Book Review: The Art of Being a Baseball Fan
The Art of Being a Baseball Fan. Brian R. Johnston. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, February 1, 2016, Trade Paperback and Kindle, 218 pages.
Reviewed by Dennis Hetzel.
The back cover of Brian Johnston’s The Art of Being a Baseball Fan has this sentence: “I’m just an average guy who enjoys watching the game. And I wrote this with all you fans in mind.”
You can think of the book this way: You enter a bar. You find Johnston sitting on the next stool. It only takes a few minutes of conversation before you realize you have something in common. Like you, he’s a diehard Chicago Cubs fan who also has done a lot of thinking about both his passion and the state of major league baseball today. You quickly realize he knows even more about the Cubs than you do. It’s a pleasant conversation, mainly about the Cubs with bits and pieces about the rest of your lives. After an hour or two, it’s time to bid farewell, and you get on with life.
The Art of Being a Baseball Fan is the printed-word equivalent of a pleasant bar conversation with a knowledgeable, thoughtful guy you might meet in the neighborhood pub or perhaps on the sidelines at your kid’s soccer game.
That is both the strength and limitation of this book, which chronicles the ups and downs of being a Cubs fan. It includes flashbacks to decades past and a lengthy, week-by-week recap of the 2015 season as the author experienced it. Most will recall that in 2015 the Cubs made fast progress to the greatness that would come their way very soon, but they fell short in the National League Championship Series against the New York Mets.
If you are someone who loves baseball and can’t get enough of the Cubs – and there are plenty of those in our midst these days – this book offers rewards, particularly if you are new to rooting for the Cubs or a younger fan. Johnston also writes with clarity and smoothness. He has done his research and checked his facts. It’s an easy read.
However, the book lacks original reporting and is thin on deeper insights. A comment such as “I was sad that Ron Santo passed away” doesn’t add much to our understanding of either the author or the meaning of Santo’s life. Scenes could be more vivid; emotions could be described and shown instead of stated. As an extended monologue, the book also lacks the stuff of the best nonfiction: revealing interviews with primary sources or research that brings topics and people to life with insights we haven’t read or heard before. And those subjects are interesting to fans. Johnston touches on subjects such as the motives of baseball’s leaders, the impact of technology on the game, the joy of spring training and how money and free agency have changed baseball.
That might not be the point. Ultimately, Johnston’s book is about him, and how being a fan has become such a key part of his personality and life. We observe his life in its routines, such as what innings of a game he watched on television versus which ones he followed on his phone. The rest of his life as a husband and father with other responsibilities we see in brief glimpses and snapshots.
The author also has the misfortune of having completed the book before the just-ended championship season. It’s no fault of his, but it feels like a letdown for the book to end in 2015. It might be worth the time to add an epilogue for the 2016 season.
As a lifelong Cubs fan myself – and one who is several decades older – I enjoyed revisiting names of forgotten Cubs and recalling some of my own memories of seasons past, particularly the 1969 team that collapsed in the fall of my senior year in high school. Johnston helps new fans understand the passion, loyalty, and frustration of the generation or two ahead of them.
Any Cub fan will find similar, memorable nuggets in this book. For an “average guy,” Johnston has made a good start toward a bigger, better book about the ongoing journey for those of us who let the Chicago Cubs into our lives.