One of my favorite baseball books. Contains the classic article by Rodger Angel describing the 6th Game of the 1975 World Series. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in good baseball journalism.

Charles Einstein has compiled baseball stories, articles, poems, letters, and much more into one book. The length of its selections makes the book perfect for those with a short attention span (like yours truly). The strongest point, however, is the variety of selections. Einstein includes selections from the 1890s, 1900s, 1920s, 1940s, and so on up until the present day. From fictional stories to a letter from Ty Cobb to a chapter from "Babe" to Roy Campanella... lots to treasure here. If you're looking for the "good old days" and for some baseball nostalgia, this book is for you.

If you can find this book, get it and enjoy it. It is a wonderful book about Mays, baseball, and the America in which he lived. It works as biography and baseball and history, delivering big in all ways.

"My Life In and Out of Baseball" was written in 1966 or thereabouts - while Willie was still active.

For the most part, the tone rings honestly, and so I do believe that Willie played an active role in the writing of his autobiography with Charles Einstein - which can't be said for all athlete biographies, of course.

This was written before Jim Bouton's "Ball Four", when it first became customary for ballplayer autobiographies to compete with each other by showing as much of the game's dirty linen as possible. So there are no sensational revelations here.

But this is a good snapshot of the era in which Willie played, as he experienced it at the time.

A very lyrical phrase which begins "I remember the clouds" opens the first chapter of this book which takes place in the 9th inning of the New York Giants' deciding 1951 playoff game against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In this inning, responding to a heartfelt plea from manager Leo Durocher, the Giants would cap a season marked by a miraculous comeback from 13 1/2 games out and stage an incredible 4-run rally in the bottom of the 9th inning to steal the pennant from Brooklyn - capped off, of course, by Bobby Thomson's famous 3-run homer, hit while Willie, a 20 year old rookie in 1951, was nervously waiting his turn in the on-deck circle.

When the book shifts to the last game of the 1962 playoffs between the Giants and Dodgers (both since transplanted to the West Coast), Willie or Einstein or both cleverly start that chapter with the same lyrical phrase that begins with, "I remember the clouds..."

The Giants, of course, are about to repeat history by staging another last-ditch comeback to win, though it will be with less melodrama than that which took place in 1951, and in view of this, the authors recite where some of the participants from 1951 are on this occasion in 1962.

"Durocher?" Willie asks rhetorically. "He was in the Dodger dugout as a coach. But I knew he remembered. I knew he remembered." Yes, one expects that Durocher must have remembered; must have awaited the start of the 9th inning with trepidation; and must have been the least surprised man on the field or in the dugout at the outcome.

On this occasion, of course, Willie is not a mere spectator, but on this occasion, eleven years later, he's no longer a nervous rookie but an established star who wants to be up there with the game on the line, and his single off of Ed Roebuck's leg fanned the flames of the rally.

For the most part, it's over the head of the Giants organization that the clouds have hung, but one must be grateful to Mays and Einstein for portraying - and in such poetic fashion - two occasions where the clouds hung over the heads of their opponents instead.

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