Book Review: The Opposite Field by Jesse Katz

By The Common Man

As he has mentioned a couple of times on Twitter, The Common Man took a weekend to rest up for the stretch drive up at the cabin this weekend. He cleared brush (hey, that does work as something more than a euphemism), pulled the pontoon up on the shore for the winter, and took The Boy and The Uncommon Wife to see Lake Superior for the first time. All in all, it was a successful mini-vacation, made all the more successful because TCM got to finish Jesse Katz’s memoir The Opposite Field.

Katz is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has written for the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine, and who made his bones on the gang beat in the 1990s. His credentials don’t really figure much into the story, except that they speak to how skillful he is as a writer and how much he put on hold as he took over and restored his son’s Little League as the organization’s commissioner.

According to Katz, the Monterey Park Sports Club baseball program was rife with corruption and mismanagement, to the point where the league was planning to “take a year off” to reorganize. Katz stepped into a largely Latino-run organization and nurtured it back to health.

You might ask why race needs to be included in a memoir about a Little League, and why TCM is even bringing it up in this review. In Katz’s book, race is everywhere. He is a Jew living in a part of Los Angeles that is rapidly changing from a white and Hispanic suburb to an Asian-American community with a Latino-run government. Katz covers the African-American gangs beat in Watts. Katz’s son Max, who a friend of his dubs the only Nicaraguan Jew, has a mixed ethnicity. Max and his best friend call each other coffee and cream. Each ethnicity, in Katz’s narrative, clings to their identities and to what little power and control they have managed to amass, and many of the book’s players do not take kindly to Katz charging in.

That said, Katz is careful (in most cases) not to paint himself as a white knight (pun intended) riding in to save the league. He’s incredibly concerned for his son, after trouble at home with his step-son and friction with his wife leave him concerned that his son will grow up idolizing the gang culture his father chronicles and drifting aimlessly like his half-brother. Indeed, Katz’s motives are selfish, as he quickly volunteers to take over the league (and ropes in a friend as a deputy), and gets in over his head.

Katz is also careful to document his own faults and failings, as a commissioner, as a father, as a husband, as a journalist, and as a man. He falls for grifters and con men at the ball park. He ignores his wife (and step-son) to devote his entire attention to Max. He ignores Max and his job when the business of running the league gets too involved and he is unwilling to sacrifice control. And he ignores basic morality when he strikes up an affair with the wife of one of his coaches.

But it’s hard to fault Katz, in part because he is so self-aware of his faults, in part because he is a wonderful writer, and because he goes into this adventure with the best intention, providing the best for his son. That Katz has chosen baseball as a vehicle to bond with his boy is rooted in his own upbringing, as his father regaled him with stories of the Brooklyn Dodgers while they played catch. And baseball provides ample opportunity for Katz and Max to bond, as Katz also serves as his son’s coach.

It would be tempting to chalk all of this up to the “powers of baseball to unite us,” but that’s not really what Katz’s story is about. Indeed, Katz’s success as a commissioner helps a community unite around baseball, there are still power struggles and pettiness and in-fighting within that community over players, facilities, and games. Rather, it’s the story of a father and son, and how that father uses baseball to help guide his son and keep him close. And, as a baseball fan, that’s just fine with The Common Man. Would that we all have that opportunity.

TCM recommends this book to dads, sons, baseball enthusiasts, and anyone dumb enough to think running a baseball league is an easy job.  It's available in paperback or Kindle and probably on other digital readers that TCM doesn't know about and won't spend time linking to.  You're resourceful people; have at it.

Book Review: The Road

With the country resting safely in the hands of the man with the plan, and with almost nothing happening in the sports world, The Common Man is finally getting around to reviewing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Road (he finished it over two days around Christmas.

The book follows a father and a son (neither are given names) as they make their way across a post-apocolyptic United States. The land around them is burned and barren, and stripped of almost anything edible. Painfully aware that they are starving to death and cannot last another winter (the temperature has dropped dramatically as the result of some cateclysm that has left the land poisoned, the sky clouded, and ash everywhere), the pair heads vaguely south and east, trying to reach the sea. Along the way they starve, meet hostile survivors, and simply try to perservere, pushing their shopping cart of belongings down the road, through the snow, and across what's left of the country.


McCarthy's novel is terrible and sad, but full of individual moments of triumph that transcend the horrible reality in which the father and son find themselves. Their joy, particularly in the face of the overwhelming brutality of their new America, is infectious, and well rendered. And despite not telling his readers much about the bleak near-future he has imagined, McCarthy creates a realistic vision of a dying world and its people.


