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The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 - When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone By Mike Shropshire ( Grand Central Publishing )
Release Date: 2008-05-14
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Product Description
There are baseball books and there are baseball books.
But for the baseball cognoscenti, there are just a few "must-have" classics: BALL FOUR by Jim Bouton. THE LONG SEASON by Jim Brosnan. WILLIE'S TIME by Charles Einstein. And SEASONS IN HELL by Mike Shropshire, which was a hilarous first-person account of Mike's travails serving as a daily beat writer covering the hapless 1972 Texas Rangers.
Now, in The Last Real Season, Shropshire captures the essence of a different time and different place in baseball, when the average salary for major leaguers was only $27,600...when the ballplayers' drug of choice was alcohol, not steroids...when major leaguers sported tight doubleknit uniforms over their long-hair and Afros...and on July 28th, 1975, the day that famed Detroit resident Jimmy Hoffa went missing, the Detroit Tigers started a losing streak of 19 games in a row. On the day that the Tigers blew a 4-run lead in the bottom of the ninth, Shropshire recalls: "I drank three bottles of Stroh's beer in less than a minute and wrote that 'Jimmy Hoffa will show up in the left field stands with Amelia Earhart as his date before the Tigers will win another game.'"
And so it goes. Filled with just the kind of wonderful baseball stories that real fans crave, this is the funniest baseball book of the year.
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Billy Ball Redux
For anyone who has had the pleasure to read "Seasons In Hell", baseball can never really look the same. Told from a boozy, shambling perspective of a fly-on-the-wall beat writer for the Texas Rangers in their inaugural seasons, it exposes the players as less than serious competitors, and the managers as part strategist, part baby sitter, part comedian, and part cheap psycho-analyst.
"The Last Real Season" begins with more lofty intentions, with a forward from the great manager Earl Weaver on the competiveness of the 1975 season, and the quality of hunger of the athletes pre-free agency.
It then springs into the contrast between the Big Red Machine of the Cincinatti Reds and the Boston Red Sox and Yankees and Orioles and fading dynasty of the Oakland A's of the American League. It talks of the changes big money would bring to baseball, and ultimately the corporate aspect would ruin both the fun of the game, and the on-field product.
However, it does not sustain this track at all. Mike Shropshire goes into a continuation of his first book, and picks up his beat of the Rangers from where it left off.
Still, this is not a bad thing. He shows the contention minded Rangers and their mercurial manager, Billy Martin self destruct. Along the way, we see the hilarity of Shropshire's own actions, the quirky nature of many of the teammates, from Willie Davis, the zen meister, to Mike Kekich, the wife swapper, to Steve Hargan, equally hilarious in this book as the last, and of course, Billy Martin, who is the proverbial train wreck you can't shield your eyes from.
In many ways, every bit as funny as its' prequel, missing the shock value, because it is more of same.
I would have liked to have seen a prologue detailing the careers and lives of the principals after the 1975 season ended, as well as some information on Shropshire's post beat career, as well.
In many ways, these stories bring out the joyousness of pro baseball. On seeing how futility plays out among the players, how second division managers cope with disappointment and frustration, and why they continue to come back for more punishment, even before the money kept them there.
Recommended reading for any pure baseball fan.
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A Funny Look Back at the Good Old Days ( mcg19592 )
This book begins with a review of the 1974 Oakland-LA World Series. When Catfish Hunter leaves the three-time World Champion A's due to a contract technicality,author and beat-writer Shropshire writes about how his hometown Texas Rangers can be considered favorites to win the 1975 AL West.
Shropshire does a terrific job of weaving significant events outside of the baseball world that year with his own and the Rangers' escapades during what became a disappointing season for the Rangers.
This book brought back fond memories of teams that were built from strong minor league systems--A's, Reds, Royals, Dodgers, et.al. before the Free Agency era led to the destruction of fine organizations (Pirates, Reds, Royals) and the continued dominance of the large market teams.
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"This is a baseball biography. Not of a player, but of a season." ( marybookgirl )
"This is a baseball biography. Not of a player, but of a season."
Mike Shropshire's newest book focuses on one of his favorite subjects....the 1975 Texas Rangers and how terrible they were. The Last Real Season actually looks at major league baseball during the 1975 season. Back in the good old days when major league players made an average of $26,000 a season, and negotiated their contracts without agents. Billy Martin (just crowned Manager of the Year for the previous season) was at the helm of the Rangers...the team who had managed a second place finish the season before. The very Texas Rangers being mentioned as a World Series possibility. With amazing recall for someone who imbibed his way through the baseball season, Shropshire recalls those days when players played for the love of the game, the drug of choice was usually on ice after the game, and the players modeled $49.00 leisure suits in the pages of the local papers. The Last Real Season holds nothing back, the infighting, the power struggles, the skirt chasing, the drinking, the weirdness that was the 1975 Texas Rangers (but no mention of the player who kept a gun with him in the bullpen or the night a batboy grabbed an open mike during a national telecast and asked "hey, Cosell, how does it feel to know the whole state of Texas hates your f@!!**@* guts?). Under the "leadership" of pugnacious Billy Martin (who was harder to control then any of the team) the Rangers began to implode before the All-Star break. Shropshire also serves as an eyewitness to Martin's final days (and possible behind the scenes high jinks that landed him at the helm of the Yankees a few day later) ...........and provides the ultimate fan quote "... I guess if you can get rid of the president of the United States, you can get rid of Billy Martin, too."
The Last Real Season is the chronicle of a bygone era. Shrophire looks at the entire 1975 season throughout the major leagues. The 1975 season was the last year before free agency took hold, when polyester ruled, baseball had many larger than life personalities and the hope for the Rangers to make it to the World Series was not yet tainted by years of "almost made it". This book covers one of my favorite times. I worked at the big orange monstrosity called Arlington Stadium and suffered through 1975 with all the rest of the fans (and people who had to be at the fall games when the season was already over). Working for the Rangers for the three years before I moved away to go college, was the best job for a baseball loving Texas girl and provided me with memories of people, a time and a place never to be seen again. The Last Season brought it all back and made me laugh out loud.
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 Sorry, But I'm Disappointed ( bemblom )
Sequels rarely live up to the original. Mike Shropshire wrote one of the funniest baseball books I have ever read in Seasons in Hell. I enjoy anecdotes about players more than I do baseball statistics, but I found The Last Real Season to become a tiresome read of profanity and players over-indulging in alcohol and other drugs. To me at least I found my interest waning by the time I read two-thirds of the book. I imagine another author could write a book of any team and include similar anecdotes. I realize the story of the Texas Rangers of 1975 is a light-hearted effort, but I personally prefer a book about The Summer of '41, The Boys of Summer, October, 1964, or The Tigers of '68. I brought three copies of The Last Real Season prior to reading it, one for myself, another for a friend, and a third for the school library. My mistake! It was three copies too many.
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