Bill Madden

The author is a sportswriter who had become particularly close to Seaver over the years. He had conducted several lengthy interviews with Seaver after the pitcher's retirement. I wouldn't say there's a whole lot of depth to this biography. It's essentially an (adoring) survey of Seaver's life and, especially, baseball career. Well, when a 70-year life is covered in only 285 pages, you are not going to get much in-depth probing. As such, though, I mostly enjoyed it. It's not the most sharply written book on the bookshelf, and there are some spots where an editor's hand might have been useful, and that recounting of Seaver's life was interesting enough for a baseball fan.

I did learn a few things that I either didn't know or had forgotten. One is that Seaver openly criticized the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The other was that Seaver signed first by the Atlanta Braves, and he was looking forward to being teammates with the great Hank Aaron. But due to an entirely accidental breaking of the rule against signing college players while the collegiate season was in progress (two games that everybody thought had been pre-season exhibitions had turned out to be on the official season schedules of the team involved), Seaver ended up the prize in a lottery among any team that was willing to match the Braves' offer, and in that way ended up on the Mets. It was nice to learn that throughout his life, and even at the height of his fame and success, Seaver remained close friends with many of the guys he'd played Little League, high school and junior college baseball with in his home town of Fresno, CA. Seaver's battles with Mets general manager M. Donald Grant are well chronicled, here, as is his up-and-down relationship with his own fame, and certain individual games are highlighted in depth to good effect. Madden is, after all, a sportswriter first and foremost. All in all I'd say this is a good if not great biography, but absolutely for baseball fans only.… (more)