Title/Author:
“108 Stitches: Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns and the Darndest Characters from
My Time in the Game” by Ron Darling
Tags:
Baseball, professional, memoir, Mets, Athletics, Expos
Publish date:
April 2, 2019
Length:
272 pages
Rating:
5 of 5 stars (outstanding)
Review:
Ron Darling can be described as a baseball lifer, first as a player as
he enjoyed a moderate amount of success as a pitcher with the New York Mets,
Montreal Expos and Oakland Athletics. He is now a successful broadcaster for
the Mets and also for TBS on their national baseball telecasts. Having spent decades in the game, he would naturally
have many stories to tell and he does so in this, his third book.
At the beginning, Darling tells the reader that baseball has its own “six
degrees of separation” and that is how everything in the game is somehow
connected, but makes a better analogy by describing the makeup of a baseball
and its 108 stitches. Pull one story
out of his memory and he connects it with another, which is related to yet a
third one and soon one will see how everything in the game is connected, just
like the 108 red stitches keep a baseball together.
Darling also drops names of the people in his story in (almost) alphabetical
order and these people, mostly players who were teammates at one time or
other broadcasters, range from the obscure to the superstar. Most of the stories are about the Mets,
since that is the team with which he has spent the most amount of time, but
there are also good stories about his time with Oakland as well. He was only on the Expos for about two
weeks, so he doesn’t recall much about them, but is able to portray that
transitional period about as well as one can expect.
These anecdotes can range from hilarious to poignant. There is one chapter on crying in baseball
which was probably the best, as those were the touching stories and a reader
will almost tear up when reading some of those. The best of these for me was the one on a
young player in a late season game.
The young player had struck out in the second inning, killing a Mets
rally. The Mets got things going again
in the third, the young man’s turn came up again – and the manager pinch hits
for him. This left that player
demoralized and was sobbing on the bench – and his teammates felt sympathy
instead of the usual indifference. I
left the names out so as not to spoil the story, but this is an example of
the prose that Darling produces throughout the book.
The book ends with Darling’s take on the modern game, one which he
views from the broadcast booth and while he is critical of many of the
strategies of today’s analysis-driven game, he doesn’t come across as a
grumpy old man as many former players can do.
Instead, he offers illustrations of what makes today’s baseball
different from when he played. It is a
fitting conclusion to a book that starts slow, but picks up steam and ends up
being a fast, fun read for hard core baseball fans. Readers who are more casual fans may not
pick up on all the names as easily, but should still be able to enjoy reading
about some of Darling’s favorite people and stories.
I wish to thank St. Martin’s Press for providing a copy of the book via
NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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