The Long Season: The Classic Inside Account of a Baseball Year, 1959

The Long Season has been regarded as a pioneering work of sports non-fiction since its publication in 1960. Authored by the late Jim Brosnan, a major league baseball pitcher for the Cubs, Cardinals, Reds and White Sox from 1954 to 1963, The Long Season, is a candid, thoughtful chronicling of a year in the life of a professional athlete.

Having been an avid reader of baseball-related non-fiction since the mid-1960’s, I somehow had overlooked The Long Season until very recently. This is akin to an armchair Vietnam War historian overlooking Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest or They Marched into Sunlight, by David Maraniss. There are inevitable comparisons to be made between The Long Season and the abundance of sports diaries which followed, most notably Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, first published in 1970.

In the decade between The Long Season and Ball Four, baseball expanded from 16 to 24 major league teams. During that same time span, American cultural life changed more dramatically than at any time before or since. Brosnan’s diary does not pretend to be a social history of the last years of the Eisenhower administration, but there are some delightful jock insights about life beyond the left field fence.

One re-occurring theme in The Long Season is the tenuous employment status of most MLB players from season to season (Brosnan was traded from the Cardinals to the Reds during the ’59 season and saw teammates released or sent down to the minors). Another theme, familiar to anyone who must travel frequently as a condition of employment, was the challenge of maintaining any semblance of a normal family life. Finally, Brosnan does a nice job of including baseball fans in his musings, those fickle, often annoying creatures with mood swings paralleling the fortunes of their favorite teams.

I read Jim Brosnan's "The Long Season" because I had read in various places that it was the best book ever written by a major league baseball player and one of the best books ever written about baseball.

It is neither.

Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" is better by light years. And I've read probably at least a hundred other books about baseball better than Brosnan's.

Jim Bouton wanted to be a baseball player more than he wanted to be a writer, but he was probably a better writer. Jim Brosnan wanted to be a professional writer more than he wanted to be a major league baseball player. He was able to do both, but he was a better at playing baseball.

I enjoyed "The Long Season" because I am deeply interested in baseball history and it told me many things about the game in 1959 that I did not know. But I cannot recommend the book. The reader feels Brosnan's passion for carefully crafting his words, but better writing feels effortless. He is clever without being funny. He is interested in many things other than baseball, but he isn't particularly reflective. His only mention of current events in the world is a brief anecdote about soldiers in the grandstand at a baseball game in Cuba, but Brosnan gives us no hint why they're there.

Sometimes I wonder whether people praise books like this simply to show they've read them.

OK, I'm biased.

I first read this book when I was 12 or so, a couple years after the Giants had relocated to San Francisco. Back then, the NFL was an afterthought and baseball was truly the national pastime.

I subscribed to The Sporting News, Baseball Digest and anything else I could find, and I gobbled up the stories of the heroic individuals who played baseball. They were noble athletes, striving to win games despite the cost to their bodies, and they were true exemplars of American manhood.

Then I read "The Long Season."

And re-read it. And re-read it. Many, many times. It was funny, well-written, revelatory and made me feel like I understood the reality of major league baseball and the men who played it. (As it turned out, "The Long Season" wasn't quite as realistic as all that -- I had to wait for "Ball Four" to learn the truth.)

So after being forced to pack up books to get new carpet, I came across a copy of "The Long Season,"the book, and decided I needed to read it again.

It was just as good.

"The Long Season" is essentially a diary of the 1959 baseball season by a journeyman pitcher named Jim Brosnan. He was 29 years old and played for the St. Louis Cardinals.

The book begins with his contract negotiations, which are far, far different than today's. Players were tied to a team in perpetuity, unless the team released them, and there was no such thing as arbitration or free agency. Players took what was given, and negotiated with experienced businessmen without the aid of agents.

Baseball players were still well paid -- in today's dollars, Brosnan made about $150,000 -- but most worked in the offseason, which partly explains the length of spring training. Few players had been to college, as myriads of minor leagues sucked up teenagers and put them on the field. (Brosnan, for example, was signed at age 17 -- and threw 228 innings that season. Yes, it was a different world ...)

So Brosnan, who smoked a pipe and read books, brought his cynical and sometimes dyspeptic world view to the world of professional baseball in 1959, and the book opened the eyes of fans to what the game/business was really like. Naturally, many were offended (not the least the owners) by his candor, and thought that revealing baseball players were actually human beings would damage the sport.