The novel is even darker than his previous novel, No Country For Old Men (reviewed here), but less fatalistic. The father and son tell themselves that they "carry the flame" of humanity, that their moral actions prove that humanity's goodness is not entirely gone. And the father's central goal, to keep his boy safe, proves that, despite the depravity around them, their hope for the future is still intact.

The other truly remarkable aspect of McCarthy's book is the relationship he draws between the father and son. McCarthy's story, above all, is the story of this father's enduring love for his boy, and his determination to see him safe. The father is constantly teaching the boy, preparing him for a day when his father will not be there. And really, that is the essence of fatherhood. Regardless of how far-fetched McCarthy's setting may seem to you, that love and that relationship is universal, as is the desire to pass on the flame. After all, why else would people decide to have children if not to pass on the flame. As the heart around this novel is based, it is a moving relationship that every father and mother can connect to, and every child should appreciate.

The Road is a very powerful read, and you can do it quickly. The characters speak in short, simple dialogue, there are almost no long passages. Just miles and miles and miles of walking and talking. And while it's the most grueling walk you'll take all year, it's also the best and most rewarding (far better than actual exercise). The Common Man is excited for the film version, which will presumably be released this fall.

Better Late Than...No Country For Old Men in Fiction and Film

It has dawned on The Common Man in recent weeks that this blog has morphed far more into a political site than he ever intended, particularly since the election really heated up in the fall. The Common Man's politics are important to him, and he refuses to apologize for that, but after rereading some of his earliest posts, he misses the playfulness of his earlier posts. His cynicism has crept in, and he misses being able to wax nostalgically about culture and life. He also notices that this shift in tone has corresponded to a decrease in posting. Part of that has to do with work heating up, and not being able to find enough hours in the day, but some of that is undoubtedly because blogging sometimes requires The Common Man to get angry, and he doesn't like to be angry. So, this week, even though it would be fun to make all kinds of shoe-throwing jokes about how the Twins or Vikings should snap up a certain right-handed journalist in Iraq, The Common Man is going to strive to focus on not-politics. Maybe he can be more upbeat.


Sometimes, the world is a profoundly dangerous and disturbing place (so far, so good. Very upbeat.), and people do not always comprehend the dangerous paths they are on, even as they move closer and closer to their own deaths. Regardless, you are responsible for those choices, and they ultimately will lead to a reckoning if you show even a moment of weakness or vulnerability. Only through strength can you survive what life throws your way.

That's the primary message The Common Man got from reading No Country for Old Men (2005), the excellent, haunting, and violent novel by Cormac McCarthy, and watching the movie adaptation by the Coen brothers. McCarthy's novel is set along the border of Texas and Mexico, and focuses on the struggles of regular people trying to adapt to a new world with a new set of rules, a world that has been fundamentally altered. The drug trade has begun to wreak havoc on the American southwest, and these men and women, who were part of the old world, have not yet adjusted to this new paradigm.

There is danger in their ignorance. When welder and Vietnam veteran Llewellen Moss stumbles upon a bloodbath in the desert and $2.3 million in drug money, he sees an easy payday. But when his conscience gets the better of him, and he returns to the scene, he becomes the target of a massive manhunt. Chased by an embodiment of death itself, a remorseless, creative, emotionless, and seemingly invincible killbot, Moss makes his way across Texas, trying to outrun his decisions. But, as he tells a hitchiker he picked up along the road, “You dont start over. That’s what it’s about. Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it…. You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who’s layin there?" (227).

[Spoiler alert] The conclusion of Moss' story is at the same time tragic and inevitable, his unnatural death the natural conclusion of his decisions. His fight against his fate is both heroic and manly, very Cooper-esque, and his stoicism hides his growing desperation and dread of the end that is hunting him.

[End spoiler] The book is both meloncholy and colorful, very readable but also profound. The Common Man appreciates the grimness of its conclusion, and how vividly it draws its characters. McCarthy's novel expands a specific time period into a microcosm of human history, showing the inevitable march of "progress" and its consequences for the people caught up in it. The novel is well worth your time, especially if you're willing to read through grisly murders to get to an ending that is at the same time unresolved and extremely satisfying in its vagueness.

If, however, you're short on time and would rather watch the Cliff's Notes, you won't find a much more faithful adaptation of a book than Joel and Ethan Coen's celebrated film version. Dialogue is often lifted directly from McCarthy's novel, which is important given the importance McCarthy places on the way things are said, the short, measured lines his characters say underscores the culture they live in and their nature. Understanding they could not improve on the dialogue, the Coens largely left it alone. And scenes are recreated lovingly and painstakenly from the novel. While the Coens hide most of the violence behind props, it is still brazen and brutal. And the gore becomes less important than the reactions of those perpetrating the violence.

