The Line Up: Ten Books that Changed Baseball by Paul Aron (review)

Reviewed by: The Line Up: Ten Books that Changed Baseball by Paul Aron Jorge Iber Paul Aron. The Line Up: Ten Books that Changed Baseball. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2022. 237 pp. Paperback, $29.95. Paul Aron starts off his monograph with a pretty substantial claim: "Here are ten books that changed America" (1). He then proceeds to back up this admittedly audacious statement by detailing the "influence" of the selected individual works and how they helped reshaped the American social landscape. All ten works are indeed important, and Aron then proceeds to provide readers with what can be called a "runners up" listing of fifty works that could have been included in a much longer tome. Does this reviewer agree with every single book listed in the top ten and the "nearly as important" further fifty? No, but that is not really the point of this work. Aron's proposal was to select ten works on baseball that not only impacted the game but also affected the broader American society. In this regard, he is very successful in his analysis, though as he was rounding third and heading for home (in other words, on the last two books—both on Pete Rose), he stumbles halfway toward home plate, recovers, and then finishes off with a very ugly face plant with at least half of his potential readers. In other words, he makes his case for the significance of the books on the Reds' legend, but it might have been best if he had been more balanced in his analysis. The ten works selected should be relatively familiar to persons interested [End Page 133] in the history of the sport. Among these are books by A. G. Spalding, Ring Lardner, Satchel Paige, Bernard Malamud, Jim Bouton, Roger Khan, Bill James, and Glen Waggoner. The author then proceeds to provide a brief summary of each work and analyzes the impact of each upon the sport and the broader society. With these eight works Aron hits the mark. For example, the essay on Pitchin, Man: Satchel Paige's Own Story, presents an effective argument concerning the seriousness of this legendary pitcher's achievements, as well as how he dealt with Jim Crow. Given that the publication date of this work was 1948, it is hard to criticize Paige for his deflection of a direct challenge to the racism so then prevalent. Aron rightly then notes how a subsequent work by Paige was "much blunter than the first about racism" (46). Likewise, Aron is spot on with his analysis concerning the importance and impact of Jim Bouton's Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues. Here, the work not only shocked MLB and its fans regarding "what really goes on" in locker rooms (and team hotels), but the reaction to the work clearly demonstrated "the nation's ideological split in the 1960s" (70). Certainly, the impact of the work went well beyond what happened on the diamond and the offices of MLB brass and reached into the very consciousness of the nation making later works, such as Out of Their League by Dave Meggysey and Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big by Jose Canseco (which, by the way, is one of the books in the fifty "runners up" list at the end of the work) much more acceptable to the broader reading public. Our "heroes" were (and are) not as squeaky clean as the folks in the "gee whiz" era of sports writing had informed us. Bouton's work certainly made those of us who love not only baseball, but all sports, realize that the foibles present in many of our lives are present in the existence of those who wear MLB jerseys. So far, so good, but now here comes the (partial) face plant. Aron's discussion of the two works (by Rose with Roger Khan and the second with Rick Hill) on Pete Rose are on point. Yes, Rose is a liar, and so is Donald Trump. Both appealed to their bases—blue collar workers. However, why then go on to pontificate that only Trump has "mastered the art...