The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 - When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone - Hardcover

Mike Shropshire

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446401544 ISBN 13: 9780446401548

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Don Imus on Seasons in Hell:
"The single funniest sports book I have ever read."
MIKE SHROPSHIRE is a longtime sports columnist who has written for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Dallas Morning News, Playboy and Sports Illustrated.

Review:

One of the funniest baseball books I've ever read - NEW YORK DAILY NEWS 'Before money corrupted the game, players had to corrupt it themselves. Mike Shropshire's account of baseball's raucous pre-agent era will leave any fan laughing and smiling at the bad old days' #NAME?

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0446401544
• ISBN 13: 9780446401548
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288