Baseball Between Us

February 6, 2012
Luery, an investigative television reporter, has written a baseball travelogue bound to be the envy of any father and son fans of the game. Luery and his son, Matt, spent parts of their springs and summers over a 16-year span traveling to every Major League Baseball stadium. Along the way, the self-professed "baseball buddies" argued over music, free speech, and sex, first exploiting and then accepting each other's quirks and shortcomings. Luery includes interviews with ballplayers he met on the road, including former Los Angeles Dodger Maury Wills, and he incorporates a few observations about each ballpark. His main focus remains his evolving relationship with Matt, who by book's end has grown into a witty young man bonding over beers with his dad at ballpark No. 32, Target Field in Minneapolis; Matt's epilogue offers his own revealing take on this father-son journey. Often falling prey to overeager prose and contrived dialogue, Luery also strikes out with simple solecisms and sentences that read like term-paper extracts. But a glossary of baseball terms and several pages of family-friendly activities and places to stay in every Major League city make this book a useful travel guide as well. While not quite the "Road Map to a Winning Father/Son Relationship" as claimed by the subtitle, this is a heartwarming and entertaining read.