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I Don't Care if We Never Get Back
by Ben Blatt & Eric Brewster

What is it about baseball that makes even its most partisan supporters feel the need to trash the game? To readers who delve into I Don't Care if We Never Get Back, that may not seem like a pertinent question. Since the book is a travelogue relating the ups and downs of two friends on a 30 games in 30 days road trip, and most of the downs are related to things that happen beyond the ballpark, you could be forgiven for believing that this book does little to besmirch the game of baseball. But it's not as simple as that.

Clearly, for no other sport would such a trip be possible; only baseball plays its games on such an abundant schedule that a game a day for a whole month would even be plausible. And no other sport would inspire one of its fans--note: one fan, despite the book's two authors; more on that below--to even contemplate such a trip, including going to the trouble of developing an algorithm that would provide--in theory--the most efficient driving route to get one's self all the way across the country and back for all those games, in minimal time. Only a baseball fanatic would go to such trouble, and thus the game itself comes under some scrutiny when the concept goes a little sour.

I Don't Care if We Never Get Back
by Ben Blatt and Eric Brewster

And sour it goes, on more than one occasion. Co-authors Blatt and Brewster find themselves in trouble all over the place: torrential storms that threaten their tightly woven schedule (not to mention their lives on the roads); ticketing troubles, including an unfortunate scalping incident; utter exhaustion due to lack of sleep, and its consequences; and a friendship strained to the limit by one participant's lack of enthusiasm for baseball.

It's that last item that hangs over the narrative right from the start, making the reader wonder why in the hell Brewster, who doesn't care much for the game, would agree to accompany the baseball and statistics mad Blatt on such a trip in the first place. It's out of friendship, of course, and that acknowledgement comes in due time, but the damage to the reader's enjoyment of the story is done long before Blatt and Brewser--in their prose, at least--come to terms with their fraternal feelings for each other. The authors play up the conflict for comedic effect, but for most readers the laughs are few and far between; the most likely impression the reader will get from these chapters is the sense that these guys are not very pleasant to be around. Why then would one want to waste time reading a book about them?

Other problems abound here, the major one being the choice to write the book in both second person and third person voices. The more illiterate among us probably wouldn't even notice, but if you understand composition at all, you're not likely to enjoy a narrative that bounces back and forth between "We did this..." and "Eric said this..." or "Ben checked that..." Perhaps it should have been a warning that the need to share author billing--and thus torment the voice of the narrative--would make for a less than successful book (and, for that matter, road trip).

Some further issues, mostly mechanical problems, take some steam out of this work as well. At one point, during a discourse on the worshipful attitudes fans take towards their favorite ballplayers, the authors offer this nugget:

In World War II, the United States government name a 422-foot ship the SS Christy Mathewson [sic] after the legendary Giants pitcher. The military, which surely should have no shortage of its own heroes to draw from on the battlefield or in the halls of Congress, chose to honor a man who threw a ball a shorter distance than a soldier could throw a grenade.

Um, no. That ship was named after Christy Mathewson, who, in addition to a Hall of Fame pitching career, served during WWI and thus suffered exposure to poison gas (during a training exercise) that left his lungs permanently damaged and susceptible to tuberculosis--a condition that ended his days on the mound. That story is well-known among baseball fans; how did the baseball-obsessed Blatt not know it, or not care enough to avoid besmirching the memory of one of the game's legends? Beyond that major gaffe, other instances of careless writing pop up: the sentence that begins "It's difficult to appropriate the exact moment..." (presumably, 'appropriate' should be 'approximate'); the chapter headings where the home of the Reds is spelled 'Cincinatti'; and the chapters where accounts of certain games get short shrift. Again and again, Blatt and Brewster come up short as proofreaders, at the least, if not as prose stylists.

There are a few redeeming notes here and there. The boys' rumination, in the course of a game in Baltimore, on the nature of "The Star Spangled Banner"--the national anthem as question, not statement, at least in its usually performed verses--is insightful and thought-provoking, even if the authors step on their own premise a few paragraphs later. And, as noted above, when Blatt and Brewster do finally acknowledge the depth of their friendship and what it means to them, they are redeemed (somewhat) in the reader's eyes.

Unfortunately, that redemption comes too late in the game to affect the outcome. I Don't Care if We Never Get Back has to go down as a loss for the authors and their readers. As with baseball itself, having a little respect for the game going into it is a big help; otherwise, the game is famous for humbling its participants. Blatt and Brewster should have learned that lesson on their trip, and if not then, then certainly by the time their book was published.