, many of these columns come across in retrospect as being pointless to reread. Why should I read something about Jackie Robinson by Will where he just barely touches the tip of the iceberg when there are a number of great books on Robinson which can give me a complete view of the man and his life's work?

So that's the shortcoming of Bunts in my mind. While the individual columns may have been worth reading at the time they were written, I simply see no use for revisiting most of them now twenty five years later. You might want to check this one out of the library and just skip thru it and read individual columns that look appealing but don't waste your time sitting thru the whole thing. You will have gained little or nothing from the experience.

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

--JingleBob, August 14, 1999