Watching Baseball: Discovering the Game within the Game
- Book Review,
by Jerry Remy
Review
From a Boston.com chat with author Jerry Remy:
I have been reading (and enjoying immensely) your book Watching Baseball. I think that there is a lot of potential for a show on NESN for it. You can either show vintage clips.... or clips from each previous week (any team) or previous season (so we can watch baseball in the off season) and pick plays that explain to us each facet of the game that you describe in the book. I have always been a baseball fan, but I can''t believe how much I''ve been missing from the game. Your book has helped me enjoy the game even more.
One other question, since you talk in your book a lot about defensive alignments...why can''t you convince NESN to put some cameras where we can see the alignments as they shift. If would help a lot, when you watch on TV, you''d swear that the players are always playing in the same spot.
Thanks, and keep up the good work. Congrats to you and all the other Red Sox greats. This one was for you as much as the fans!
Sandy Mascola, Bristol, Rhode Island
Book Description
The Boston Globe''s Number One bestseller is back, revised and updated for the 2005 season. Jerry Remy''s name and face are already known to millions of fans. Every night during the baseball season, 400,000 or more households tune in to listen to his broadcast of the Red Sox game. But fans learned to love him years ago, when he was traded to the Red Sox in 1978, earning a trip to the All-Star Game in his first year with the team; Remy hit .278, scored eighty-seven runs, and stole thirty bases.
Injured in 1984, Remy never played another game. In 1988, he began his work as an announcer, working color commentary for Red Sox broadcasts on NESN, which is a basic cable channel throughout New England and available by satellite across the country. He covers more than 150 games per season for NESN and broadcast television, plus regular assignments on the national Fox Game of the Week. But the best part of Jerry Remy is his easy style: listeners feel like they''re having a beer with a friend while they''re watching the game.
If spectators just follow the ball, they are missing much of the game. Baseball is a lot more complex than that. Everyone talks about second-guessing the manager; and there''s a lot of fun in that for everyone except the manager. Those opinions can be heard all day on the sports talk shows and read in the newspaper columns. But if the people are really going to get into the game, they need to start first-guessing. That''s what this book is all about.
From the Back Cover
The Boston Globe''s Number One bestseller is back, revised and updated for the 2005 season. Jerry Remy''s name and face are already known to millions of fans. Every night during the baseball season, 400,000 or more households tune in to listen to his broadcast of the Red Sox game. But fans learned to love him years ago, when he was traded to the Red Sox in 1978, earning a trip to the All-Star Game in his first year with the team; Remy hit .278, scored eighty-seven runs, and stole thirty bases.
Injured in 1984, Remy never played another game. In 1988, he began his work as an announcer, working color commentary for Red Sox broadcasts on NESN, which is a basic cable channel throughout New England and available by satellite across the country. He covers more than 150 games per season for NESN and broadcast television, plus regular assignments on the national Fox Game of the Week. But the best part of Jerry Remy is his easy style: listeners feel like they''re having a beer with a friend while they''re watching the game.
If spectators just follow the ball, they are missing much of the game. Baseball is a lot more complex than that. Everyone talks about second-guessing the manager; and there''s a lot of fun in that for everyone except the manager. Those opinions can be heard all day on the sports talk shows and read in the newspaper columns. But if the people are really going to get into the game, they need to start first-guessing. That''s what this book is all about.
About the Author
Jerry Remy is an extraordinary broadcaster, with an intimate knowledge of the game within the game of baseball that comes from more than a decade as a major league player and more than 2,000 games as the voice of the Boston Red Sox. He promotes his Web site, www.theremyreport.com, during his broadcasts, and the Jerry Remy chat room on Yahoo is one of the most popular baseball sites. He is well loved by the huge Red Sox Nation.
Corey Sandler is author of more than 125 books on entertainment, travel, and business topics. A lifelong baseball fan, he maintains the arcane art of scoring a baseball game from the stands or the press box.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Bold and the Restless
I guess listeners know that I have a not-so-secret addiction to "Days of Our Lives." For me, baseball is also like a soap opera.
In baseball, the soap opera starts opening day and continues to the final day of the season. There are going to be so many ups and downs over 162 games and six months of playing: wins, losses, injuries, players upset at the manager, the manager upset with the players, superstars who refuse to talk to the press, and superstars who talk too much.
In football, you have one game on Sunday and then it is all preparation until the next game a week later. Baseball changes every day.
During the off-season, people ask me all the time who''s going to be in the lineup on opening day. First of all, I have no idea what kind of trades the team will make and who will look good in spring training. And then three days into the season, the opening day roster could be thrown out the window.
Over the course of a season, we don''t know if our star shortstop is going to get hurt, or if our superstar pitcher''s shoulder is going to fall apart. We don''t know if a guy with a great career record as a hitter is inexplicably going to have a terrible season, or if some unheralded rookie is going to tear the cover off the ball for the entire season and take the job of a veteran. These are the days of the baseball soap opera.
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