Okay, as excellent as some of the inside scoop is — and you really can’t beat Calvin Schiraldi bitching, almost twenty years after that fateful World Series, “Gary Carter can suck my ass” — the writing is bad.   It is hard at times to write “straight” about baseball, but…”Unlike fans in New York City, which is to baseball championships what Rome is to crucifixes, the stench of repeated failure clung to Bostonians like a million pounds of spoiled scrod.”   I…what?   What the hell was that?   With the misplaced modifier and the awful similes, each of which tramples the other…forget edited, that sentence should be taken out back and shot.   This is what gets you a job at SI — rampant misspellings?   Because Denny McLain came to kind of a sad end, but he’s also the last major-league thirty-game winner; get on the freakin’ internet and learn to spell his last name.   It’s not obscure.     I still enjoyed the book, but I lived through that season and I grew up with these players; I don’t know how much a non-Mets fan would get out of it when the prose is that clunky and Pearlman is spending so much time going over games inning by inning.   We don’t really need another description of the grounder to Buckner, so instead of doing that, how about you look for an editor who knows baseball?   (3/31/05)

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