Review of "Baseball, I Love You! Jolly Cholly’s Story," by Charlie Grimm with Ed Prell

Review of

Baseball, I Love You! Jolly Cholly’s Story, by Charlie Grimm with Ed Prell

Three out of five stars

 Charlie Grimm was a baseball man whose career spanned many of the designated ages of baseball. His first appearance as a player in a major league game was in 1916 and his last was in 1936. He played for four different teams, so he was on the field with and against many of the all-time greats. Furthermore, he was the manager for at least parts of sixteen different seasons for two major league teams and many minor league teams. He also served as a live radio commentator and in executive positions and as a scout. With a career in baseball that started before World War I and lasted until the sixties, Grimm had a wide variety of experiences with many of the greats of baseball.

 With all that possible material, this book is a disappointment. It reads more like a series of routine diary entries rather than a chronicle of what was an incredible career in baseball. There are few of the humorous stories about the characters of baseball and very little of the personal dirty laundry typical of the modern tell-all books. Grimm supposedly was a comic in a baseball uniform, but none of that appears in this book. It was surprisingly dull.