Baseball great Mike Piazza, a home run slugger and 12-time All Star widely regarded as the best hitting catcher in history, is working on a memoir.Odd choice for a memoir. While Piazza was the greatest hitting catcher of all time, his life hasn't exactly been page-turning material. Beyond being an underrated amateur player -- a fate which many have shared -- there isn't an interesting beating-adversity angle that I know of. He once had a bat thrown at him by a drugged-up psychopath, but that's, what, two pages? Three? Yes, there are the gay rumors, but unless his denials and his subsequent marriage were a lie -- in which case this would be a very important book -- that's not exactly interesting stuff either.
"I look forward to having the chance to take people behind the scenes and to talk about the many great people and characters I've played with and for over the course of my career," Piazza said in a statement issued Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, which plans to release the book in 2010.
Mike Piazza was an excellent ballplayer, but excellence in and of itself is boring. It's the stuff of a nice Scholastic reader for the middle school library, not a big publishing house memoir.
3 comments:
I would point you to the David Foster Wallace essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" from Consider the Lobster to remind you that in general sports autobiographies (or indeed memoirs, as it were) are terrible and have little in the way of insight.
But as you said - if it turns out he's gay and in a sham marriage, I take it all back.
Craig, I know that you know, but I doubt that Piazza is "writing". I suspect it is an "as told to" project.
Who was the jock who claimed to be misquoted in his own book?
APBA Guy-
Wait just a second: his marraige, "sham" or not, is to one of the millenium Playmates.
That's worth 3 pages and a whole slew of pictures.
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