The acting is excellent. Javier Bardem, of course, received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the central antagonist, the philosophical and terrible killer tracking Moss. He is mesmerizing when he is onscreen, capable of making even an innocent grin feel venomous. Tommy Lee Jones simmers throughout the novel, struggling to control his frustration and his bewilderment at the changing world around him and his inability to stop its momentum. As he says at the start of the film, "I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet somethin’ that I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say 'okay, I’ll be part of this world.'" And when he realizes his ineffectiveness, he is driven out from that world, broken. Josh Brolin is also solid in the film, but his words are mostly irrelevant (in the film, anyway), as he serves mostly as the means to move the plot forward and reveal to the other characters (including his wife, played with remarkable vulnerability by Kelly Macdonald) how royally their lives have been fucked up by his choices.

The Common Man realizes how late he is getting to this film. It is, after all, almot a year since it won the Oscar, and more than a year since its release. But a recent conversation sparked The Common Man into reading the novel, giving him a better understanding of McCarthy's vision, and that of the Coens. Everyone dies, they want you to understand, and that death is ordained by the choices you make, even a heart attack at 84 can be traced back to a burger you ate at 37. As the killer tells Moss' wife, “Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased….A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning” (259).

And so the ultimate message of the film is that everyone is responsible for the decisions they make. It is the ultimate end to the argument for personal responsibility. But even so, it acknowledges that some things are beyond the control of the individual, and all that ultimately matters is the decisions that you make when dealing with those circumstances. Which is true from both a religious and non-religious standpoint. The only things that matter are what you do, even if they don't change anything all that much. The Common Man thinks Hemingway would approve of that message, and is going to go reread the last ten pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls now to confirm that.

Book Review: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

As The Common Man sits watching the Twins/White Sox grudge match, and praying to the baseball gods for another big win, he figures it's a good time to review Chris Aschburner's new book, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Heart-Pounding, Jaw-Dropping, and Gut-Wrenching Moments from Minnesota Twins History. After all, The Common Man is one of the world's biggest Twins fans, and figures that nothing could be more exciting than to simultaneously write about and watch his favorite team. However, The Common Man has a hard time being excited about Aschburner's book, as he made the single subject that interests The Common Man most uninteresting, redundant, and trivial.

The most important word, it turns out, in Aschburner's title is "moments." Aschburner comes from a newspaper background and it shows as he reduces 47 years of Minnesota Twins history to a series of vignettes, the majority of which seem to deal with the 1987 and 1991 teams. What's more, the vignettes are out of order and splattered throughout the book under various headings that seem incredibly arbitrary ("The Good," for instance, includes only Kirby Puckett, the '87 Champions, and the '91 Champs; "It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over" includes short articles on Calvin Griffith, the '76 batting title that Rod Carew narrowly lost, Minnesota all stars, and interesting HR in Twins history). It's like reading a collection of newspaper articles strung together in haphazard, nonsensical fashion, so that there's no sense of a narrative.

For any Twins fan without a thorough background on the Twins and their history, the book's stories feel disconnected with the larger Twins history, and impossible to place. It's less a history and more a "here's stuff I remember about the team I covered forever." Also, there's a strange discussion of the old Senators team that discusses great old players from the Washington days, but that feels entirely out of place in a book that spends the rest of its time hyper-focused on the Twins.

More disappointing, however, is that Aschburner gives short shrift to the Twins pennant winning team in 1965, and the strong clubs in the late '60s and early '70s. Yes, he covers players like Killebrew, Oliva, Carew, Chance, Hall, and Blyleven, and discusses the old Metropolitan Stadium, but Aschburner refuses to go into depth about any of those teams, and how their success helped solidify baseball in Minnesota for the next 30 years. To exclude them is criminal, particularly because far more Twins fans are familiar with the teams since the late-80s and need a primer on the early years.

Aschburner also hits all the safe high notes, championing the inductions of Bert Blyleven, Tony Oliva, Jack Morris to the Hall of Fame, rips on what it's safe to rip on (the Metrodome, Ron Davis, Terry Felton), and undersells such egregious parts of Twins history as their treatment of Jim Eisenreich, the potential racism of Calvin Griffith that led (in part) to the trade of Rod Carew, the cheapness and rat-finkery of Carl Pohlad (Aschburner almost omits the contraction saga entirely), and the struggles of Tom Kelly to adapt to young players toward the end of his managerial career (amazingly, in a book of notes about famous Twins faces, there's no section that highlights the man who guided them to two world championships and led and personified them for 15 seasons. He gets 3/4 of a paragraph.).

