Imperfect: Jim Abbott Shares the Story of His Remarkable Life

“Find something you love, and go after it, with all of your heart.” ~Jim Abbott

Baseball books are legion. In part, because we love reading stories about this game that has been part of so many of our lives and, when we were little, part of our dreams as well. But a book like this one is rare. It's a story about a boy born without a right hand who was made to believe anything was possible, and his dream of playing baseball went far beyond most peoples' expectations, including his own.

It's also a story about life, about victories and losses, the "agony and the ecstasy," and the profound insights gained from a perspective we don't always see.

The book I'm writing about is Jim Abbott's Imperfect: An Improbable Life.

Abbott was a major league baseball player who pitched for four ball clubs over a period of ten years. Though his career stats place him as relatively average, he also had some rare highlights, including one stellar season in which he was considered for the American League Cy Young Award. He also threw a no-hitter, while wearing the Yankee pinstripes, an experience that becomes Ariadne's thread leading readers through the labyrinth of his life story.

There are many precious moments in this man's tale. The audio version of this book is read by the author, which (in my opinion) doesn't always work. In this case it adds another level to the story, read by the man who lived it. When he writes about his painful experiences, you hear it in his voice, as you hear his satisfaction in sharing the high points of his life. You can hear the anguish of disappointing those who counted on him, and how humbled he was by the fans who brought their own children with missing limbs to the park to watch him play, either to get an autograph or hear words of inspiration from someone who really did "make it."

Early on Abbott notes that he never wanted to be known as "the one-handed pitcher." He wanted to be known as a major league ballplayer, not the one-handed major leaguer. Then he adds that by the end of his career he achieved his goal. Ironically, his stats showed that he was just another pitcher, nothing special.

What makes the book exceptional is the extreme candor of this man. He bares it all, his self-doubts, the ways in which he sabotaged his own aims at times, and the many ways he felt he let himself down. He is also candid about his fears, including the fear of having a child in the event that his missing hand was a genetic disposition. (He shares the joy of counting to ten over and over again when looking at the first ultrasound of his daughter in his wife's womb.)

Jim Abbott and his co-writer Tim Brown tell the story by going back and forth between the day of Abbott's no-hitter and his own life story. The no hitter story begins early in the day, hours before the first pitch. So does Abbott's story, beginning before Jim was born, how his parents met and the events leading up to his birth.

The week before his no-hitter Abbott had been pounded by the Cleveland Indians and he was pulled early in the game, having given up seven runs. Now he had to face them yet again, with their powerful bats and experience. But what a difference a day can make.

What is success? What is greatness? Abbott says, "People will tell you that I overcame obstacles…maybe. But the truth is I was incredibly blessed in my life. More was given than was ever taken away."

The story ends with the aftermath of that final out in Yankee Stadium, which is followed by a host of acknowledgements. No great man achieves anything alone. But the audio book has a nice addition, an interview between sportswriter Tim Brown and Abbott.

Imperfect: An Improbable Life is a great book on many levels, but is especially a nice addition to any collector of baseball stories. 

A Whole Book of Rube Goldberg Schemes

There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house. ~Joe Ryan

This past week was our annual Friends of the Library Book Sale, one of my favorite events based on how often I try to make it. The last day of the sale is bag day where you acquire as many books as you can fit into a shopping bag all for a fixed price. It used to be a dollar, but this year four dollars, which is still a bargain. The thing that amazes me is how many classics and great books are still left on the last day.

Another feature of making this an annual trek is that you can trace your life interests based on what kinds of books you bring home. Having grown up in close proximity to New York, I often reflect that my bio could be written based on which parts of the City I visited in the various eras of my youth, from Yankee Stadium to Central Park to Greenwich Village to Soho to Madison Avenue.

So it is with the bags of books I bring home. There was a time when I would scarf up classic literature and other times it would be history and biography. Friday I went for the art books, though I also found a number of Life magazines from 1971 or so that slid easily into the side of the bag. And I also brought home this small jewel of a book The Best of Rube Goldberg.

Click to enlarge so you can read text.

