Still Pitching (review)

Reviewed by: Still Pitching Peter Carino (bio) Michael Steinberg. Still Pitching. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003. 300 pp. Cloth, $27.95. Fans often come to baseball through playing the game in youth, through rooting for a particular team, through a parent, or through any of the many other ways the game works its way under the skin and into the blood. WithStill Pitching Michael Steinberg creates a poignant memoir of his relationship to the game as a player and a fan growing up in 1950s Brooklyn. Good books about baseball, however, are always about more than baseball, and Steinberg's memoir also recounts his coming of age, tracing the ups and downs, the pain and joy, of moving from boyhood to young manhood. For Steinberg this period in his life parallels the heyday of the always contending Brooklyn Dodger teams, beginning in 1950 and ending when the club moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. Coincidentally, Steinberg's family moves to Los Angeles the next year, and having just graduated from high school, Steinberg follows them shortly after. Thus his adolescence is inextricably linked to the fate of the Dodgers. In falling short every year but coming back strong the next, the resilience of "dem Bums" inspires the young Steinberg in his annual quests to make the team, win the big game, and attract one of the prettiest girls in school. Like the Dodgers' finally winning in '55, Steinberg ultimately achieves his goals, earning his varsity letter, pitching in a high school championship game, and finding a steady girlfriend of the type he previously considered out of his league. From the anxious, confused boy emerges a confident young man who must face one more challenge and, like the Dodgers, start anew in L.A. As the book closes Steinberg reassures himself by thinking: "I wouldn't be the only New Yorker out here who was starting over again." Steinberg's love affair with the game begins with his father, who plays in a Sunday softball league. Watching his dad with his teammates, the young boy thinks: "They're so easy and intimate with one another—like they all belong to an exclusive club—a club I ache to belong to." Such feelings of longing drive much of Steinberg's narrative as the boy always feels a bit outside of things, whether it be a baseball team he is striving to make or the social cliques in junior high and high school. Even the relationship with his father disappoints when the father must spend more and more time on the road in his job as a salesman. In Steinberg's reconstructed version of himself the reader finds a sensitive boy with a rich interior life, who seeks refuge in reading and writing while searching for acceptance from others and comfort with himself. From the perspective of the man looking back on the boy he was, this search [End Page 142] unfolds in all its pain and joy in a style at times lyrical, at times direct. Baseball is often the vehicle of expression. By the time he is ten Steinberg is taking the bus with his friends from their Rockaway neighborhood to Ebbets Field: A 32,000-seat bandbox of a park set in the heart of Flatbush, it radiated a cozy intimacy and an inviting familiarity.... From the center field bleachers you could hear left fielder "Shotgun" Shuba yell "I got it Duke." And from the upper deck behind first, you could see the grimace on Jackie Robinson's face as he went head-to-head with umpire Jocko Conlin. Filtered though the grown Steinberg's mature memory, this passage evokes the magical effect of Ebbets on his younger self. The adult knows the boy felt welcome there, at home with his heroes, almost intimately as he eavesdrops on their intentions. Other times Steinberg opts for more direct language that could almost come from the boy himself rather than from the older man looking back. Listening to the 1951 playoff with the Giants, he says: "Then with two on and one out, Thompson hit the game winning, season ending homer. I sat stunned under a tree...

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