Have Glove, Will Travel
Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
It was 1982 when Bill Lee was famously booted from the Montreal Expos after he went AWOL in protest of another player’s mistreatment by management. His reputation for antics both on and off the field guaranteed that no other club would pick him up. The Ace from Space had landed on professional baseball’s blacklist, and so it was that one of the most popular major-league pitchers of our day was fated to pack his bags and wander the globe searching for a ball game.
Have Glove, Will Travel is the chronicle of an amazing odyssey that began more than twenty years ago and continues today. Unable to live without baseball, Lee went anywhere he could find a game, beginning in the dank and dreary locker room of a Canadian hockey team that later became a softball team. We follow him around the world as he competes in pickup games, town tournaments, senior leagues, and fantasy camps, barnstorming like a modern Satchel Paige around the United States, South America, China, Cuba, Russia, and every province in Canada.
At the heart of this story are the rollicking, colorful characters Lee meets during his travels, and the mishaps that befall him whether he’s sober or stoned. There’s the eccentric Latin pitching master Lee plays with in Cuba, who once struck out Ernest Hemingway. And a hilarious story that takes place in the backwoods of a British Columbia timber town, where Lee and Hall-of-Famer Ferguson Jenkins go fishing and end up being chased back to their pickup truck by a 450-pound black bear.
Have Glove, Will Travel is so much more than the average baseball book. Lee’s humor, keen eye for detail, and extraordinary pitching intellect are always on display, but in the end this book is a love story about a middle-aged maverick who refused to stop pursuing his passion for a boy’s game long after the grown-ups told him he couldn’t play on their team anymore. Readers who loved Lee’s bestselling The Wrong Stuff, also written with Richard Lally, will find the long wait for this rich and wonderful sequel well worth it. Those who haven’t yet encountered the literary Bill Lee have a great treat in store.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lee was considered one of Major League Baseball's biggest flakes in the 1970s, a freethinker who defied nearly every manager or owner who tried to control him. Although Lee, who pitched for the Montreal Expos and Boston Red Sox, was removed involuntarily from the pro ranks for his controversial statements and attitudes (e.g., suggesting pot smoking as a way for pitchers to better concentrate), he never lost his love for the game and played whenever and wherever he could, at first with the hopes of returning to the majors, later simply for the enjoyment of it. He picks up where his 1984 memoir The Wrong Stuff left off, recounting his travels playing with myriad amateur and semipro baseball and softball teams in the U.S. and Canada, as well as in Russia, Cuba and Venezuela. Lee's anti-establishment attitudes he writes candidly, humorously and unapologetically of his drug and alcohol abuse also drew him into alternative politics, as the 1988 presidential candidate for the Rhinoceros Party. For all his antics, however, Lee speaks eloquently of the connection between baseball and male bonding, especially between fathers and sons. This is a thoughtful and droll journal of an itinerant journeyman, content to ply his trade for whatever he can get out of the experience.
