Book Review: "Rollie's Follies" By Rollie Fingers & Yellowstone Ritter

Look at that cover, would you?  Imagine if people really looked like cartoons?  Our positive and negative physical attributes would be so overemphasized that we'd all be muscle bound, huge-chinned, funny-haired men or wonderful-boobed, thin-at-the-waist women.  If you read Rollie's Follies: A Hall of Fame Revue of Baseball Stories and Stats, Lists and Lore, you'll understand the cover.  Baseball, as a game, is like a cartoon.  The players are not human, which we all know (accountants don't take performance enhancing drugs, they just buy faster software packages).  The situations players find themselves in are not the everyday kind (supermarket cashiers don't commute by limousine).  And 7th grade algebra students don't have access to their teacher's career statistics from the back of flash cards.  Rollie's Follies captures that cartoon world of baseball.

Similar to The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci, which is really a Tom Verducci book with input from Joe Torre, Rollie's Follies is a Yellowstone Ritter book with input from Rollie Fingers, 1992 inductee into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  That's not a criticism.  The Yankee Years is a very good book probably because Joe Torre isn't a writer and Tom Verducci is.  With all due respect to Rollie Fingers, Yellowstone Ritter is a good writer who's written for TV, comedians, baseball websites and his high school English teacher.  The book, a collection of short stories, lists and quirky "factoids," was Ritter's brainchild.  He reached out to Fingers.  Add your name and some recollections and we'll have ourselves something pretty cool.  They both succeeded.  Listen HERE to hear how Rollie & Yellowstone put the book together (and much, much more).

Rollie's Follies is the perfect bathroom book.  If you're a man and you find yourself with time to spare while in "the can," here's your entertainment.  It's the kind of book that you don't need to read from beginning to end.  You can pick it up on page 96 and read "The Rickey Henderson Dossier" in about 3 minutes (did you know Rickey's most frequent opponent in his career was the California/Anaheim Angels?).  Or turn to page 183, which just happens to be Chapter 42, and scan the list of "Twenty-One Pitchers Who Could Wield A Bat" (in 1955, Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe hit .355 with 7 home runs).  There are pictures, there are drawings, there are paragraphs and lists.  It's pleasing to the eye.  It's an easy, fun read.  There's nothing bad to say about it.

It is here that more credit should be given to the artist, the man who actually drew the front cover cartoon characters.  The artist is Jerry Dowling, a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America.  Bill Lee, Ty Cobb, Albert Pujols, Reggie Jackson...  They all get the Dowling Treatment, which is colorful, accentuated and amazingly detailed.  If you hate baseball and you hate numbers, you're still going to like the pictures.

This book is not strictly aimed at idiot men who poop a lot.  Put it on your coffee table in your loft or brownstone or mansion.  Somebody's going to pick it up and say, "Cool."  Here are cool things about the book, factoids, if you will, about Rollie's Follies:

1.  How many co-authors have you ever heard of have the first name of Yellowstone?

2.  Chapter 20 is about Billy Werber, who was the last living teammate of Babe Ruth.  It was written in June, 2008 when Werber turned 100 years old.  On January 22, 2009, Werber died.

3.  Chapter 10, "Ten Maple Bats," is about John Odom, an independent league pitcher who was traded in 2008 from the Calgary Vipers to the Laredo Broncos for 10 baseball bats.  Six months later, Odom was dead of an apparent drug overdose.

There's more, much more to Rollie's Follies: A Hall of Fame Revue of Baseball Stories and Stats, Lists and Lore.  You'll chuckle a few times.  You'll find yourself immersed and saying out loud, "Hmm" a few times.  You might even learn a few things, none of which will help you if you're an accountant or cashier or algebra teacher.  But the time spent with this book will improve the quality of your life for a few minutes.  My recommendation?  Next time you have the urge to turn on The Simpsons, Bugs Bunny or Dora The Explorer, pick up Rollie's Follies instead.  At least the cartoons inside this book are based on real people; real people just like you and me.