Being that English was my chosen course of study at MSU, I have done multitudes of required reading in my life.\u00c2\u00a0 From high school thru college, teachers and professors have found it entertaining to assign me \u00e2\u20ac\u0153required reading\u00e2\u20ac\u009d then regurgitate back to them the simple answers they were looking for. I have been assigned Gulliver\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Travels 4 times \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I refused to read it, still haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t read it and will never read it just out of spite.\u00c2\u00a0 With that being said, there wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t much time in my life for recreational reading.\u00c2\u00a0 Like most people, I fit into the mindset of when the book is selected by the reader instead of being forced on them, they are more likely to read and absorb it.\u00c2\u00a0 I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t wait till the day school was over and I got to pick what I wanted to read versus the syllabus that sat on my desk telling me what I had to read.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
This was the case with me and the book The Final Season<\/u> by Tom Stanton.\u00c2\u00a0 Stanton\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book follows his experiences and feelings during the Tigers final year at Michigan and Trumbull.\u00c2\u00a0 I had heard about this book thru multiple websites and reviews, so I purchased the book then it sat on my shelf for over a year before I finally started in on reading it. Now it sits as a #1 pick on not only my baseball book readers list but, but for anyone who wants to feel a little nostalgic and remember the good old days of their youth.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Once I started reading The Final Season<\/u> it was almost impossible to put down.\u00c2\u00a0 Stanton weaves a beautiful tale of how his two families collide in one very sad baseball season for the Detroit Tigers faithful.\u00c2\u00a0 His first family is his actual blood family.\u00c2\u00a0 Many snippets and stories and recollections of his childhood growing up Polish in Detroit are exposed to the reader.\u00c2\u00a0 He goes into detail about how his childhood was typical with one major exception, his families\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 love of baseball, most notably his father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.\u00c2\u00a0 A natural progression of handing down the torch is displayed as Stanton attempts to pass that love of baseball and family history down to his own sons. The other family followed in this memoir is his Tigers family.\u00c2\u00a0 Graphically, Stanton conjures up the love and loss of bleacher friends, vendors and other personnel that were working at Tiger Stadium in its final season.\u00c2\u00a0 Most of these people Stanton has known for years.\u00c2\u00a0 They weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just vendors and assistants they were part of his summer family.\u00c2\u00a0 As a reader, you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just hear or read that the hotdog vendor is sad about the closing of the stadium, you feel it.\u00c2\u00a0 You aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just told that the parking attendant is upset about the Tigers moving downtown, you feel like you are part of his fight to maintain his source of secondary income.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stanton\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s writing style can be summed up in one word \u00e2\u20ac\u201c imaginative.\u00c2\u00a0 The words aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just black and white on a page.\u00c2\u00a0 As a reader you start to smell the hotdogs and popcorn in the air as he spins his story. \u00c2\u00a0You feel the hard plastic seat under your butt and you hear the vendors yelling out \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hot dogs, cold beer, peanuts\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as you continue to read.\u00c2\u00a0 In the background you hear the thwack of player\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bats and the thud as the balls hit the backstop behind home plate.\u00c2\u00a0 The format of the text is also unique and imperative to the telling of the story.\u00c2\u00a0 Each home game of the 1999 season is broken out into its own mini chapter.\u00c2\u00a0 Each game was important enough in the writers mind to do so.\u00c2\u00a0 Months and series couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be lumped together for fear of missing details. Yet each game served as one event, one more brick in the cobblestone path to the end of history at The Corner.<\/p>\n
Above all, Stanton does an excellent job of making the reader feel as if it is actually them sitting in the park.\u00c2\u00a0 By peppering the book with his own personal stories about finding long lost uncles, taking his dad to the park and bringing his own kids and wife down to the corner, the reader starts to reflect on their own past experiences.\u00c2\u00a0 Baseball is simply a catalyst for the reader to connect with their own past and their own experiences.\u00c2\u00a0 You start to think back about the times you and your dad, or uncle or mom or neighborhood friends went off and played ball for hours on end.\u00c2\u00a0 You start to relive the memories of your youth and the fun times that were had.\u00c2\u00a0 Above all, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a reminder to all that baseball, as in life, is a game of winning and losing.\u00c2\u00a0 Change is hard and sometimes not fun.\u00c2\u00a0 Change makes us laugh, change makes us cry and change makes us reflect on our past.\u00c2\u00a0 People, places and things change, but memories are permanent in the recipients mind and those are the things in life to hang on to \u00e2\u20ac\u201c memories.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
I can honestly say I read the first 80 games in 24 hrs. The story wraps you up and makes it incredibly difficult to put down.\u00c2\u00a0 However, the last game, #81 took me almost 3 days to finish.\u00c2\u00a0 My feelings on the end of Tiger Stadium aside, the story comes to a head and the emotions and connections felt by the reader are at its strongest during that final game I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not ashamed to admit the tears flowed freely, sometimes to the point of having to put the book down and walk away.\u00c2\u00a0 Once I made it thru the last game, I had to pick it up and read that chapter again just to make sure in my memory flooded, tear filled eyes that I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t miss something important.\u00c2\u00a0 Very rarely, if ever, has a book made me stop mid chapter for emotional reasons.\u00c2\u00a0 As a reader you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want the book to end because that is the beginning of change.\u00c2\u00a0 We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want the memories of the good times in our past to stop.\u00c2\u00a0 Above all, we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to accept the fact that just as history at the Corner of Michigan and Trumbull had to end, so does our own story.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be a baseball lover to appreciate the tale that Mike Stanton weaves in this book.\u00c2\u00a0 All you have to have is a few memories from your youth, a heart, an understanding that change is a part of time and life.\u00c2\u00a0~Shelly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/352"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}