I Don't Care If We Never Get Back
30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever
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3.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Two friends take a wild month-long road trip to hit every Major League Baseball stadium in America: “A fun ride” (The Boston Globe).
Ben, a sports analytics wizard, loves baseball. Eric, his best friend, hates it. But when Ben writes an algorithm for the optimal baseball road trip, an impossible dream of every pitch of thirty games in thirty stadiums in thirty days, who will he call on to take shifts behind the wheel, especially when those shifts will include nineteen hours straight from Phoenix to Kansas City? Eric, of course.
On June 1, 2013, they set out to see America through the bleachers and concession stands of America’s favorite pastime. Along the way, human error and Mother Nature throw their mathematically optimized schedule a few curveballs. A mix-up in Denver turns a planned day off in Las Vegas into a twenty-hour drive. And a summer storm of biblical proportions threatens to make the whole thing logistically impossible, and that’s if they don’t kill each other first. I Don’t Care if We Never Get Back is a book about the love of the game, the limits of fandom, and the limitlessness of friendship.
“Moneyball-worthy mathematical algorithms and the sharp, hilarious prose that has made Lampoon alums famous for generations . . . Nate Silver numbers and James Thurber wit turn what should be a harebrained adventure into a pretty damn endearing one.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Evokes the spirit of sports stunt journalist George Plimpton and the dazed road-trip fever of Hunter S. Thompson, minus the mind-altering substances . . . . It’s great watching Blatt and Brewster race home.” —The Boston Globe
“A cross between The Cannonball Run and The Great Race, with portions of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World thrown in for good measure . . . The dynamic and back-and-forth tension and sarcasm between Blatt and Brewster is funny . . . Worth reading.” —The Tampa Tribune
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When sports analyst and baseball fanatic Blatt first came up with an algorithm that figured out how one could see every pitch of 30 baseball games in 30 different ballparks in 30 days, it seemed like a pipe dream. That is, until his best friend Brewster, who "didn't like baseball," agreed to come along for the 22,000-mile ride. As expected on such as trip, the games themselves take a backseat, so those looking for exciting sports writing or an in-depth baseball history best look elsewhere. It also takes a little time getting used to the writing combination of two different third-person narratives plus the first-person plural as well as the way the friends talk in witty rejoinders (Eric: "I thought you didn't want children."/Ben: "But everyone wants grandchildren"). The story doesn't start to get interesting till something bad happens, and here it occurs about a third of the way through the trip when Ben messes up the start time for the Rockies game, putting the 30-in-30 streak in serious jeopardy. As the two friends put their heads together to figure out how to salvage the trip, the journey picks up steam, and from there it's the fun road trip/ballpark adventure with pranks, missed exits, a misadventure with a scalper, and a sellout on the worst possible day that has you rooting for them to accomplish their goal. The result, like any good road trip tale, is less about the destination and more about the bonds formed and experiences had trying to get there, and in that respect Blatt and Brewster have definitely scored.
