Baseball and Men's Lives: The True Confessions of a Skinny-Marink
by: Robert Mayer

Softcover. NY, Delta/Dell, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 275 pages. In his look at the role baseball plays in the lives of American men, the author recounts his own role as shortstop and discusses Bobby Thompson's home run, the 1969 Mets, and other events. By making baseball the focal point of his evocative memoir, the fifty-something Mayer can lay claim to spiritual kinship with all American males who ever aspired to major-league stardom and settled for the sidelines. Looking back on the pre-TV days when he roamed N.Y.C.'s rough diamonds as a scrawny shortstop, the author recalls the pleasures and pains of rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, an aberrant choice for a Bronx- born lad whose immigrant parents lived within walking distance of Yankee Stadium. Mayer's loyalty to the team did not survive the franchise's flight to Los Angeles; as a young newspaperman, however, he found it possible to transfer his allegiance to the Mets. Clean copy.