Squeeze Play: A Novel

Jane Leavy has written several sports related books that I’ve really enjoyed, all best selling non-fiction, about stars such as Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax. “Squeeze Play” is the fictional account of a hapless major league team and the locker room antics they engage in.It’s a raunchy story full of sex talk and nasty tricks with little to recommend it as great fiction. But, as a career sportswriter with access to locker room antics, Leavy lets out all the secrets about a woman in an atmosphere of naked men with nothing but time on their hands and a woman to harass. Out of some 100,000 words in her book, probably 25,00 f-words and numerous other foul expressions dominate. I suspect she used some literary license in her account to create interest because, during 30 years in a male-dominated firehouse, I never witnessed such licentious behavior.I did, however, enjoy the book because her descriptions, while outlandish, gave real insight into the pressure put upon professional baseball players. It’s not an easy game although it appears peaceful and serene compared to football, hockey, and basketball. The striving for perfection that keeps players in the game creates great tension. Their performance is always open to discussion and criticism. The plot is about the demands and performance standards that keep their lives in turmoil and their careers unstable.Not a book for the prudish, it’s a revelation for those who know sports. They shouldn’t be shocked to find that the boys of summer are not choirboys. I enjoyed its raucous atmosphere and waded through its raunchiness with many a laugh and even a little anguish. I thank the author for taking me inside the locker room.Schuyler T WallaceAuthor of TIN LIZARD TALES

Most baseball fans with an interest in the game's history will remember that for the first 70 years of the twentieth century, the nation's capitol was represented by two American League clubs known as the Washington Senators. (Their moments of glory were few. The famous cry was: "Washington. First in War, First in Peace and Last in the American League.) But what about the third Senators franchise, born in 1989? You don't remember them? That's because, sadly, they only existed in the imagination of Jane Leavy and between the covers of this book."Squeeze Play" is a wild, bawdy, funny, true-to-life account of life in a big league clubhouse and in the sports department of a daily newspaper. Leavy, a former sportswriter and more recently the biographer of Sandy Koufax, draws on her own experiences, a passionate love of the game and a wild imagination to create one of the most entertaining baseball novels I've ever read.I suppose I should add a cautionary note: "Squeeze Play" is not for the prudish. Sex and crude behavior are often on display (just as they are in the real world.) The book is told in the form of a diary of the Senators' first season, as chronicled by Leavy's alter-ego, A.B. Berkowitz. Berkowitz, who grew up worshipping Yankee Joey Proud (a fictional re-creation of Mickey Mantle) is about to find out if her love of the game will withstand close daily exposure to it...in particular, as practiced by this group of has-beens and never-weres. The team starts out the season challenging the record for most losses to begin a campaign and comes to the wire shadowing the 1962 Mets for the title of worst team of the modern era.But this book is about a lot more than wins and losses on the field. Leavy has a lot to say about life, love, friendship, moral values and all the things that really matter....and she does it with an abundance of wit, style and humor.--William C. Hall

Sophomoric, salacious, scatological, stereotypical, sacrilegious, stale and snobbish.After reading the author’s “A Lefty’s Legacy”, I had high hopes for “Squeeze Play”. Alas, my hopes were dashed, partly because the author seems to have gone to the Howard Stern School of novel writing. After the text of the novel, the author includes an “Author’s Note”, which amounts to a kind of apologia for the novel. In this apologia, the author condescendingly criticizes George Herbert Walker Bush for not understanding that the “whole point” of the novel is to disgust and appall. Yet, if to disgust and appall is really the whole point of the novel, then it is a failure. To be sure, the novel does often disgust and appall, but it also bores. There is a lack of restraint that soon produces numbness rather than shock or disgust. There is a lack of focus that produces sympathy for filth, instead of revulsion. Indeed, the only thing that the author’s alter-ego, A.B. Berkowitz, seems consistently disgusted by is anything remotely connected to Christianity. Throughout the book, Berkowitz vents her spleen with sweeping generalizations about the failings of “most accomplished preachers” and how “the entire Christian community” is against her. Virtually every Christian character in the novel is an unnuanced caricature. This disgust results in a lack of balance and close observation. We have King James versions where Saint Joseph versions should be and crucifixes appearing where they wouldn’t be in real life. We have stereotypes, instead of authenticity. In addition, the best parts of the book sound way too much like what I’ve read from Jim Bouton or Roger Angell. At one of these points, the narrator tells us “These guys are so bad, they can’t even be original about it.” I could say the same thing about many parts of this book.