So, what Aschburner presents here is a book that's too familiar for the informed fan but too scant for the casual fan. And it's worth neither of their time and effort. Because, and The Common Man says this as someone inherently interested in all things Twins, it's freaking boring. The book jumps around too much to build any kind of momentum and ends abruptly on a section called "Pain and Suffering." Indeed, in a strange book, perhaps its strangest moment is the closing line, in which Jim Eisenreich brags "if I had been able to play, Kirby would've been in right field when he came up." And perhaps that strange comment out of left field (or center, as it were) is the best way to sum up a book full of such random disjointedness. And the best way to end this review, except to say "don't buy this book." And "if The Common Man was born in 1940 and was any good at playing baseball, Harmon Killebrew wouldn't have had a chance."

Here's Mud In Your Eye

Sometimes timing is everything. And sometimes, the week after Barak Obama's spokesman said that John McCain is "cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history," The Common Man finally gets around to finishing Anything for a Vote, Joseph Cummins reader-friendly guide to dirty Presidential politics. So is Obama's spokesman right? Where would this election cycle rank on Cummins "Sleaze-o-meter?" And is this book worth your time?

Cummins argues that dirty politics is an American tradition, and ingrained within the American populace, the nation's psyche, and the political process. "Without smears, innuendo, and thievery tainting our electoral system," he writes, "what would we have to connect us to our quickly vanishing past?... We're Americans, after all. A nice, dirty election runs in our blood." It's a provacative statement, and one that Cummins backs up by systematically examining every single election since 1789. Indeed, he concludes that "probably the only clean election in American history was the first one...in which George Washington ran unopposed." Since then, there have been a steady progression of dirty tricks and ugly accusations in Presidential races, including Davy Crockett's claim that Martin Van Buren dressed in ladies' corsets, Hoover supporters asserting that the Holland Tunnel led straight to the Vatican (as Hoover's opponent, Al Smith, was a practicing Catholic), and Rutherford B. Hayes supporters claiming his opponent, Samuel Tilden, "had contracted syphilis some years earlier from an Irish whore on the Bowery, and that his venerial disease not only affected his actions, but made him susceptible to blackmail."

In all, Cummins does demonstrate that running for President has invited mud and smears, and that candidates knew what they were in for. But, while dirty politics may have been part of the game since the bitter 1800 election between Jefferson and Adams, he gives his highest "sleaze" ratings to elections in 1960, 1964, 1972, 1988, 1992, and 2000 (and with the second highest rating to 2004). Prior to that run, only 3 elections reached the pinnacle of sleaze, the aforementioned 1800 election, 1879 (Hayes v. Tildon), and 1928 (Hoover v. Smith). So while the dirty pool is nothing new, the intensity seems to have ratcheted up in recent years, and become increasingly vindictive. So it's entirely plausible that this year's cycle will see the most vitriolic, ugly, and disgusting attacks in campaign history. And it validates the idea that, in bygone days, politics wasn't so rancorous and off-putting as it is now, and that when Obama and McCain talked about getting back to a more civil style of politics they weren't idealizing and romanticizing the past.

So far, The Common Man would put this election cycle up at a 8 or so on Cummins' "sleaze-o-meter." News networks have openly speculated that Barak Obama is Muslim (a similar charge dogged unsuccessful 1856 candidate John Fremont, who was accused of being a secret Catholic), and one blatantly false McCain ad has suggested that he wants kindergarters to have "comprehensive sex education." He's also been drug through the mud because of his tangential associations with Reverand Wright, Father Pflager, and William Ayers. And he and his wife have openly had their patriotism questioned because sometimes he chooses not to wear an American flag pin and his wife has been honest enough to bring up that life in America is often more difficult for people of color, particularly if those people are women.

Of course, Obama's not alone as a target, nor is he entirely innocent of the mudslinging. Obama's campaign has lampooned John McCain for being unable to use a computer, when it's possible that his POW injuries won't allow him to sit at a desk and use a keyboard. Hilary Clinton was called shrill, a harpy, and the epitome of a bitchy feminism. Sarah Palin has been accused of faking a pregnancy to cover up her daughter's illegitamate child, and now it seems that daughter has a baby on the way. In all, it's an impressive list. The Common Man was tempted to give it a 10 so far (and someday, when books are written on this election, it might rank that high), but there are still a couple of months to go and The Common Man wants the candidates and their supporters to have a notion to shoot for (perhaps this election will go to 11).

Cummins's book itself is a fun read, and, as The Common Man mentioned, very reader friendly. And it's a very informative, quick, and breezy run through American history. It is not, however, a serious work of political science or scholarly research. There are no footnotes, nothing to suggest Cummins's sources. And his politics seem to come through in his recounting of the 2000 and 2004 elections (but really, who doesn't think that those didn't go well for this country?). Casual fans of politics will find it right up their alleys.