10. Every Pitcher Tells a Story: Letters Gathered by a Devoted Baseball Fan by Seth Swirsky

Category: 50 Books

10. Every Pitcher Tells a Story: Letters Gathered by a Devoted Baseball Fan by Seth Swirsky

This is an older book published in 1999. Two things bothered me about this book.

1. In the intro the author says you don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy the book.

2. The whole time I was reading it (and it’s a short read) I was going crazy because the letters that the ballplayers write are handwritten (most of them were. only a few were typed out). Not a single player had good handwritting and the letters were really difficult to read. I even skipped a few of the letters because it looked like they had been written with an ancient dried up ink pen and THEN copied with the shittiest copy machine known to man. I visually impair my eyes trying to read some of these things, and at the very end of the book all of the letters have been transcribed and neatly typed up.

that mess on the floor? is my brain.

So, first of all, after reading this I’d say that yes, you do need to be a baseball fan to enjoy the book. And even then, I wouldn’t say you’d enjoy it. It’s a great idea, don’t get me wrong. It just kind of falls flat. I noticed that the author also wrote a book called Baseball Letters. So i’m guessing that he pulled a book out of those letters and then decided to do a follow up book and this time focusing on just pitching. And on paper, that sounds like a great idea. But the letters themselves aren’t that great. (Some of them are, but not many. Most seem to be all, “Yeah, I remember that game. Good game. Go Mets!” or something.

Then comes the frustration of not being able to read most of the letters THEN getting to the end where they’re all typed out. The typed out letters SHOULD have been on the same page as the handwritten one. It sucked SO HARD to get to the end and realize that there are all the letters easily read AND EASILY READ IN 15 MINUTES.

On a scale of one to Fail: pisspoor execution.

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