'Baseball Eccentrics' fodder for Prime's latest effort

Baseball has always seemed to have more than its fair share of eccentricity, superstition, outrageous behaviour and just plain zaniness.

From the inimitable (and oft-quoted) Yogi Berra to modern “free spirit” Manny Ramirez, it's a sport chock full of colorful individuals, with apt nicknames like Dizzy, Dazzy, Daffy, Ducky and even “Stan the Man Unusual.”

It's the stuff entertaining and (hopefully) best-selling books are made of - one of the latest of which, “Baseball Eccentrics,” penned by Bill “Spaceman” Lee (a noted eccentric in his own right) and my buddy, Jim Prime, of New Minas - has just hit the bookshelves.

This is at least the 12th baseball book Prime has written or co-written, and his second with Lee. While he doesn't feel this qualifies him as a best-selling author, one might argue he is approaching the prolific stage.

When Prime gave me a copy of “Baseball Eccentrics,” I was looking forward to reading it. “Baseball Eccentrics” is a rollicking, often side-splitting, sometimes “X-rated” look at some of baseball's most entertaining characters. Lee and Prime have honed their technique to the point it's hard to pick out where one leaves off and the other begins.

“It was a lot of fun to do,” Prime says. “Even as a devoted baseball fan for most of my life, I discovered lots of things I never knew.”

He also enjoyed “getting inside the head of Bill Lee which, in many ways, is a pretty scary place to be.” At the same time, he says, Lee is “intelligent and witty, with a great sense of humour and a vast knowledge of baseball, both the serious and frivilous side.”

Lee knows his baseball. From his unique vantage point of being one, he knows eccentrics: he has described himself as “a southpaw trapped in a northpaw world.

“I played for the Alaska Goldpanners,” he says. “When you're playing in permafrost and it warms up and all of a sudden your centrefielder disappears, that leads to eccentricity.”

Prime also knows his baseball, but he's a thinking man's fan.

The cover notes of “Baseball Eccentrics” invite the reader to “let your mind wander to the days when baseball was much more than a business - a time when baseball was fun, and players treated it as a game.”

In baseball, as well as in life in general, some of the funniest things you'll hear were never meant to be funny - but they are. Yogi Berra is not naturally a funny man - though he is quite astute, especially in financial matters, witnessed by the fact he is now a wealthy man. Lee and Prime describe Berra as “an accidental philosopher.” Many of Berra's quotations have gone down in baseball history - “nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded” or, in reference to the left field shadows in Yankee Stadium, “it gets late early out there.”

The serious baseball fan will probably know many of the characters in “Baseball Eccentrics,” but there are surprises. In any case, I found it a good read - and not out of place at all on Jim Prime's ever-growing sports bookshelf.