writergirl70's review
5.0
One of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. The premise might be about baseball but it is so much more than that in the hands of this talented writer. Highly recommend!
writergirl70's review against another edition
5.0
One of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. The premise might be about baseball but it is so much more than that in the hands of this talented writer. Highly recommend!
eely225's review against another edition
5.0
10/7/2013
An unbelievably compelling book. The author delivers a thorough investigation into the question of who would work for, play for, cheer for an small ball, single-A club of a weak franchise. In doing so, Mann explores identity, the transforming American economy, American cultural mores and contradictions, and, of course, professional baseball. Nothing is as simple as it appears and the personal nature of Mann's investigation means he's growing as you're reading.
Something about this book took hold of me and won't let go, even months later. An immediate favorite.
10/24/2019
Until I checked on Goodreads, I didn't notice that I started re-reading this book exactly six years after I first read it. Something about the baseball season winding down must make me want to live out another one.
This book helped reignite my love for the sport in 2013, and I'm happy to say that much of what was appealing about it back then remains so. The book is not strictly a baseball book, of course. It's a document of one young man entering adulthood and not sure what to do about it. A baseball season is the means by which he is able to reflect on himself and his perspective on those around them, but reporting on the season itself isn't the point. There is not much of a narrative arc. Rather, it is a series of sequences preceding an ending, rather than a conclusion. This is much truer to life than most baseball books choose to be.
When you read this book, you won't read it for the shocking twists. You will read, and continue to read, it for the small observations of unfamiliar lives, each laced with doubt and ambiguity. It's a loosely-bound collection of mostly-chronological essays on people who are struggling to get by in their own way. Mann's strength is his desire to find a way to be sympathetic the struggles of millionaire 19 year-olds and middle-aged bleacher bums in the same breath.
The first time I read this book, I read it very fast. This time, I went slow. The experience is different when it is relished, and I'm looking forward to doing it again. Maybe on October 5, 2025, just for the sake of consistency.
An unbelievably compelling book. The author delivers a thorough investigation into the question of who would work for, play for, cheer for an small ball, single-A club of a weak franchise. In doing so, Mann explores identity, the transforming American economy, American cultural mores and contradictions, and, of course, professional baseball. Nothing is as simple as it appears and the personal nature of Mann's investigation means he's growing as you're reading.
Something about this book took hold of me and won't let go, even months later. An immediate favorite.
10/24/2019
Until I checked on Goodreads, I didn't notice that I started re-reading this book exactly six years after I first read it. Something about the baseball season winding down must make me want to live out another one.
This book helped reignite my love for the sport in 2013, and I'm happy to say that much of what was appealing about it back then remains so. The book is not strictly a baseball book, of course. It's a document of one young man entering adulthood and not sure what to do about it. A baseball season is the means by which he is able to reflect on himself and his perspective on those around them, but reporting on the season itself isn't the point. There is not much of a narrative arc. Rather, it is a series of sequences preceding an ending, rather than a conclusion. This is much truer to life than most baseball books choose to be.
When you read this book, you won't read it for the shocking twists. You will read, and continue to read, it for the small observations of unfamiliar lives, each laced with doubt and ambiguity. It's a loosely-bound collection of mostly-chronological essays on people who are struggling to get by in their own way. Mann's strength is his desire to find a way to be sympathetic the struggles of millionaire 19 year-olds and middle-aged bleacher bums in the same breath.
The first time I read this book, I read it very fast. This time, I went slow. The experience is different when it is relished, and I'm looking forward to doing it again. Maybe on October 5, 2025, just for the sake of consistency.
heathdwilliams's review against another edition
4.0
A baseball book that's about far more than baseball - it's about a group of young men, boys really, with a shared dream of getting noticed, of being good enough to move on from the rest; it's about a spectacularly devoted group of hometown fans, for whom small-town minor-league baseball has become an irremovable piece of their lives, showing up for every game and watching countless players come and go; and it's about that town, its ups and downs throughout the decades, the familiar rise and fall of working-class America and its towns that once prospered but now struggle.
It's a book that's also, though less explicitly, about a young writer who, like the baseball team and town he shadowed for a season, is haunted by ghosts from the past and finds himself in a confused present, wondering, "what's next?" Lucas Mann's prose is gorgeous and grabs you by the throat and transports you to the center of Clinton, Iowa, in the sparsely-populated bleachers at Alliant Energy Field.
It's a book that's also, though less explicitly, about a young writer who, like the baseball team and town he shadowed for a season, is haunted by ghosts from the past and finds himself in a confused present, wondering, "what's next?" Lucas Mann's prose is gorgeous and grabs you by the throat and transports you to the center of Clinton, Iowa, in the sparsely-populated bleachers at Alliant Energy Field.
samhouston's review
3.0
Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere is, not very surprisingly, a fairly depressing book. But what else would one expect from a memoir set in a little Iowa town in which most of the "characters" simply want out of town as soon as possible. Not only do the A-level ball players hope to leave quickly, but also the team's radio announcer can't wait to move on and up, and many of the team's most rabid fans seem to have little in their lives other than their “worship” of a few mediocre ballplayers who will be around town one or two seasons at most. The town is dying, the team is awful, and even the players don't really seem to like each other much.
