Still Pitching: A Memoir » (1st Edition)

Still Pitching is a coming-of age-memoir about growing up Jewish in New York in the 50's. It spans the years 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier to 1957, when the Dodgers and Giants left New York for California--thus marking not only the beginning of baseball expansion, but other significant changes in the larger culture. The narrator s personal story begins in the early 50 s, toward the end of grade school, and continues through high school graduation. The heart of the story is the author s struggles with two baseball coaches, one of whom was an anti-Semite, and the other, a Jew who pushed his Jewish players harder because he thought they were too soft. A parallel motif is the narrator s identification with the hard luck Brooklyn Dodgers, the resilient underdogs of that era-- a team whom the author views as a kind of personification of his own struggles. The memoir focuses on those struggles--the narrator s yearnings to find a place to belong and something to excel at. That something was baseball.

Still Pitching is set against the rich cultural and intellectual, backdrop of New York in the 50 s--the advent of the Beats, the Greenwich Village jazz scene, and the beginnings of both rock and roll, and Off- Broadway avant garde theater. The drama also takes place during the period that most baseball writers called "the golden age" of New York baseball--when one or two of the three New York teams, the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants appeared in the World Series ten times. The memoir ends with the Brooklyn Dodger s only World Championship, after decades of failure--while at the same time as the narrator earns his own success as a high school relief pitcher. In the final scene, the author, by pure coincidence, is once more following his childhood team, the Dodgers. He s on a plane to Los Angeles, where he will attend college at UCLA.

Publisher s comments:

Still Pitching is a coming-of-age story about growing up Jewish in New York in the 1950s. It details how a passion for baseball--a passion fueled by New York's "golden age of baseball," during which one (and sometimes two) of the city's three baseball teams made it to the World Series for ten consecutive years)--transformed the author from an introverted outsider into a popular and successful high school pitcher.

Readers will cringe at school yard slights, anti-Semitic barbs, humiliations inflicted by coaches, and the narrator's romantic and sexual confusions. They'll also root for Steinberg to figure things out, rejoice in his earned triumphs, and above all, remember how jarring and perplexing--and occasionally exhilarating-- life is on the route to adulthood. 

Baseball, in particular the author's identification with the hard luck Brooklyn Dodgers, makes everything possible. Steinberg's love of the game leads to his first success as a writer and teaches him about discipline, persistence, and hard work. As if by accident, Steinberg learns exactly the skills he needs to become a confident adult and writer. 

Author comments:

Still Pitching is not just a book about baseball, or being a die-hard Dodger fan, or even about growing up Jewish in New York in the 50 s. Those are the facts, of course. But the book is about yearning and striving. About wanting and not getting. Everything you want in life is a tradeoff and a struggle. In order for a goal to be meaningful, you have to earn it. It doesn t matter if it s making the high school baseball team or wanting to sing lead soprano at the Met.

Talent is important, of course. But it won t get you anywhere without determination, preparation, and rigor. Still Pitching focuses not on defeats or heroic results, but on doing the hard work. That s where the real achievement and satisfactions are.

ForeWord Magazine

To pigeonhole Michael Steinberg s Still Pitching as a baseball memoir is equivalent to calling Izaak Walton s The Complete Angler a tract on fishing. Both books far exceed the subject matter indicated by their respective titles, though clearly the national obsession--or national pastime--for both baseball and fly-fishing does indeed foster a similar fanaticism, one that borders more often than not on the spiritual. Steinberg enters this territory early on:

I feel a catch-in-the-throat sensation--a sense of wonder and awe that still overwhelms me every time I visit a baseball stadium. It s a signal that I m about to cross a sanctified threshold and enter a world of gods and heroes, a universe where ordinary life falls away, where the stakes are high and the outcome is always in doubt.

Yes, a world of gods and heroes, but those invoked include not only the greats who still loom larger than life in the culture s collective imagination, but those who don t--the other Babe, for example, George Babe Herman, who had the ignominious distinction of winding up on third base with two other teammates. And it s with these outcasts, these fellow pretenders that Steinberg feels his greatest affinity, and discovers his most enduring metaphors for struggle and acceptance, for enacting that next gritty (if improbable) comeback.

It s the 50 s in New York, and this wonderfully moving memoir is as deeply committed to place and family and growing up as it is to baseball and its perennial contention club of that systolic decade, the old Brooklyn Dodgers. It s a memoir about community and friendships both Jewish and non-Jewish, about loyalty, but mostly--and with a prose-style as convincing as the pop of a Sandy Koufax fastball in the catcher s mitt--it mines that interior territory where the heart confronts its deepest fears and desires, and puts them all at risk, thus creating honest and enduring human tensions.