Mann recognizes the constant pressure on these players, each game "an extended audition" with long odds. (The Seattle Mariners, he says, have only produced one major leaguer from their farm system in seven years.) He envies the players' single-minded focus and drive as much as their talent. "It's a monastic life, with fidelity to one thing. And so to watch Erasmo play baseball is to watch more perfection, more focused thought, than I will ever achieve in a lifetime of critical thinking," Mann writes.
Readers seeking extended play-by-plays and assessments of skills would do better to look elsewhere. Jim Collins' The Last Best League, about the prestigious Cape Cod summer league of amateur college players — which produces 1 out of every 6 major leaguers (and which I've followed avidly for years) — gives a better picture of scouting, while Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's 2008 movie Sugar, about a Dominican pitcher's trials in a single-A minor league team in Iowa, provides a sharper view of what's at stake for Latino players.
Mann offers a different sort of analysis, at once lyrical, intellectual and personal. His meditations on "a game that allows ample time for reflection and appreciation" lift Class A above the fray of more ordinary baseball books. He contrasts the players' undiluted optimism with his own studied, self-protective "nonchalance and irony" and his preoccupation with loss, centering on his older brother's death from drug addiction 10 years earlier. Nicknamed "Mannchild" on his Vassar College team, he's aware of straddling boyhood and manhood, like the players. He writes with self-deprecating honesty about missing bedtime baseball stories read to him by his father, about fear of failure, and about his attempts to impose metaphor and deeper meaning "onto a game and a group of people that want to be taken literally." He adds, "And yes, it is unfair to want Erasmo to feel more. I come to these games for meaning and metaphor, and he comes here for numbers, the right algorithm to move on."
Class A captures the longing, the uncertainty and the drive for recognition, both on and off the ball field.
Read an excerpt of Class A