A Season in the Sun

by Roger Kahn

In 1976 Roger Kahn spent an entire baseball season, from spring training through the World Series, with players of every stripe and competence. The result is this book, in which Kahn reports on a small college team’s successes and hopes, a young New England ball club, a failing major league franchise, and a group of heroes on the national stage.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction

199 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1978

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Roger Kahn was best known for The Boys of Summer, about the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Reviews

[Jay French]

This short book of vignettes from the 1976 baseball season starts off strong. The intro was like a magic trick - you think he's talking about one thing then you realize it's something else. Well done. And there are flashes of brilliance in the comedy reported throughout the book. But it hangs together rather loosely, like this was really a series of those "human interest stories" about ball players ranging from Little Leaguers to retired Negro League all stars to Stan Musial, Johnny Bench, and Bill Veeck. Shades of Roone Arledge - we get a lot of context around the game, but this book doesn't actually get into the game itself. There are a few stories about the owners in baseball at the time, refreshingly George Steinbrenner is absent. Overall, there are moments of brilliance in the writing, but the concept of studying the entire baseball world in a season doesn't hold together well. Realize that this is not so much about the game, but about the people who played the game -- there is very little game description in this book. For example, the Johnny Bench section is mostly about Bench's "posse" of friends from outside of baseball and about Bench's divorce and his visits to parties and a golf tournament, and how he treats people, including the author. It's a refreshing, unexpected take on a baseball book that I think could have benefited from either more focus or more breadth.

[Brina]

It’s the last week of March and baseball is on the brain. My apologies to women’s history month but once the calendar approaches April, the only thing I can think of is baseball. I can feel it everywhere between the buds on the trees and kids everywhere excited that opening day is this week. The winter doldrums, gone. Opening day should be a national holiday and in my book it already is. I’m sure I’ll read plenty of other quality women authors this year, as my stats over the years have averaged around 50-50 unless I go on a baseball reading binge as I’m apt to do, and then the stats shift slightly. It is tricky for me who tries to find women authors and marry that with my love of baseball history. Sadly until a good writer steps up and writes a manuscript about a micro history or biography, baseball writing remains largely a male dominated profession. I am positive I am not the only woman out there obsessed with baseball, so hopefully one day soon a woman writes a baseball history book that is not limited to a memoir about growing up a sports fan. My sincere apologies to Doris Kearns Godwin’s Wait Til Next Year. She is also unique and the person I wanted to be when I grew up. Regardless, writing sports history books is yet another opportunity for us to crack the glass ceiling.

To start off I selected a book written by renown baseball writer Roger Kahn. Kahn was one of a kind and is best known for his opus The Boys of Summer, of which I have read and savored multiple times. Twenty years have passed since Kahn spent his summer covering the Brooklyn Dodgers. They have long since moved to California and won multiple championships there. Following stints writing for New York papers and Sports Illustrated, Kahn shifted to books. It is mid winter of 1975 and Kahn like I feel after Cubs convention knows that baseball is on the horizon. He decides to spend the season transversing the country in search of baseball stories: retired players, little league, the minors, college, and the majors, sometimes finding multiple angles in one story. At the time Kahn was divorced from his first wife and not yet married to his second so he had all the time in the world to watch and cover baseball for a glorified season in the sun.

Kahn first encounters retired Dodgers slugger Wally Moon as head coach of an NAIA college team in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. The town is a sleepy hamlet and little did any of us know at the time that years later it would be home to the Walmart conglomerate. I am glad Kahn visited Moon and his team when he did. These young men played for the pure joy of playing. Only two players from this team would even reach the minor leagues, but ability did not deter them from being college athletes and playing for the love of the game. Contrast that with Kahn’s visits to major league stadiums in Los Angeles and Houston, superstars and moneymakers ruled the day. Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley even complained about having a grounds crew member on hand to irrigate the grass because he had already installed a sprinkler system to do the same. Any way to make or save a few bucks. And yet nearly fifty years ago even the superstars played because they loved the game. Take power hitter Steve Yeager who noted that he loved the Friday night crowds best because they were restless from a week at work and challenged the team to do their best. Yeager and his teammates were up for the challenge, and they still studied to make themselves major league hitters. Salaries were higher than they once year but not exorbitant so players for the most part played because they loved baseball, not something Kahn would find if he were alive and interviewing major league players today.

