Loathed It: The Boys of Summer

Abstract

Loathed It: The Boys of Summer Gary Gershman (bio) When I began this piece, I conducted a very unscientific poll of friends on what they thought of the iconic book, The Boys of Summer; some were baseball fans, some were not. Visiting California I talked to a handful of people, especially if they were Dodgers fans. At a friend’s house, I mentioned that I had to write an article on the book. He laughed and said it was around the house somewhere, and he would be happy to give me his copy. When I asked Brandon what he thought of the book, he described it as a “shelf turd.” It sat there collecting dust, not really wanted but not getting rid of it. He’d had the book since the eighth grade. He liked its idea but found it incredibly dull— a lot of exposition about nothing. So there it sat, unread except for a few pages and rejected. Many other sources felt differently and noted the greatness of “The Boys” and its iconic place in the world of baseball books. An Esquire article noted that baseball provided the source material for more good books than any other American team sport. It called baseball the “sports catnip for writers: a game on contemplation and strategy which lends itself beautifully to numbers and analysis as well as poetry.”1 The feeling was The Boys of Summer encapsulated this, and the magazine placed the book in its inner circle of outstanding baseball books. The Sporting News ranked the book #8 on its baseball book list and commented that Kahn’s strength in the book was that he “had the literary chops to make his book more than just a jock hagiography . . .”2 They embraced the language that so exasperated and alienated me when I read the book. The description on the back of the book declares it is not just a baseball book but “a book about America, about fathers and sons, prejudice and courage, triumph and disaster, and told with warmth, humor, candor and love.”3 Maybe it was those things, but that did not make it an iconic baseball book. In a more recent comment from the fall of 2021, Steve Barnes, in honor of the book’s upcoming fiftieth anniversary, pronounced it the “finest, funniest works of sports literature ever published.”4 He noted that critics were divided because of Kahn’s fandom, which seemed to create an inherent bias, [End Page 11] and that some suggested it was “hopelessly saccharine.” He quickly dismissed those critics, commenting the title itself was memorable by how “it rolled from the tongue like a good bunt in its final inches. So idyllic, so evocative, so resonant was the title . . . that almost immediately it was applied by every fan to the players, the boys, of almost every team . . .”5 And Barnes paid homage to the original reviews, quoting Heywood Hale Brown of the New York Times and how the book recreated the ’50s when Baseball was king— “the center of love beyond the reach of intellect.”6 George Frazier’s Boston Globe review proclaimed that one “could not imagine a more important book, a better written book, a finer discussion of the 1950’s Dodgers than this one.”7 Both of those conclusions are highly debatable. Was I reading the same book? Moving to the less professional evaluations, I dove into average, everyday readers. It was amazing to see how often the reviews found the book a template for society, life, and just understanding the cosmos. One reader declared it was the finest baseball book ever written “in part because it is about more than baseball.” He noted it emphasized how baseball and the drama that ensues, game by game and throughout the season and through players’ careers, “all mirror the larger dramas of life.”8 The lessons one can learn from the great Dodger teams of the 1950s provide insight into how to become good at one’s job, how to work with a team and tell us a lot about how to master one’s craft, and how to conquer racial and socioeconomic differences. A regular theme that permeates these...