Review of "You Can’t Beat the Hours," by Mel Allen and Ed Fitzgerald

 Review of

You Can’t Beat the Hours, by Mel Allen and Ed Fitzgerald

Five out of five stars

 As the reader of countless books about sports in general and baseball in particular, I generally place them into two categories based on a specific dividing event. The pivotal book in the description of sports was “Ball Four” by Jim Bouton. It was first published in 1970 and was a bestseller, for it chronicled the reality of the people that played major league baseball. Bouton exposed much of the dirty laundry of the game of baseball, before his book it was a rare occasion when an athlete’s human failings were exposed in print. After Bouton’s book was published, the subject matter of sports books became far more realistic and less sanitized.

 Published in 1964, Mel Allen was the voice of the New York Yankees baseball team. He started announcing Yankees’ games in 1940, so he knew all of the great Yankee players from Lou Gehrig to Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle. There is no doubt that he knew much of what was going on, but very little of that appears in this book.

 The book provides insight into the Yankee players, but it is the sanitized version that was pre-Bouton. While modern readers will likely find it quaint, there is something endearing about reading about on-field accomplishments without the modern necessity of also hearing about their off-field and often embarrassing actions. Sometimes this seems to lack a sense of realism while in other cases, such as this one, it has a refreshing air.