Jim Brosnan, baseball player, renowned author, 1929-2014 (Morton Grove, Morton: appointed, title)

[MassVt]

I just found out that he passed away in late June--he had been a resident of Morton Grove for about 60 years.

Who was he? An ex-big-league relief pitcher with the Cubs,Cardinals, Reds (his most famous stint), and finishing with the White Sox in 1963. He was the author of THE ORIGINAL baseball diary of the 1959 season, entitled "The Long Season", which he spent with the Cards, and then the Reds after a mid-season trade. No ghost-writer was involved--he wrote every word himself, and he possessed quite an extensive vocabulary, and a vivid imagination. In the minds of some baseball historians, it was the finest baseball book ever written. And as a follow-up, he wrote "Pennant Race" in 1961, in which he was one of the Reds' relief aces on a pennant-winning team that lost to the Yankees in the World Series. Both books were huge hits, with universal appeal, and much, much better than today's " as-told-to" publications that are as wooden as a tree.

In these books, his teammates and opppnents usually called him "Professor", or "'Fess", or "Broz", or "Four Eyes", and his wife called him "Meat". He has a great ear for bench/bullpen dialogue, and he was teased about how many martinis he downed while drinking in the Rendezvous Lounge in Cincinnati after Red games.
Both books , especially the latter, gave a lot of insight into the great character ( and temper) of Fred Hutchinson, the manager who eventually died of cancer while managing the Reds in the summer of 1964.

I highly recommend both books for a humerous, page-turning summer read. You will not be disappointed.