Lucas Mann, the book's author pulls no punches in his portrayal of professional baseball at its lowest level. He presents baseball as the business it is, even to stressing that most of the players on Clinton's LumberKings team are seen by the organization as just place-fillers. No one in the organization thinks they have a prayer of ever making it to the major leagues, but hey, it takes a whole lot of warm bodies to play a regular season baseball schedule and there are lots of young men willing to play the game until someone finally forces them to stop. So, for every kid that actually makes it all the way to the top, there are hundreds who spend six or eight years doing the only thing they were ever really much good at doing. Sadly, we (most guys) would have done the same thing if given the chance.
Saddest of all, however, is Mann's frank portrayal of a group of super-rabid Clinton LumberKings fans. If Mann's story is accurate, these folks don't seem to have much of a life outside their little baseball stadium. That they invest so much emotional energy into guys who are only passing through (and who forget the fans the second they leave Clinton, Iowa) is hard to watch - but there is at least a little of the same behavior in all sports fans (the best lesson from the book).
"Class A" puts the focus a bitt too much on the author and would have been more effective had Mann stayed in the background and told more about the players and their relationships to each other and their families. Although he offers a good bit of that kind of detail, it is almost overshadowed by Mann's hero worship – which is hard to figure considering that Mann is about the same age as these players and has as much baseball experience as many of them.
Bottom Line: not a bad book about minor league baseball but it could have been so much more.
Lucas Mann, the book's author pulls no punches in his portrayal of professional baseball at its lowest level. He presents baseball as the business it is, even to stressing that most of the players on Clinton's LumberKings team are seen by the organization as just place-fillers. No one in the organization thinks they have a prayer of ever making it to the major leagues, but hey, it takes a whole lot of warm bodies to play a regular season baseball schedule and there are lots of young men willing to play the game until someone finally forces them to stop. So, for every kid that actually makes it all the way to the top, there are hundreds who spend six or eight years doing the only thing they were ever really much good at doing. Sadly, we (most guys) would have done the same thing if given the chance.
Saddest of all, however, is Mann's frank portrayal of a group of super-rabid Clinton LumberKings fans. If Mann's story is accurate, these folks don't seem to have much of a life outside their little baseball stadium. That they invest so much emotional energy into guys who are only passing through (and who forget the fans the second they leave Clinton, Iowa) is hard to watch - but there is at least a little of the same behavior in all sports fans (the best lesson from the book).
"Class A" puts the focus a bitt too much on the author and would have been more effective had Mann stayed in the background and told more about the players and their relationships to each other and their families. Although he offers a good bit of that kind of detail, it is almost overshadowed by Mann's hero worship – which is hard to figure considering that Mann is about the same age as these players and has as much baseball experience as many of them.
Bottom Line: not a bad book about minor league baseball but it could have been so much more.
jakelunemann's review
5.0
I read this one to Piper over the past six months. It lent itself very well to reading out loud and was a very fun read.
brettt's review
2.0
Lucas Mann spent the 2010 season living in the Iowa town of Clinton and following the fortunes of the Class A minor league Clinton LumberKings. Then he wrote a book about it, Class A Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere.
Not about Clinton or the Clinton LumberKings, but about Lucas Mann spending a season with them, and therein lies the problem. I don't really know Lucas Mann and although I have no reason to believe he is anything other than a fine person, I don't really care about what the 2010 season of the LumberKings meant to him. Details about the players and the season are liberally salted with anecdotes about Mann's own high school baseball days and the personal events that he himself went through during the season.
Like the title suggests, Class A baseball can be found just about anywhere in the United States, and the connection between the smaller cities where it's played and the young men who spend one or maybe two seasons there on the way up or down can make for interesting reading. Major League baseball's acquisition of talent from different Latin American countries brings players from a completely different culture to small-town America, also an interesting subject on which Mann touches way too briefly.
In the end, Class A Baseball is less an exploration of the community and sport at its center and more of a diary exploring the author. And like most of us, he's not half as interesting to any of us as he is to himself.
Original available here.
Not about Clinton or the Clinton LumberKings, but about Lucas Mann spending a season with them, and therein lies the problem. I don't really know Lucas Mann and although I have no reason to believe he is anything other than a fine person, I don't really care about what the 2010 season of the LumberKings meant to him. Details about the players and the season are liberally salted with anecdotes about Mann's own high school baseball days and the personal events that he himself went through during the season.
