Baseball’s Most Bizarre Plays: A Roster of the Odd, the Improbable and the Downright Confounding in Major League History by Alan Hirsch

Reviewed by: Baseball’s Most Bizarre Plays: A Roster of the Odd, the Improbable and the Downright Confounding in Major League History by Alan Hirsch Paul Hensler Alan Hirsch. Baseball’s Most Bizarre Plays: A Roster of the Odd, the Improbable and the Downright Confounding in Major League History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2022. 199 pp. Paperback, $29.95. For well over a century, thousands of baseball games have featured even more thousands of players, and to no one’s surprise, all the action on the field taking place over so many innings provides ample opportunity for strange plays and quirks of circumstance to occur. Alan Hirsch takes a stab at finding the craziest of these as evinced by the title of this slim volume. In the introduction, the author states his methodology for determining his roster of 150 peculiar occurrences, not least of which includes proof in the form of a “newspaper or other eyewitness account of the game that reports this incident” (3). Although mass media has evolved greatly in recent years, thereby affording quick access to current website postings, “well over half of the plays pre-date 2000; roughly one- third predate 1980 and one- fourth predate 1960,” according to Hirsch’s estimation (3). The vignettes of each play are accompanied by commentary intended to be “very much in the spirit of Bill James- style baseball history” (2). Hirsch writes in a breezy, unpretentious style that is as easy as a conversation with your fellow fans at a ball game, and the kitschy subtitles for many of the selections emphasize his lighthearted approach: Play #56 is headed “Know When to Fold ’Em” and features pitcher Kenny Rogers (107); #102, “Insult Added to Injury,” describes the plight of another hurler, Jon Matlack, who takes a batted ball directly to his forehead (56). The book is a trivia buff ’s delight, as Hirsch ferrets out nuggets such as the real- life Ronn Reynolds serving as the catcher for the apocryphal Sidd Finch of Sports Illustrated fame, or Sean Casey of the Tigers being thrown out at first base on a presumed base hit to left field, only to reach base safely, ironically, on an infield hit later in the same game. [End Page 118] The author’s entries are replete with botched rundowns, strange inside-the-park home runs, misadventures caused by broken bats, and other assorted antics that go beyond what normally takes place between the foul lines (or sometimes beyond them) in a garden- variety game. This minutia makes for entertaining reading, but it comes at a steep price. As formatted, many plays and their related remarks comprise roughly one total page, but in his nod to the James style Hirsch far too often uses his commentary to segue and meander into topics and subtopics that have no bearing on the play under discussion. One example will suffice: in relating a sequence of multiple bad throws on one play in a Brewers— Indians contest from 1982— Hirsch rates this as the eighty- eighth most bizarre play in all of major- league history. The author also tells readers about the well- worn nickname of Mike Hargrove as well as Robin Yount’s journey to win the American League MVP award. But wait—there’s more! Readers are informed further about the plight of Yount’s older brother with the Houston Astros. All this bloating is derived from Yount and Hargrove being active participants in the crazy play from that 1982 game. In this instance, the author’s padded comments are nearly three times the length of the description of the play in question and add nothing to put it in a better historical context. Because this protocol follows 150 iterations, an ennui begins to set in when readers find that they are being bludgeoned with so much trivia and attendant diversions. Compounding this quandary in disturbing fashion are gaffes that should have been flagged during editing and simple fact- checking. While the author proudly notes that he presents no errors in the spelling of Jenrry Mejia’s name, there are other miscues aplenty, including, but not limited to, Hal “McCrae,” Bobby “Thompson” of the 1951 New York Giants, Wally...

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