Review of "Relief Pitcher," by Dick Friendlich

 Review of

Relief Pitcher, by Dick Friendlich

Four out of five stars

Recovering from injury to body and mind

 Pete Conroy is a very promising infielder with great range and an active bat. He is also very knowledgeable about baseball, so it appears that he will make the majors. However, a hot-dogging young player spikes him in the leg, reducing his ability to cover as much ground as before. It now appears that he will remain in the minor leagues throughout his career. Since he is still able to play at a lower level and knows the game so well, he is assigned as a manager to a low-level minor league team.

 Due to poor planning by people higher up in the organization, Conroy’s team is short of pitchers, so when his team is far behind, Pete pitches. He repeats this a couple of times and finds that he has excellent control and has some good movement on the ball. After some success, he is told to give up pitching.

 When Pete chooses to quit baseball rather than give up pitching, all seems lost. However, he quickly discovers that he has friends in high places, and he is called up to the major league Eagles as both a pitcher and a shortstop. There, he must not only perform, but find a way to make peace with the man that caused his injury.

 This is a good story about coming back from adversity and overcoming the physical as well as emotional scars to succeed. Knowledge of baseball is needed to fully understand it. Most successful paths that people take are not the first one that they started on. Pete Conroy thought he had lost his dream only to discover that there was another way to achieve it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of "The Autumn Dead," by Ed Gorman

  Review of The Autumn Dead , by Ed Gorman, ISBN 0345356322 Four out of five stars An aging ex-cop is handed a case to retrieve a case   Jack Dwyer is an ex-cop that now works for a private security agency. Most of what he does is bust shoplifters and other petty criminals. He is a bit overweight and has few prospects to improve his situation. However, he has an interesting past that is focused on his high school years.   A woman that was a flame of his in high school and has retained her beauty suddenly pops back into his life. She offers Jack a significant amount of money to retrieve a suitcase from the house of a man she had been living with. Since she has a key and claims that the suitcase is really her property and she still has a significant sway over Jack, he agrees to take the job.   When he gets there he finds the owner unconscious from a blow on the back of the head. This is the first hint that the case is much more complex than Jack thought. Hi...
Read more

Review of "The Forty-Minute War," by Janet and Chris Morris

  Review of The Forty-Minute War , by Janet and Chris Morris, ISBN 0671559869 Three out of five stars Absurd initial premise and bad ending   This book begins with an absurd premise, not the event, but the context. A group of committed terrorists manage to acquire a nuclear weapon and a plane. The manage to fly it from Saudi Arabia to Washington D. C. where they detonate it. Distraught over the knowledge that his wife and family have been killed, the American President orders a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. They retaliate and it is all over in 40 minutes. After ordering the strike, the American President takes a gun and kills himself.   There are two reasons why this premise is absurd, one major and the other minor. The major one is that the intelligence services of the United States were aware of the nuclear weapon and had an elite anti-terrorist team on the ground ready to take out the terrorists. However, the team was given a stand-down order. Whil...
Read more

Review of "Heat," by Mike Lupica

  Review of Heat , by Mike Lupica, ISBN 9780142407578 Five out of five stars More about life than sports   Satchel Paige is arguably the all-time best baseball pitcher. One of his teammates once said, “The good lord didn’t give Satchel an arm, he gave him a whip.” Michael Arroyo was also born with what his father said was, “the arm.” Even though he is still young enough to play Little League baseball, Michael can throw an 80-mph fastball and he has excellent control. His goal is to help his team move on to the Little League World Series.   While baseball is his joy, his life is complicated. His father brought Michael and his seventeen-year-old bother Carlos with him in an escape from Cuba and they now live in New York City. Their father died suddenly of a heart attack and the boys are terrified that social services will learn of their plight and either separate them into foster care or send them back to Cuba.   With the help of some kindly neighbors, the ...
Read more