Now it must be said that having been a baseball fan at the time makes the book more fun to read, because I have hazy memories of many of the players mentioned, so it's possible that a younger reader would be less interested, but Brosnan is an excellent writer and his wit and humor shine through.

And of course, those who might wonder how the game was different 60 years ago will find the book fascinating. There were doubleheaders, real back-to-back doubleheaders, and a lot of them. Players shared rooms on the road, and there were no charter flights. Air-conditioned clubhouses in St. Louis in the summer? Not happening ...

And since people are people and baseball is baseball, there's much that hasn't changed. And neither has my high opinion on "The Long Season," which may have had more to do with my lifelong love of sports than any other book I ever read.

I like Jim Brosnan and he gives a good, day to day account, of the 1959 season. I always prefer Baseball histories as their author's character studies are always much deeper than most sports bio's. It is here that I found the book lacking as it seems to just skim the surface of the day to day aseball activities and characters. To be fair, I could only get half way through the book, before I bogged down.

Jim Brosnan's "The Long Season" is an interesting book. I can see why, when it came out, it would've been considered controversial. Brosnan provides access to conversations among players and between players and front office personnel that were, at that point in time, infrequently presented to the public. But it certainly feels tame compared to the many books that have come after it.

Brosnan starts the 1959 season with St. Louis and you can tell he is frustrated by the quality and amount of conversation from the manager and the coaches regarding his role. He is traded to Cincinnati, where his performance improves. This seems to be at least in part because of a better relationship with Cincinnati's manager (Fred Hutchinson) than what he had with the manager of the Cardinals (Solly Hemus).

If you've read Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" you'll recognize some of the same conversations: negotiating contract with the GM, going over the hitters and how to pitch to them, pitchers in the bullpen talking about being second guessed when the hitter hits a good pitch. The primary difference is that Brosnan mostly reports while Bouton provides incisive commentary. Another noticeable difference is that Bouton's teammates seem to be more comical. For example, in all of Brosnan's coverage of how to pitch to the opposing hitters, nothing comes close to the humor in "Ball Four" when Gary Bell repeatedly says 'smoke him inside' when asked how to pitch the other team.

It's really unfair to compare any book to "Ball Four", in my opinion and, while it is hard to read this book and not think of other similar books that came after it, such comparisons shouldn't distract from enjoying this book.

Perhaps the most interesting takeaway for me is how much Brosnan did not seem to like Harry Caray, who was a Cardinals broadcaster at the time.

At the back of the book, Brosnan provides a glossary of baseball slang and also a rundown of the various people in the book - players, coaches, managers, sportswriters, etc. Because this is a diary, it's broken down into short, daily entries and is easy to read in short bursts.

I'd recommend it to baseball fans and especially to fans of the Cardinals and Reds of that era.

Go behind the scenes and find out what happens in the daily lives of MLB players. Great read for the baseball fan.

An excellent old time baseball read. Very well done even tho it’s about the 1959 season

I thought the details of what went on would be interesting but they were terribly boring. Could only read the first chapter and even that was a waste of time. Probably was great to read in 1969 or 1970.

o, I finally got around to reading this baseball first of a kind. It's a diary of the 1959 season by an occasional starter but mostly relief pitcher. The book is 60 years old but is still entertaining and a valuable asset to any baseball collection. Brosnam writes intelligently and with great wit. The best portions are the bull pen dialogues during games among the pitchers, catchers, and coaches. No, this isn't a tell all Jim Bouton book but there is great insight into the life of a major leaguer of a by gone era well before the players association. I was impressed with Brosnam's insight into the game(he recognized that ERA was far more important than games won and that the rules on awarding wins to relief pitchers were arbitrary). The reader realizes the financial value attached to the label of a pitcher. Starters get paid the most, closer's next, and long men the least so wins will still be meaningful at contract time despite their misleading nature. I was also surprised to read that even in 1959 pitchers like Brosnam were complaining about all of the hurdles a pitcher had to overcome in his era: the lively ball, bigger players, better bats, a shrunken plate and strike zone, and smaller parks. Sound familiar?
This is a good book for kids of all ages, from 9-92. RIP James

Thanks