Like the title suggests, Class A baseball can be found just about anywhere in the United States, and the connection between the smaller cities where it's played and the young men who spend one or maybe two seasons there on the way up or down can make for interesting reading. Major League baseball's acquisition of talent from different Latin American countries brings players from a completely different culture to small-town America, also an interesting subject on which Mann touches way too briefly.
In the end, Class A Baseball is less an exploration of the community and sport at its center and more of a diary exploring the author. And like most of us, he's not half as interesting to any of us as he is to himself.
Original available here.
gemmak's review
1.0
Maybe I was foolishly trusting of this book's blurb, and I should have understood that when it says Lucas Mann will "turn his eye on the players, the coaches, the fans, the radio announcer, the town, and finally on himself," I should have understood that to mean "and mostly on himself."
At a certain point in the book, LumberKings catcher Hank Contreras gets sent back down to rookie ball. He asks Mann to write about him, specifically asks him to "use my name." And sure, Mann does that, literally spells out his name on the page, but that's as close as he gets to writing anything that's actually about Contreras. Mann uses every player as a tool to dig more deeply into his own thoughts, to reflect what he wants to talk about. I learned more about these guys from their B-Ref pages than I did from this 336-page book. He's not interested in finding out what's up with their lives or what it feels like to be a Class-A ballplayer -- he's way more interested in talking about how they don't symbolize what he wants them to (without explaining who they are), how he wants them to like him, and in one uncomfortable moment, how he sort of wants to bang one of their wives.
He's also (perhaps predictably) extremely dismissive of female fans. He calls women fans "uncomplicated" because apparently we all just love the players like our children and want to protect them. And if we're not mothering, we're just baseball groupies, a stereotype that doesn't make sense if we're not hot enough or young enough or whatever.
A quick anecdote: When I was in college (for theater), we had a class where we made 10-minute one-person shows. One of my classmates wanted to do one about discipline, and asked us to give him a list of things to do before the next class. For his next presentation, he told us that he didn't do any of the things we wrote down and he just sat in the park all day enjoying the weather, and that was greater than anything he could have done. He missed the point of the assignment he set for himself, just like I think Mann did here. He doesn't care what you've been promised as a reader -- he's going to indulge himself and leave you rolling your eyes.
At a certain point in the book, LumberKings catcher Hank Contreras gets sent back down to rookie ball. He asks Mann to write about him, specifically asks him to "use my name." And sure, Mann does that, literally spells out his name on the page, but that's as close as he gets to writing anything that's actually about Contreras. Mann uses every player as a tool to dig more deeply into his own thoughts, to reflect what he wants to talk about. I learned more about these guys from their B-Ref pages than I did from this 336-page book. He's not interested in finding out what's up with their lives or what it feels like to be a Class-A ballplayer -- he's way more interested in talking about how they don't symbolize what he wants them to (without explaining who they are), how he wants them to like him, and in one uncomfortable moment, how he sort of wants to bang one of their wives.
He's also (perhaps predictably) extremely dismissive of female fans. He calls women fans "uncomplicated" because apparently we all just love the players like our children and want to protect them. And if we're not mothering, we're just baseball groupies, a stereotype that doesn't make sense if we're not hot enough or young enough or whatever.
A quick anecdote: When I was in college (for theater), we had a class where we made 10-minute one-person shows. One of my classmates wanted to do one about discipline, and asked us to give him a list of things to do before the next class. For his next presentation, he told us that he didn't do any of the things we wrote down and he just sat in the park all day enjoying the weather, and that was greater than anything he could have done. He missed the point of the assignment he set for himself, just like I think Mann did here. He doesn't care what you've been promised as a reader -- he's going to indulge himself and leave you rolling your eyes.
heathdwilliams's review
4.0
A baseball book that's about far more than baseball - it's about a group of young men, boys really, with a shared dream of getting noticed, of being good enough to move on from the rest; it's about a spectacularly devoted group of hometown fans, for whom small-town minor-league baseball has become an irremovable piece of their lives, showing up for every game and watching countless players come and go; and it's about that town, its ups and downs throughout the decades, the familiar rise and fall of working-class America and its towns that once prospered but now struggle.
It's a book that's also, though less explicitly, about a young writer who, like the baseball team and town he shadowed for a season, is haunted by ghosts from the past and finds himself in a confused present, wondering, "what's next?" Lucas Mann's prose is gorgeous and grabs you by the throat and transports you to the center of Clinton, Iowa, in the sparsely-populated bleachers at Alliant Energy Field.
It's a book that's also, though less explicitly, about a young writer who, like the baseball team and town he shadowed for a season, is haunted by ghosts from the past and finds himself in a confused present, wondering, "what's next?" Lucas Mann's prose is gorgeous and grabs you by the throat and transports you to the center of Clinton, Iowa, in the sparsely-populated bleachers at Alliant Energy Field.
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