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Have Glove, Will Travel: Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond
Books: Travel: Akron: Item 2
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Have Glove, Will Travel: Adventures of a Baseball Vagabondby Bill Lee and Richard Lally
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful: Bill Lee Has A Genuine Love For The Game, February 19, 2005 Reviewer:C. W. Emblom "Bill Emblom" (Ishpeming, Michigan USA) - I was going to rate this book three stars, but the book rallied in the last few chapters. I was not interested in reading about Bill Lee's adventures around the world as it applied to drugs and other hell-raising escapades. He was put on baseball's black list after going AWOL during a game with the Montreal Expos when a friend of his was unfairly, according to Lee, released. There is a wonderful chapter on the conversation he had with Ted Williams. Williams, of course, claims he made a living off of dumb pitchers. However, Lee challenged Teddy Ballgame by saying he could tell him one reason Williams was such a good hitter that Ted wasn't even aware of. The skeptical, but curious, Williams decided to hear what Lee had to say. After having Williams conduct a simple experiment involving his eyes, Lee made a believer of Williams in regard to which of Williams' eyes was the dominant one. Lee genuinely loves the game of baseball as has previous generations in his family. In fact, his aunt, Annabelle Lee, was a professional ballplayer for nine seasons as the ace left-hander for several women's baseball teams during the 1940's. Her uniform hangs in the Baseball Hall of Fame. For Lee to continue playing wherever a ballgame can be found shows he has a genuine love for the game. There are some very funny anecdotes that will be fun to pass on to others. I give the book four stars rather than five, due to a lot of the aforementioned mischief stories involving drugs and alcohol. The last forty pages, however, make this book a worth while read.
From 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.
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
This is an odd hybrid of a book, proceeding where Lee's popular Wrong Stuff left off some 20 years ago. Unceremoniously released by the Montreal Expos in 1982 at the age of 35, Lee began a second career traveling the world--Russia, Venezuela, Canada, Cuba--in search of a place to play ball. With coauthor Lally, Lee recounts his adventures at far-flung ballparks, his friendships with players (Ted Williams, Ferguson Jenkins), and his lively encounters with the locals. And always, at least until the birth of his daughter recently, there are the drugs--Lee arguing, for instance, that he could pitch effectively on a marijuana high: "Hitters could not think with me because of the simple fact that I had ceased thinking." Lee is at his best, though, when he talks pitching. He gives a clinic on the subject when he tells how he pitched 64 innings four years ago at a weekend tournament in Pennsylvania while throwing only 320 pitches, or about 5 per inning. A book probably best enjoyed by the armchair-traveling baseball fan with a long memory. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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