| Description: |
|
Product Description
In Zim, one of baseball’s most eccentric characters and storytellers chronicles his life in the sport, from playing high school ball in Cincinnati to his current role as bench coach for the New York Yankees. Don Zimmer’s career has crossed paths with the game’s most memorable people and events, and Zim includes them all, from Babe Ruth, who lauded Zim’s team a year before he died, to the Brooklyn Dodgers, who drafted him as a potential heir to shortstop Pee Wee Reese, to Casey Stengel, who Zimmer played for as one of the original New York Mets. Accounts of his tragedies — two life-threatening beanings — and triumphs — managing the San Diego Padres, Boston Red Sox, Texas Rangers, and Chicago Cubs — give a panoramic history of both the man and the sport.
Amazon.com Review
For more than half a century, Don Zimmer, baseball's beloved gerbil, has been the Zelig of the national pastime, the character in the corner of so many interesting pictures. He may have been only--as he likes to remind us throughout Zim: A Baseball Life--a .235 hitter, but he was a .235 hitter who played with Jackie Robinson on the only Brooklyn team to win a World Series. A year later, he was there, on the bench, when Don Larsen threw his perfect game. More than just an original Met, Zim was the first player ever photographed in a Mets uniform. As the Red Sox third-base coach in 1975, it was Zim who waved Carlton Fisk home in the bottom of the 12th to end the greatest World Series game ever played. Three years later, it was Zim, now the Sox manager, who watched in despair as Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent sealed one of the greatest late-season collapses in the annals of the game when Dent's pennant-winning homer settled into the net atop the Green Monster. Of course, it was Zim who led the Cubs, of all teams, to a rare postseason appearance, and, approaching 70 at the turn of the millennium, it was Zim who added four championship rings to his collection as Joe Torre's bench coach in the Bronx.
Bridging the gap between the game's early years of integration and the advent of the $200-million-plus contract, Zim hasn't just witnessed the history of the second half of 20th-century baseball, he's embodied it, and he remembers it with a genial charm and disarming honesty that turns Zim into one of the more spirited and beguiling baseball memoirs to step up in some time. "I've had a hell of a life," he admits with an amazed cheerfulness that's evident on every page. --Jeff Silverman
|
