This Month
Michael Street Reviews Tim Kurkjian's
Is This A Great Game or What?
Thursday May 15, 2007 12:00pm
If you've ever watched ESPN's Baseball Tonight (and let's face it, who among us hasn't?) you've also seen Tim Kurkjian, the nebbishy looking Armenian guy who delivers earnest assessments of current baseball players. He looks intelligent, unremarkable, and smiles with the glee of an eight-year-old at an all-you-can-ride amusement park.
Small wonder. Mentored by The Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy and the immortal Peter Gammons, Kurkjian has covered baseball for the past twenty-five years, and still has that childish love for the game that has driven him to endure the daily grind of a baseball writer for so long. Although he comes from athletic stock-his baseball-playing mother is the best of the bunch-and played baseball as a kid, Kurkjian realized quickly that he'd never make a profession of it, but he never let go of the baseball. Or more like, it never let go of him.
He began writing for the baleful Texas Rangers of the eighties, moved to the halfway-decent Orioles, and then to Sports Illustrated, but now he resides as one of several go-to guys in ESPN's hallmark baseball show. Because of his obvious intelligence, friendliness, and an unfailing honesty and trustworthiness (often exploited by prankish baseball players), he has succeeded, collecting a host of great anecdotes along the way. Is This A Great Game or What? is his attempt to collect some of these stories and memories between two covers. It's an expression of his love for the game and its players, for the manifold intricacies and contradictions of both, the unexpected moments and highlights, and the warm fuzzies that have kept him slogging away at an underpaid, underappreciated, largely ignored profession.
For those of us not fortunate enough to be stringers for a big-league club, it's hard to imagine how such a profession could be anything but a dream come true. But, as Kurkjian points out, it isn't easy to spend twelve hours every day around the game and its players who, in their best moods, are merely tolerant of him, only to complete an article in a thirty-minute frenzy once the game is complete, followed by long car or plane rides to the team's next destination. Multiply that times one hundred and sixty-two, tack on a possible postseason stint and spring training, and you begin to see that being a full-time baseball writer is more time- and life-consuming than any job outside of a Chinese toy factory. Only someone with his abiding love for the game could put in those long hours amid prickly players tired of answering the same questions night after night, all without going insane or broke.
The book begins a bit slowly, attempting to explain this masochistic love with a chapter about Kurkjian's history, followed by one that explains what makes baseball such a great game. The first chapter is arguably necessary as biography, but the second becomes quickly repetitious, in the way that any sermon preaching to the choir would. If we're reading this book, we likely love the game at least enough not to need convincing of its greatness. In another sense, it's a bit like reading a love letter to someone we also adore; it might be necessary to the writer, but it's hardly something we want to read. We agree with it and are, perhaps, a bit jealous of the writer's better proximity to the object of our mutual desire.
Once these preambles are past, however, Kurkjian gets to the meat of the book, and the real enjoyment begins. Loosely structured into topical chapters about the competitiveness, obsessiveness, odd quirks of the American pastime, and the amazing abilities of its players, the book is crammed with fun stories and interesting tidbits, so much so that we don't really notice the loose connectivity among them. Some of the ground is well-traveled, like the silly things players can say about themselves, each other, or the game, or the obsessiveness of baseball statisticians. (Kurkjian himself has a seventeen-year scrapbook of every box score from every game in major-league baseball, which he cuts out and hand-pastes himself each morning). These are interesting and entertaining, and don't feel like retreads of previous books because of Kurkjian's ability to make us feel involved and interested. Like a quick-pitching moundman, he skillfully repeats his delivery each time, with enough pace and variation that any occasional miss is quickly followed by so many superior shots at the bullseye that one quickly forgets about the earlier flub.
Kurkjian also covers some unfamiliar territory, such as the inside jokes that pepper Baseball Tonight, a defense of the embattled MLB commish Bud Selig, or the beleaguered life of a baseball scout, a job thats even more anonymous and less thankless than a baseball writer's. Probably the best part is when Kurkjian talks about a rarely discussed subject: the fear that baseball players must overcome, repeatedly facing a deadly or injurious missile every night. Contrary to what your Little League coach tells you, getting hit by a baseball hurts, and if it hits you in the face, you can utterly lose the nerve to face another fastballing big-leaguer (if not lose much more, including eyesight and health). He passionately advocates for facial protection in Little League, as well as teaching the youngsters how to properly react to a too-close pitch, by turning your back (not your face) towards the pitcher.
The other chapters cover similarly notable subjects, such as the one about players whose ambidexterity is not only strange (Mark Mulder does everything above his waist left-handed, and everything below his waist right-handed) but also somehow essential in a game that requires equal coordination of both hands when fielding or batting. Kurkjian talks in another chapter about signs, a strategy that's often seen, but very rarely interpreted correctly by even the most attentive fan. He devotes an entire chapter to his personal mysteries and pet peeves of the game, such as the reason that pitchers hit the guy after the one who just hit a homer off him, why bunting in a no-hitter shouldn't be considered bush-league, or (my favorite) why there are no left-handed catchers in the majors (see my message board thread for more on this).
Those who are familiar with Kurkjian from ESPN will recognize other familiar themes, like his assertion (and in these pages, frequent defense) of the notion that baseball is the supreme skill sport. Baseball Tonight fans will also know him from his affection for hard-working players who love the game as much as he does and who play the game the way it's meant to be played. Kurkjian combines the knowledge of a lifetime devotee of the game with the writerly skill of one long used to crafting America's greatest game into words. What he lacks in plotting, he makes up for in juicy tidbits and memorable stories, and one can only hope that he has not exhausted his mental mine of such nuggets, and that there are future books with more of his observations and wisdom about this game that we all agree is the finest game on earth.
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