Reuben "Rube" Goldberg was an American cartoonist as well as author, and inventor. His cartoons are what made him famous, and rich. The cartoons were essentially depictions of ultra-complicated ways to do simple things. His first was appeared in 1914 and by 1928 he was pulling in $125,000 a year. He also wrote articles and stories for magazines and even travelled some with a vaudeville act. These were the days before television and the Roaring Twenties to boot. Later in life he did political cartoons and even won a Pulitzer Prize for one depicting the dilemma of atomic power. Post-World War II he also devoted himself to being a serious sculptor.

Growing up I often heard the expression "that's another Rube Goldberg scheme." Everyone knew what it meant because his cartoons had been absorbed into pop culture. Games like Mouse Trap and Crazy Clock (1964 and 1965) capitalized on this notion of comical contraptions designed to achieve a simple end, further cementing Goldberg's influence. Years later our daughter built a huge and hugely complicated Rube Goldberg sequence in our basement, which should have been filmed or documented and was probably photographed.

Goldberg was a contemporary of another cartoonist who made it big in pop culture in the pre-TV era, Robert Ripley, whom I interviewed here at Ennyman's Territory in 2008.

A Simple Fly Swatter

If you like quirky stories, here's a link to my Featured eBook of the Day: Newmanesque, free for members of Amazon Prime.

Have a very special day.

Public Speaking

“If I had a choice between getting a round of applause by delivering a twenty-six second applause line and getting a round of boos by telling the truth, I’d rather get the round of applause.” ~ former Senator Bob Kerrey, on why campaign finance reform won't work.

The Bob Kerrey quote, extracted from Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan, was used to illustrate why campaign finance reform favors small organized groups rather than the masses. But it also says something to me about politicians. They are people like you and me. They prefer being liked than being disliked. They prefer applause and hurrahs to brickbats and broken jaws. (Yes, I went for the cheap rhyme there.)

My thought upon reading this quote (one of many other extracts from this book I'd recommended the other day) is that politicians must get a rush when they encounter large, passionate crowds. And politicians who are good at working a crowd help their audiences enjoy it even more, stoking passions and making moments memorable.

Newsweek magazine, after the Kerry/Bush election, did a marvelously detailed and lengthy overview of the campaigns of John Kerry and Bush in 2004. Their reporters were embedded inside the campaigns, having agreed to share none of their inside observations till after the elections, much like the reporters embedded within the armed forces in their assault upon Baghdad.

One of the most memorable scenes in the Newsweek report was a description of Kerry at one of his last whistle stops in Iowa, the weekend before the election. He'd landed at an airport, the mobs were enormous that had come out to greet him. His children were there, including a daughter who lived in California and was (if my memory is correct) somehow professionally involved in some facet of public speaking herself.

This daughter observed her dad's power to mesmerize the crowd, and then while the energy level was peaking, while they were at a crescendo of emotion, in this particular instance he kept talking and talking and talking, and despite her having chastened him about this before he pretty much violated that basic maxim of public speaking, "It is better to talk ten minutes too short than two minutes too long." Kerry spoke for an hour when twenty minutes would have been more than sufficient. He essentially left them flattened because at that point they did not want to hear all this political jabber. They just wanted to get jazzed.

Whether you're an entertainer, a public speaker or a customer service professional, one of your goals is to keep them coming back for more. You don't have to say everything you know every time you have an audience. Like a daily blog, you just want to make sure there's something of takeaway value that will keep them coming back.

Rather than bore you with everything else I know about public speaking, just go out there and have a great day.

A SOFT FAREWELL
On another topic tangentially related to public speaking, tonight the New York Yankees will be playing their last game at Yankee Stadium. The season is winding to an end and the Yanks will begin next season at a 1.3 billion dollar ballpark across the street. Completed in 1923, a lot of history was made there. One of my most memorable personal moments was seeing the great Mickey Mantle knock in two runs with a one-hop-into-the-stands double to left on Bat Day in the mid-sixties.

Known as The House That Ruth Built, one of the greatest public speeches in baseball was given there by Lou Gehrig, the former Iron Man of baseball, the man for whom A.L.S. was named. Here's the opening line of that great speech followed by a YouTube link to that incredible moment. It was an awesome moment, preserved for us by the miracle of modern technology.

"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." ~ Lou Gehrig, July 4, 1939