Out Of The Park: Memoir of a Minor League Baseball All-Star Review

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Out Of The Park: Memoir of a Minor League Baseball All-Star ReviewThose of us who grew up as baseball fans in the 1950s and 1960s can find much to enjoy in Ed Mickelson's personal journey, Out of the Park--Memoir of a Minor League Baseball All-Star. Mickelson played professional baseball for eleven years and finished with a career average well over .300 in the minor leagues. He had three short stints with the Cardinals, Browns and Cubs but never quite made the Big Show as a regular. Along the way, however, Mickelson retells anecdotal stories about legendary figures that would have been a dream come true for so many young boys playing Little League back in those days. For example, in his first major league start for the Cardinals in 1950, Mickelson subbed for a feverish Stan Musial and singled in his first at-bat against Warren Spahn. In 1953, he played with the legendary Satchel Paige while a member of the St. Louis Browns and, as that season came to a close, Mickelson drove in the last run for the Browns before they became the Baltimore Orioles. Of course, the Browns lost that game.
But outside the anecdotes, Mickelson provides a fresh insight into the love of a game that uniquely flourished in the post-World War II era. As thousands of GIs returned from the battlefields, there was a unprecedented number of young men looking for new adventures and many tried to make their dreams come true playing the game they loved during a time when nearly sixty minor leagues flourished and provided entertainment in the far reaches of Americana. It was the unparalleled time before television sets were able to bring major league baseball into the everyman's living room, and the country adored their national pastime by watching the nearest minor league game that was conveniently within traveling distance with their newly purchased automobiles.
Mickelson was a star at the highest levels of the minor leagues and the salaries of the stalwarts of the Pacific Coast League were comparable to the money earned by marginal major leaguers. Playing three years for the Portland Beavers, Mickelson competed in the current major league cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle. The stadiums were nearly major-league capacity and the league was filled with many former major leaguers who still played for the love of the game. Mickelson's career hit several setbacks because of injury, but perhaps the biggest setback came when he made the decision to finish college while he was still eligible for the GI Bill. Thus, he had to choose between going to college (Washington University) for the entire academic year or playing the entire season after being an All Star in the Texas League the previous year. Missing spring training and the first two months of the season greatly affected his performance just as it appeared that he had played well enough to realize his dream of reaching the Big Show.
Out of the Park will by no means go down as a literary classic. If you're an enthusiast for books about baseball, the book will not be viewed as authoritative as David Halberstam's "October 1964" or George Will's "Men at Work." However, you will enjoy reading the first-hand accounts of a young man who shared a dressing room with such legends as Musial and Red Schoendienst as well as befriending other major leaguers such as Ray Jablonski and Harvey Haddix as they also journeyed through towns like Pocatello, Idaho, and Lynchburg, Virginia. As he shares his tales of what life was like as he tried to climb the baseball ladder to the highest pinnacle, we also gain a new appreciation of how difficult that ladder was to climb and a new insight into the phrase "for the love of the game."Out Of The Park: Memoir of a Minor League Baseball All-Star Overview

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