Book Review: For the Love of Baseball

For the Love of Baseball: A Celebration of the Game That Connects Us All can only be described as one of the best baseball anthologies of all time.
Image credit: Skyhorse Publishing
Edited by Lee Gutkind and Andrew Blauner with a foreword provided by Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra, this book compiles essays about the game by numerous writers. This book updates the previously published Anatomy of Baseball (Sport in American Life) (Southern Methodist University Press, 2008) and Great Baseball Stories: Ruminations and Nostalgic Reminiscences on Our National Pastime (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012). Contributors include writers such as 2014 Spink Award recipient Roger Angell, Kevin Barker, Frank Deford, George Plimpton, and Stefan Fatsis. This new edition now includes pieces written by A. Bartlett Giamatti, Gay Talese, Matthew McGough, and George Vecsey.

Rick Harsch provides a case study on umpiring while Frank Deford writes an ode to, what else, baseball caps.

Gutkind and Blauner, through the selections that they have picked out, have an intimate understanding on baseball’s lasting impact on the fans. With elegant, unsurpassed essays, readers will only indulge on their nostalgia for the love of the game.

Their their compilations, the editors have woven tight, varied, and lyrical interpretations of “the gorgeous minutiae of baseball” as Fatsis describes it.