Kahn was originally asked by his editors to write his piece as a series of essays for Sports Illustrated but he realized that that was asking too much and set off to write a book. Along the way he tutored his younger son about the nuances of hitting and visited Bill Veeck at his Maryland family home. Veeck was always a character and here Kahn found him in his second stint as owner of the White Sox. At the time the White Sox were atrocious (ha) but Veeck spiced things up with his gimmicks including a bicentennial celebration and not written about here demolition derby night. He even had his players wear shorts on certain occasions to pay homage to Chicago’s softball leagues (also not here). Ideally Veeck wanted to field a winner but it didn’t happen for him, although Kahn and his family were guests at Veeck’s home and even went swimming together, something I doubt would happen today. I also enjoyed reading about Kahn’s relationship with Reds slugger Johnny Bench and how the catcher allowed divorce proceedings to affect his play for an entire season, and then blame poor play on a shoulder injury. Bench made up for a poor year by dominating a Big Red Machine World Series win so all was forgotten at the time. The chapters on Bench and Veeck made this entire book; I would have read either as an individual essay or article.

There aren’t writers like Roger Kahn today. Both he and Roger Angell have passed on in the last few years and writers today are not the same breed. When Kahn covered a team he flew on their plane and hobnobbed with the players and owners. He knew everything about everyone and forged lifelong relationships with many of the men he covered. If he needed a story about the minors or a retiree for this book, he would ask one of his many friends or contacts for a tip. Besides the bygone era, Kahn could write, merging baseball history and personal narrative. I could read his unique cadence everyday of a baseball season and not get tired of it. Now with another season in the sun about to embark, I have a full lineup of new and old baseball books on deck. Somehow I tend to favor the old as the writers of days gone by wrote with a unique lens on the game.

⚾️ 4.5 stars ⚾️

[Mark Phillips]

I enjoy reading good baseball books. Roger Kahn wrote one of the best baseball books of all time, The Boys of Summer. So when I was looking at his bibliography, I was interested in A Season In The Sun. It was a quick read. Kahn traveled the baseball landscape of USA and beyond for the entire year of 1976.

He started with Wally Moon coaching NAIA baseball in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and finished with Johnny Bench and the Reds beating an overmatched Yankees club. In between were short chapters of former players and trips to Puerto Rico and Pitsfield, Massachusetts.

It was a good book, but nothing stood out, really. I think it was a pot boiler for Roger Kahn, but it was worth a read simply because of how quickly the book can be read.

[Tom Gase]

Parts of this book was interesting, as I liked the parts on the Astrodome, Bill Veeck and Stan Musial, but a lot of this was kind of boring. Roger Kahn has written some great books such a Boys of Summer, October Men and The Era, but this one seemed like he was trying too much to pull off what John Steinbeck did with Travels with Charley. It doesn't really work here as it is planned and not a drive through American and meeting people randomly. I'd start with Kahn's other books before reading this. A very quick read, however , at around 175 pages.

[SheMac]

Like everything Kahn did, great!

[Brett Wood]

Up there in quality with Boys of Summer to which I awarded 5 stars as I am a Dodgers fan.

[Fred]

This is a short chronicle of Kahn's travels during the 1976 baseball season. The most interesting thing about it is that it was written in 1976. It is not nostalgia and, of course, Kahn has no idea what will happen in the future. It is both the strength and the weakness of the book. It is amazing to hear 46 year old Sparky Anderson, manager of the Big Red Machine, say his "Three Hall of Famers" get different treatment because they have earned it. He mean by this Bench, Morgan and Rose. It is interesting to hear minor league managers fear that they will get pushed out of the game or that they think the game should "speed up." Kahn wonders what "free-agency" will do in the future, or if the Dodgers will ever get past the Reds juggernaut. It is also amazing to read about the small crowds at various games back then. The Braves, who were not very good and wouldn't be for another 15 years, had a give-away for the first 7,700 fans. But only 3300 showed up. The best chapter is the one of Johnny Bench, a superstar at the top of his game. He says almost nothing of the bicentennial celebration that enveloped all of America that year -- maybe at the time it was no big deal, but that is not how I remember it. Oh and one more thing: he mentions that Dodger announcer Vin Scully was slowing down, only announcing home games because he had been doing it so long -- 40 years ago!

[Pablo]

Kahn is my favorite baseball writer. He knows the game as well as anyone who's ever written about, and his knowledge, respect and passion come through in every piece he writes. I like the idea of writing about a single season as experienced at various levels of the game, from fields in Puerto Rico to tagging along with Johnny Bench during the 1976 World Series. Almost 40 years later it's easy to read the book and be nostalgic, but the book seems to carry a sense of nostalgia that was probably no less palpable when it was first released.

[Todd Weber]

I read this once when I was a kid when the book was fairly new, but wanted to re-read. Kahn's writing is terrific. He went on the road for a whole season and could have written about anything or anybody he wanted. His choices seemed a little off the wall, which makes it more interesting to me. Not the same old angles of a typical beat writer.

[Robert]

An excellent collection of profiles of people in baseball. I can't repeat the one on Stan Musial without getting choked up

[Kay]

Enjoyable book and very quick to read.

[K]

Easy and enjoyable baseball book. Good read for simple relaxation. Low rating due to some questionable facts. If you like baseball you will like this book.

[Matt Moran]

Lacking cohesion, below his normal standards.