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Away Games: The Life and Times of a Latin Ballplayer
A moving, sometimes painful story of baseball and its role in the hopes and dreams of young Latino boys is told through the experiences in the Major Leagues of Miguel Tejada, who ultimately found success as the star shortstop for the Oakland A's. 25,000 first printing.
- GenresBaseballSportsNonfiction
272 pages, Hardcover
First published April 6, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 28, 2010
My review published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999:
AWAY GAMES
The Life and Times of a Latin Ball Player By Marcos Breton and Jose Luis Villegas Simon & Schuster; 272 pages; $23
Miguel Tejada was not the only one who scored big when the Oakland A's installed him as their starting shortstop last year, completing a remarkable journey that started in the Bani barrio of Los Barrancones in the Dominican Republic.
The authors of this fine study, Sacramento Bee staffers Marcos Breton (writer) and Jose Luis Villegas (photographer), also came out looking great. They had been following Tejada for years, eager to tell the story of one among the many Latin American players changing the face of baseball, and they hit the jackpot with Tejada.
The resulting work is important. Too often, books tracing the growing Latin American flavor of major-league baseball have either been academic studies or books such as John Krich's playfully intelligent ``El Beisbol,'' as much a travelogue as anything.
A void was left for books that can draw on deep familiarity, and this the authors do, especially when they offer vivid descriptions of Tejada at home in the Dominican Republic. One especially evocative scene follows Tejada and a band of his followers on a night out:
``There came a song he liked, and Miguel danced with a gorgeous, dark-skinned woman with full lips and smooth, bare legs -- a radiant girl wearing an alluring blouse cut low to reveal a supple, full bosom . . .,'' they write.
``The people of the Caribbean seem to wear their perspiration like clothing and this girl was stunning in her sweat, which, mixed with perfume, drew Miguel in like a magnet. The song they danced to was about leaving: leaving a lover, leaving the island, losing one's self.''
Such writing pulls the reader into Tejada's world and helps us identify with him as he works his way up from being just another skinny kid playing ball on a rock- strewn field. But the book runs into trouble when the authors try too hard for rich description. At times it can choke the reader with journalism-school writing larded up with description designed to tell more about the writer than the subject.
Elsewhere, the authors fritter away credibility like an infielder booting an easy ground ball. To make the point that many of the players who in America turn shy and withdrawn are actually talkative and clever back home in the Dominican Republic, the authors write: ``You would never know it to see them in an American clubhouse, but these boys were uproariously witty, with razor sharp tongues and keen intellects.''
Einstein had a keen intellect. Susan Sontag has a keen intellect. Anyone who has been around ballplayers year in and year out, as I was, covering the Oakland A's for this paper for more than four years, will tell you that it takes a helium-to-the-brain style of hyperbole to describe any but the very rare athlete as any kind of intellect, let alone keen.
Problems like this crop up often enough to point to another weakness of the book: its narrow frame of reference. It rightly laments the exploitation of young Latin American ballplayers, many of them signed and pulled from the island, then cast off as rejects. One of the best chapters takes a hard look at all the former Dominican ballplayers in New York doing menial work and slowly killing off their pathetic dreams. It closes with a look at two former prospects talking of their dead hopes.
``Let's get out of here,'' one says to the other. ``I'm tired of talking about this.''
``The two men looked at each other for a moment and (Victor) Martinez started his car. As the rain fell harder on New York, the George Washington Bridge cast a beautiful reflection on the Hudson River.
``In an instant, Martinez's cab was gone. They were heading nowhere in particular.'' But as nice as this scene is, it doesn't compensate for the authors' too often making it sound as if Dominican ballplayers in this country were the only immigrants ever to be misunderstood, to be treated as clowns or exploited. The many Russians making their way into the National Hockey League in recent years would gladly have traded in the special hatred reserved for a Cold War enemy for simple scorn and ridicule.
Still, this is a shortcoming that's easy to forgive, given the book's passionate study of the history of Latin Americans in the game. We are told, for example, about a man named Emilio Sabourin, who helped found Cuba's national professional league in 1878 and was later arrested for using gate receipts to help Jose Marti's independence movement.
No fan of the game will fail to appreciate the rich tapestry of information provided, even if at times the effort to turn the game into a symbol of imperialist oppression rings hollow. In the end, the book is Tejada's story, one that anyone can enjoy. He was not the best of the Dominican prospects who gathered every day in his hometown to be drilled in the game. After his mother died and his father left town, he was almost an orphan.
Yet he is the one in the big leagues now. The day he hit his first big-league home run, the authors were in a position to give the event a perspective lost in most newspaper accounts. ``As he neared home, he pulled out the eagle-shaped necklace he always wore and pressed it to his lips,'' they write. ``Pointing it skyward, he looked up as well -- a tribute to his mother.''
Former Chronicle sportswriter Steve Kettmann is co-author of ``Thinking Forward: The Igor Larionov Story.''
This article appeared on page RV - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...
