Here's the opening of Charlie Patton's article about the book for "The Florida Times-Union." See the link below for the full article.
Want to make a grown man cry?
Show him the scene from "Field of Dreams" where Kevin Costner's Ray Kinsella asks the youthful ghost of his father, "Hey, Dad, wanna have a catch?"
"Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age and death," poet Donald Hall wrote in his book of essays, "Fathers Playing Catch with Sons."
Hal Jacobs uses that quote as the epigraph for his new baseball book, "Ball Crazy: Confessions of a Dad-Coach."
It's the story of Jacobs' intense involvement as a coach of the Druid Hills Bulls, a Pony League travel team of 12-year-olds from an Atlanta suburb. One of the 12-year-olds was Jacobs' son, Henry.
Travel teams are all-star teams assembled from lower-pressure recreational leagues. Jacobs quotes a New York Times story that estimated there were 30,000 travel teams nationwide in 2006.
Jacobs alternates the story of a few intense weeks during which the Bulls tried to qualify for the Pony World Series in Washington, Pa., with memories of his own childhood involvement with baseball.
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