Books : The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 - When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3570973
EAN num: 9780446401548
ISBN number: 0446401544
Label: Grand Central Publishing
Manufacturer: Grand Central Publishing
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: May 14, 2008
Publishing house: Grand Central Publishing
Sale Popularity Level: 19484
Studio: Grand Central Publishing
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Product Description:
There are baseball books and there are baseball books.
But for the baseball cognoscenti, there are just a few 'must-have' classics: BALL FOUR by Jim Bouton. THE LONG SEASON by Jim Brosnan. WILLIE'S TIME by Charles Einstein. And SEASONS IN HELL by Mike Shropshire, which was a hilarous first-person account of Mike's travails serving as a daily beat writer covering the hapless 1972 Texas Rangers.
Now, in The Last Real Season, Shropshire captures the essence of a different time and different place in baseball, when the average salary for major leaguers was only $27,600...when the ballplayers' drug of choice was alcohol, not steroids...when major leaguers sported tight doubleknit uniforms over their long-hair and Afros...and on July 28th, 1975, the day that famed Detroit resident Jimmy Hoffa went missing, the Detroit Tigers started a losing streak of 19 games in a row. On the day that the Tigers blew a 4-run lead in the bottom of the ninth, Shropshire recalls: 'I drank three bottles of Stroh's beer in less than a minute and wrote that 'Jimmy Hoffa will show up in the left field stands with Amelia Earhart as his date before the Tigers will win another game.''
And so it goes. Filled with just the kind of wonderful baseball stories that real fans crave, this is the funniest baseball book of the year.
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Rated by buyers 
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very fun and quick read. almost as good as season's in hell. can't wait for his subsequent book!
Rated by buyers 
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Today in major league baseball the use of steroids is rampant, while the average salary of even a journeyman ballplayer is half a million dollars. This has not always been the case. As recently as 1975, before the advent of free agency, the average professional baseball player's salary in the majors was $27,600. Except for a handful of superstars, baseball players had other jobs or at least played in Latin America in the off-season to make ends meet.
Mike Shropshire, a former Fort Worth Star-Telegram sports writer, recounts the highlights of the 1975 season in his personal journal as he follows the trials and tribulations of the Texas Rangers and their American League opponents.
Shropshire writes in a lighthearted gonzo style, where his antics are as much of the story as the events and the people he is covering. This cynical offhanded approach is incorporated with a tendency toward exaggeration, which is the want of many a sportswriter. What is clear is that players of that day and the journalists who covered them, drank to excess, smoked or chewed tobacco incessantly, and chased women with abandon. It would also appear that at least in the recent past, baseball was rife with more than their fair share of characters.
Shropshire's chronicle is not for the faint of heart, the politically correct or the prudish. But if you long for the day when booze was the drug of choice, and the ranks of baseball consisted of men like Ferguson Jenkins, Sparky Anderson, Reggie Jackson, Charlie Finley, and the irrepressible and mercurial Billy Martin - this may be the book for you.
Armchair Interviews agrees.
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