AWAY GAMES
The Life and Times of a Latin Ball Player By Marcos Breton and Jose Luis Villegas Simon & Schuster; 272 pages; $23
Miguel Tejada was not the only one who scored big when the Oakland A's installed him as their starting shortstop last year, completing a remarkable journey that started in the Bani barrio of Los Barrancones in the Dominican Republic.
The authors of this fine study, Sacramento Bee staffers Marcos Breton (writer) and Jose Luis Villegas (photographer), also came out looking great. They had been following Tejada for years, eager to tell the story of one among the many Latin American players changing the face of baseball, and they hit the jackpot with Tejada.
The resulting work is important. Too often, books tracing the growing Latin American flavor of major-league baseball have either been academic studies or books such as John Krich's playfully intelligent ``El Beisbol,'' as much a travelogue as anything.
A void was left for books that can draw on deep familiarity, and this the authors do, especially when they offer vivid descriptions of Tejada at home in the Dominican Republic. One especially evocative scene follows Tejada and a band of his followers on a night out:
``There came a song he liked, and Miguel danced with a gorgeous, dark-skinned woman with full lips and smooth, bare legs -- a radiant girl wearing an alluring blouse cut low to reveal a supple, full bosom . . .,'' they write.
``The people of the Caribbean seem to wear their perspiration like clothing and this girl was stunning in her sweat, which, mixed with perfume, drew Miguel in like a magnet. The song they danced to was about leaving: leaving a lover, leaving the island, losing one's self.''
Such writing pulls the reader into Tejada's world and helps us identify with him as he works his way up from being just another skinny kid playing ball on a rock- strewn field. But the book runs into trouble when the authors try too hard for rich description. At times it can choke the reader with journalism-school writing larded up with description designed to tell more about the writer than the subject.
Elsewhere, the authors fritter away credibility like an infielder booting an easy ground ball. To make the point that many of the players who in America turn shy and withdrawn are actually talkative and clever back home in the Dominican Republic, the authors write: ``You would never know it to see them in an American clubhouse, but these boys were uproariously witty, with razor sharp tongues and keen intellects.''
Einstein had a keen intellect. Susan Sontag has a keen intellect. Anyone who has been around ballplayers year in and year out, as I was, covering the Oakland A's for this paper for more than four years, will tell you that it takes a helium-to-the-brain style of hyperbole to describe any but the very rare athlete as any kind of intellect, let alone keen.
Problems like this crop up often enough to point to another weakness of the book: its narrow frame of reference. It rightly laments the exploitation of young Latin American ballplayers, many of them signed and pulled from the island, then cast off as rejects. One of the best chapters takes a hard look at all the former Dominican ballplayers in New York doing menial work and slowly killing off their pathetic dreams. It closes with a look at two former prospects talking of their dead hopes.
``Let's get out of here,'' one says to the other. ``I'm tired of talking about this.''
``The two men looked at each other for a moment and (Victor) Martinez started his car. As the rain fell harder on New York, the George Washington Bridge cast a beautiful reflection on the Hudson River.
``In an instant, Martinez's cab was gone. They were heading nowhere in particular.'' But as nice as this scene is, it doesn't compensate for the authors' too often making it sound as if Dominican ballplayers in this country were the only immigrants ever to be misunderstood, to be treated as clowns or exploited. The many Russians making their way into the National Hockey League in recent years would gladly have traded in the special hatred reserved for a Cold War enemy for simple scorn and ridicule.
Still, this is a shortcoming that's easy to forgive, given the book's passionate study of the history of Latin Americans in the game. We are told, for example, about a man named Emilio Sabourin, who helped found Cuba's national professional league in 1878 and was later arrested for using gate receipts to help Jose Marti's independence movement.
No fan of the game will fail to appreciate the rich tapestry of information provided, even if at times the effort to turn the game into a symbol of imperialist oppression rings hollow. In the end, the book is Tejada's story, one that anyone can enjoy. He was not the best of the Dominican prospects who gathered every day in his hometown to be drilled in the game. After his mother died and his father left town, he was almost an orphan.
Yet he is the one in the big leagues now. The day he hit his first big-league home run, the authors were in a position to give the event a perspective lost in most newspaper accounts. ``As he neared home, he pulled out the eagle-shaped necklace he always wore and pressed it to his lips,'' they write. ``Pointing it skyward, he looked up as well -- a tribute to his mother.''
Former Chronicle sportswriter Steve Kettmann is co-author of ``Thinking Forward: The Igor Larionov Story.''
This article appeared on page RV - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...
October 15, 2007
I love Miguel Tejada. The writing is not so great in this book. But it's worth it if you want a glimpse into baseball from the perspective of the up and coming experience of someone from the Dominican Republic and trying to break through into the American sport.
August 1, 2018
The story of Miguel Tejada, then a prominent short stop for the A's rise from poverty in the Dominican Republic to the major leagues. The story is bracing and makes clear Tejada is one f the few lucky ones. I enjoyed it.
October 8, 2013
An eye-opening look into the hopes and dreams of some of Major League Baseball's future stars.
April 18, 2015
Interesting stuff on the difference with signing Latin/Dominican players vs. American ones..but otherwise pretty much meh.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews